Earth Lounge: An Environmental Book Discussion: "The Overstory"

Explore the curiosities and complexities of nature, environmentalism, and sustainability through fiction and nonfiction literature in the Earth Lounge Environmental Book Discussion Group, held on Wednesdays in the later half of the month every other month beginning in January 2024.

In The Overstory by Richard Powers, an air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back to life by creatures of air and light. A hearing-and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, and five other strangers -- each summoned in different ways by trees -- are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest.