Richard Powers in conversation with Scott Timberg at Live Talks Los Angeles

I don't really like to play favorites with the people I interview but I have to say this book is really quite beautiful some of you have probably read it the writing is lyrical all the way through and it's it's a book about trees it has some of the best characters ever read it's sort of amazing I'm gonna start by asking you to read a little bit of it so we get a flavor of the book and then I'll ask some questions then we'll come back to the audience after a little while kick it off Richard I thought I would just read the opening page and a half partly because it is a self-contained set piece it's just a lyrical prelude to the book as a whole and partly because I thought if you can't read from page one without establishing something you've got problems so first there was nothing then there was everything then in a park above a Western City after dusk the air is raining messages a woman sits on the ground leaning against a pine its bark presses hard against her back it's hard his life its needles sent the air into for sums in the heart of the wood her ears tuned down to the lowest frequencies the tree is saying things in words before words it says Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering it says a good answer must be reinvented many times from scratch it says every piece of Earth needs a new way to grip it there are more ways to branch than any cedar pencil will ever find a thing can travel everywhere just by holding still the woman does exactly that signals rained down around her like seeds talk runs far afield tonight the bends and the altars speak of long ago disasters spikes a pale Chinquapin flowers shake down their pollen so they will turn into spiny fruits poplars repeat the winds gossip persimmons and walnuts set out their bribes and ruins their blood red clusters ancient oaks wave prophecies of future weather the several hundred kinds of Hawthorne laughs at the single-name they're forced to share laurels insists that even death is nothing to lose sleep over something in the air sent commands the woman close your eyes and think of willow the weeping you see will be wrong picture an acacia thorn nothing in your thought will be sharp enough what hovers right above you what floats over your head right now now tree is even farther away join in all the ways you imagine us to which mangroves up on stilts but nutmegs inverted spade gnarled baja elephant trunks the straight up missile of a saw are always amputations your kind never sees us hole you missed the half of it and more there's always as much below ground as above that's the trouble with people their root problem life runs alongside them unseen right here right next creating the soil cycling water trading in nutrients making weather building atmosphere feeding and caring and sheltering more kinds of creatures than people know how to count a chorus of living wood sings to the woman if your mind were only a slightly greener thing we'd drown you in meaning the pine she leans against says listen there's something you need to hear thank you so I I get a sense that then at some point you suddenly started seeing into things that you had been maybe overlooking your whole life the way a lot of the characters and look had that you know you were that there's a sort of world that that all of us move through without really noticing that it's a world dominated by by trees and by nature and plants and so on how did that happen and I get a sense that may have happened while you're living in California right I think you were at Stanford maybe five six years ago that's right that was the beginning of the awakening that's right I've lived in a lot of places in the world but mostly in cities large and mid-sized I retired from a job that I've been working in in Midwest and accepted a job at Stanford and went out there in in 2012 and you know for those of you who know the central Peninsula and in Palo Alto and that area it's a it's a strange part of the world it's a it's an intense part of the world on the one side you know you have Silicon Valley which incidentally used to be called the valley of heart's delight it was nothing but fruit trees as far as the eye could see yeah blossom Valley another name for it but now it's the engine of the president of the future it's it's Google Apple Intel HP Facebook you know every HQ that's created the present and it's creating the future right and it's an extremely go-go culture you know there are a lot of people there who are pretty sure that if they just hold on for a while longer they're gonna live forever all the technology will solve all the problems that there are when I needed to escape the valley just on the other side was the Santa Cruz Mountains and through foresight of a lot of people Wallace Stegner among them actually felt of a literary program that's right right into grape it's a great great writer Wallace Stegner there there is a tremendous amount of land that's been set aside as open space preserve I think you can walk pretty much from San Francisco to Santa Cruz you know in this public set aside land and it's mostly were right right above Palo Alto was mostly a second growth redwood and you know if you've been in a redwood forest I can't I can't really claim that I had any special sensitivity to trees before this time but you don't need to have special sensitivity of trees for trees to to resonate with a redwood forest I mean there's just it's like being in a holy spot you know it's just like being inside one of the great cathedrals I was walking up there one day actually this is where I also just got addicted to walking as a way of being as a way of thinking there there are hundreds of miles of trails up there and I I want to walk them all but it was I was up there one day and came across an uncut tree and uncut redwood an old one and I've been marveling for all this diamond at these enormous you know majestic trees and these dense wonderful forests a redwood could do a lot in a hundred years it's really a fast-growing incredible tree but when you let it go a thousand years it's something from another world and you know standing in front of this tree as wide as a house this as tall as a football field is long and you know maybe almost as old as Jesus mm-hmm and I thought this is what this forest looked like before we got to it and it was it was mind-boggling to me and I started to read up on the region and and you know what I realized was that this forest had been cut down to build San Francisco and to rebuild San Francisco and one thing leads to another in human culture and you can say without exaggeration that Silicon Valley was down there because the redwoods were up here and there this was a strange you know visceral apprehension of a kind of reciprocal relationship between human history and tree history operating unfolding on very different timeframes that I had never seen really treated in fiction before and you know realized that there was a large part of our story that actually hadn't come on stage for a while right and that's what I wanted to do so you had this really powerful connection with with the redwoods and with with the contrast right between the sort of teeming sort of you know the tech money the tech corporations and so on on one side which probably was not probably probably not the probably not exactly all of the best human qualities right in one place right maybe the on the one hand no but on the other hand it absolutely epitomizes our incredible ingenuity in our ability right to to take control of time and space and to turn them into other things right so you've been so you weren't fleeing us sort of you were fleeing Palo Alto because of a sort of narrow mindedness or self-absorption or anything like that you weren't you weren't doing a sort of back-to-the-land sort of exile kind of thing it was more it was more about thinking about time differently mm-hm and thinking about reciprocal relations differently and thinking about the debt that we humans old to nonhumans right and you know once I started you know looking into that story the whole human story changed from me right so you had this this big sort of philosophical emotional response to being in these redwoods but then at the end of the day you're a novelist right so if you're gonna do something with this you've got a you've got to take it somewhere and the tree that the wondrous thing about the tree is that it hasn't changed in any obvious way except it's changed maybe in subtle ways you've got to somehow make this a novel that has drama that has character that has a story and so on and that's something that people have not done that well were that widely in literary fiction right I mean we have there are nature writers but many of them are poets they're conservationists like John Muir they're sort of what would you call Thoreau there's sort of cranky memoir s like Thoreau but you know and we can say that with nature is in the background a lot you know a lot of but as far as a novel that puts trees and and and nature in the earth that the centre hasn't been done that often so did that prove to be that proved to be a difficult task for you I would modify what you said just a little bit I would say it hasn't been done very often recently okay right that this Hobbit David work has to be at the center rise the rise that we told ourselves and you know if if you look at American fiction as recently as the 19th century Authority or something you know all these stories are about this precarious relationship between us right and not us but here's what I think has happened you know in a nutshell yes as we have gotten better and better at dictating the terms of of time and space and taking control and mastery over the world our stories have collapsed back into ourselves you know our I think of it this way in when I was in grade school can remember an English teacher saying though there were three kinds of dramas that that compel us and one is a drama of a conflicted person the fact that we are constantly each of us trying to accommodate the contradictions and and battles inside our own psyche right and you can call that a psychological story right there is a second order of drama where you have values and I have values and they're they're not commensurate Alandra somehow we're both decent people and values are laudable but the way we would solve a particular problem is not the same so we have to negotiate that and you know that those kinds of social or tensions right either individuals or groups of people right this third kind of story which is we humans as a whole trying to accommodate or come to terms of the fact that the rest of the world does have agency does have desire it does have purpose and in meaning but it's not ours right so is that what an elementary school they called man versus nature yeah the way they introduced the Jacqueline did not man a man versus himself man versus man and man versus nature right because we had this sense somehow you know we passed a threshold in our you know cultural history and we thought well that battles done you know we've won that one you mentioned Jack wasn't sort of an archaic idea that somehow I still be threatened with this well see now my feeling is now that we're realizing that not only didn't we win but we're gonna actually have trouble just hanging on that that whole type of drama is gonna come back into our stories with a vengeance but it's gonna become an increasingly important part of the literature that we make for ourselves right well part of what's fascinating about the book is that it's very much about I mean I was gonna say it's about the relationship of man and nature but it's really in a lot of ways about people who were stepping back and watching or watching nature do what it does or listening to it deeply and discovering new things about it and yet the book is told from the point of view of of characters and maybe you could tell us and they're wonderful very difficuit maybe tell us about 2/3 of the characters here that there are a lot of them that give us just a glimpse of the kind of people that we encounter well you know I should say that when I started out with this book my dream you know that's you know that revelation is it that I had up in Santa Cruz Mountains as it unfolded was that our problem is that we think of ourselves as qualitatively separate from everything but there is a notion of human exceptionalism and how how would you tell a story that troubles that and I thought well one way would be to make the trees themselves central characters and that's what I really want that is one way of Tolkien yeah yeah yeah at the end I wanted somehow to have these trees with their personalities and their agency and their volition at the heart of story well there were some technical challenges slow well then this part of it to write that that whatever drama is unfolding in a tree or among trees and it turns out and I hope we can get into this they turn out to be vastly social creatures and yeah the more the more that's discovered about them this is all unfolding in the last few decades the more we realize how interdependent trees are on each other but more on that later that clearly had to find some way of solving this problem in you know using human proxies to get these other supporting characters on stage in a major way we really love ourselves we really like things that look like us and operate on our time frame and are about our size and move around at our speed those are the things that we understand you know we're shaped by natural selection to pay incredible attention in fact I mean we can we can see a face at the age of five and remember that face you know at the age of 50 it's really stunning right whereas you know you can what most people can barely tell a sycamore from a maple you know right so so the question was how to make the story compelling to us and and and the answer was and to put a center stage but but to tell the story of these multiple people who for very different reasons as you mentioned start to have these moments of realization just how much of themselves depends upon the nonhuman and so you you have on the one hand you the character Patricia Westford was a hard-of-hearing little girl whose father is an Ag Extension agent and she doesn't really understand people she can't interact with them in the way that they you know that they demand and she's a bit cut off partly because of her disability and and partly because her father opens her up onto this magnificent world of living things so she she begins life identifying with plants and that and that sets a trajectory for her for later years and in fact she's so capable and has such empathy for these non-human things that when she gets into graduate school in forestry and starts doing her research she is in a position to put forward this rather stunning idea at the time that plants are communicating with each other over the air that a tree that's being attacked by insects will not only start to produce its own insecticide but issue pheromones that Alert nearby treaties to this invasion and the nearby trees start to set up a pre-emptive defense so it's almost like trees sharing an immune system because of her ability to identify with trees she's in a position to do that research which is immediately mocked and ridiculed in her field and she becomes a pariah she's driven out of the field spends many years the underground so that's that's one extreme somebody who starts out with extreme sensitivity on the other would be you know just to pick another one of the nine at random olivia van der graaf who is a an extreme example of the narcissistic self-indulgent young twenty-year-old undergraduate who's studying actuarial science partly because she doesn't know what it is you know a hard hard living drug using college girl who has a near-death experience and comes out of it on the other end completely alienated from the person that she was and hearing these voices so you know between these two one that you know starts the story with absolutely no ability to empathize with anything except herself and the other one who extends personhood even into green things I deploy these other characters each of whom you know comes to trees in different way you know becomes unblinded begins to see their agency little by little I guess about half of the characters are drawn up together and the stories begin to unite in in this effort in the in the 90s that people refer to as the timber Wars the attempt to save the last small patches of American old-growth forests it's kind of stunning I should you know just as an aside it really it bowled me over to realize you know while doing this research that of these four great forests that that populated the American continent when Europeans first came each of which was considered to be inexhaustible in its day about 95 to 98% of them are gone and have been replaced either by agriculture plantations of some kind tree farms or mono crop tree plantations or second growth forest but of the of the old original patch is almost not none remains factor so stunning stat the other days at them about 55 percent of American trees were younger than 40 years old that just gives you a sense of how completely man altered yeah it is yeah well I you know that so the the trees that that inspired you and that are you know inspiring the characters in here are hundreds in some cases thousands old you know we've had foliage on the planet for a very long time but I wonder if there's something a little more specific happening in the last few years maybe in the last decade of and I don't know if it's happening in literary fiction but a kind of maybe it's maybe it's a Renaissance in nature writing that I'm talking about maybe it's the kind of general public New York or reading person just kind of getting more so here's what I'm thinking of things like was it Elizabeth Kolbert book the sixth distinction for instance which everybody I know red you have simultaneously the research that you're talking about here about how trees are in fact a communal kind of creature right and there was another book that everybody read that came out last year at the page of old a pan book they hidden the hidden life of trees I think okay men just to synthesize and popularize a lot of the most okay yeah and then in in Britain I don't know if there's an equivalent here but in Britain you have this writer robert mcfarlane you know I'm talking about who I was appalled to see as younger than me I thought it was like a nine year old man who hiked across the continent 40 times he does have a very old yeah he does yeah but just an incredible sort of lyrical writer and I guess the his book the old ways was the first one I read yeah um and there's a bunch of people like that in Britain if you're in a bookstore in London they'll have a huge shelf of nature writing and it's a lot of its new you know so anyway it feels I'm just guessing but it feels to me like there's a consciousness and it's it's not just a back-to-the-land thing I don't know what it is exactly but it is wonder if you feel like you're part of a larger dialogue or larger sensitivity a larger kind of waking up to the fact that there are other people on the bus or other things on the planet what does I do I I do think there's a groundswell asking this question of how are we going to remain here and can we meet the neighbors and how can we live with them however you know to be slightly more pessimistic are I think there's a proliferation of everything I mean there are there are now seven and a third billion of us and we're producing cultural artifacts at faster and faster rates and consuming them interest and faster rates right so you probably could make a case for the the an upsurge in just about any yes any trends we want to identify we could probably figure out a way to do it yeah but but I do think that that's that's the one that's going to decide you know yeah our durability here right you know it's it's interesting that the book sets itself as a story of you know saving the trees but there is a kind of inversion by the end of the book where it becomes clear that really this is a story about saving us trees I mean it's it's it's an interesting thing but that idea of getting something up on a woody trunk and extending branches and putting up your solar cells and and turning the sunlight into food you know into everything that there is that's such a great idea that actually natural selection comes up with it at least six different times independently mm-hmm and entries have been around for you know for hundreds of millions of years you know for 300 million years or more way before the dinosaurs if they've lived through mass extinctions right you know a couple of coal birds massive mass extinctions you know the question is what about this hundred thousand euro up star you know the master of the universe and and how is that story going to be stabilized and extended right right yeah we're the we're the newcomers effectively um let me ask you about something slightly different you've been personally and intellectually interested in music for a very long time you've got some books that are more explicitly driven by your interests especially in JS Bach and classical music I wonder if if music at structures the way it what it does to your mind you know if it has any bearing and in this book which seems in some ways to be something fairly different yeah listen listen this book that in a number of the other books this book structurally I mean you think you've alluded to it earlier yeah it takes the shape of a giant tree so you get these righties backstories these these nine characters it's all secreting a series of short stories with great compression in green yeah for those of you who have the book you've already seen it but it's all nine I guess characters have these each one gets sort of a novella or something from the beginning so that's part of the reason I wondered if this might be the way you know the Goldberg Variations or something it's like a Bach fugue or something like that yeah so introduce you introduce all of the themes or motives and then you combine them with variations that kind of feels like that yes but rather than you know the the the explicit analogy structure for this book is that those are the roots of this massive tree and any stories converge the the second section of book is called trunk and that becomes that that becomes the dramatic account of these characters who move forward with their environmental activism then there's a kind of crisis point where catastrophe backfires and shoots them out all in their separate ways and that part of the book the third section is called crown as they as they split outwards into their separate lives and the final part of the book which deals with the long-term and unforeseen consequences of their actions called seeds where the story terminates for music it wasn't honestly it wasn't a huge inspiration on this book it has been as you say number of other times it's my twelfth novel I would say four of my books are explicitly on musical themes structured as musical pieces or dealing with makers of music or music as a cultural phenomena right right right do you still spend a lot of time listening music playing music do you feel like it keeps your brain alive or keeps you thinking in ways that you need to think as a writer yeah beyond the doubt and and and you know music was a constant source of refreshment for me while I wrote the book for sure but I'll say that there's another way in which you know the my compositional technique for this book changed profoundly so I've been working on the book for over five years and I had been reading for for a couple of years about about the paucity of all growth and how different all growth is from from forests that that we know when we think of an American forest and while his reading are kept reading about very specific patches of old-growth and I went around the country visiting them and one was the Smoky Mountains I kept reading that if you wanted to see what an Eastern broadleaf forest looked like before the craziest came that the Smokies was a good place to go and I went down there three years ago and you know I've walked in a lot of forests and they're there you know even the regrowth in the Smokies is extremely impressive and beautiful and restorative but as I walked up into these patches there's about a hundred thousand acre still left in the Smokies of what-what a force looked like before it was cut for what it right how old are those the oldest trees there well it depends on the species right you know what a good eastern tulip poplar can be well over five hundred years and you know the the other you know old hemlock or an old you know silver Bela I've seen maples there that were several hundred years old to fighting like the Western trees you know nothing like Bristlecone pine seven thousand years seven thousand years longer than we've had righty-right an individual tree would in any case so I'll go up into these you know into the old-growth in the Smokies and suck him my job was just you know the farther up into the forest I got that lower my jaw was there something about standing there and looking at this and saying this is what my country looked like this is not only what it looked like you know prior to the Europeans but what it looked like uh you know at the at the end of the last ice age hmm ten thousand years ago right and and I liked I thought that was you know there was some feeling there you could you hear a difference you know you smell a difference and you see a difference and I it got under my skin and uh and I couldn't forget it and I ended up buying a house there and and moving down there and I've been living there for the last two and a half years so the book literally changed my life literally redirected me so in reading this there's so much passion you know you've got these really detailed descriptions of what's happening when people go outside and say forests or when they are driving and they suddenly see the trees for the first time I didn't in worse morning with Pat Morris and that the Oh times and she called it tree porn right right right it's like there's so much detail and it's so vivid it almost is sort of sexual and I guess when we're talking about reproduction you know it's well anyway I won't go there but anyway yeah I I do imagine you so your characters are connecting deeply with with especially these huge old trees and I wonder if besides moving there it's made you spend the free time you have hiking walking connecting communing with with these group it's changed it's changed everything about my day and in my and my season in my year you know music remains a wellspring of inspiration but but walking is I mean I used to feel in I've been I've been writing novels for a third of a century now you know this is number 12 and and I used to feel like if I didn't get my thousand words hmm every day that wasn't a real writer you know it was all gonna disappear and I'm right get it back somehow and there was a tremendous work ethic in it and driven by fear what drives most of us yeah but now now I feel like you know my day is much more likely to be there there nine hundred miles in my backyard of trails eight hundred square miles of wilderness and nine hundred miles of trail and I'm much more likely now to just get up and find one that I haven't hiked and start hiking it and eighteen miles later I might have something to write about for that I mean the problem working that way is you're six miles in when you have this and somehow pecking it in on a phone isn't quite conducive but but yeah I mean it's it's there's a great you mentioned that cantankerous journalist I guess but you know his line is breathe the air drink the drink eat the fruits live in each season as it passes resign yourself to the influence of the earth and that's what I've been trying to do um one thing that's that's kind of amazing to is the detail both the the nature detail but also you tell stories that go back to a hundred years or so writing you you write mean there are demons throughout this story right right now if it plays a central role right book you know other indigenous myths right you talked about I think how trees were the first religion for the counts and and for lots of other people but in any case I I wonder how much it must have been tons of research for this just to get historical d2 for that because again the characters we're often introduced to characters by like their great-grandparents right and you've got details of what it would have been like in the Midwest in the late 19th century and I mean you must have I can tell it took 5 years to do well and as you say you know if you really if you really take seriously this descriptive act as part of a narrative active right seems to be a lot of yeah you're definitely taking it seriously there's no right it's not it's not something that's percolating in the background of a human you know of a primarily psychological or sociological story I mean they actually become you know essential protagonists in their own right and to do that you know if if part of the arrival point of the book is we have to learn to see these invisible things that are so much older than us so much bigger than us and so you know so much more ingenious than we realize they were then you actually have to have to get them in their specifics and this question of you know what is that tree in front of me becomes you know the the everything has to do with the precise nature of the details and not only the individual trees but but types of forests and in that you know that's not it's not incidental to the story it is the story and to be able to move through those regions of this country and to see them as having personalities and distinctive qualities you know that that's part of the animism that I'm trying to get to here yeah yeah yeah well you know the the individual people you described and the cultures they come out of because we have people who are Indian and we have people and were sort of Scandinavian Midwestern you know there's human cultures but each as you say each of the species or each of these forests has its own culture its own personality as you say as well you know and that's that's the that's the goal to see to see these things not as resources or as aesthetic accouterments but actually those creatures that are that are making it possible for us to live here and that write us right you are both biologically and culturally right right so in the in the smokies for instance there are six different kinds of forest well that have distinct qualities to them and and you know what that forest is doing it has everything to do with its altitude its aspect and so forth but the the character the forest the personality of the forest changes the way that human being in that forest can be and what you know we are when we're there you know so the flipside I started talking a little bit about Patricia West for its work and she she of course is drawn from real world scientists including a couple of very prominent women researchers the the extension of the story it's even crazier than this idea of trees having over-the-air communication and sharing a kind of immune system and this has to do with work that's pioneered by many people Suzanne simmered is a name in the forefront of this field but it has to with underground connection between trees and this is becoming more broadly known to the general public but fungus you know the long filaments that can be it can be you know they the the underground fungal threads they go directly into the roots of a tree sometimes even into the cells of the roots and they set up this mutualism this kind of two-way street so they can't photosynthesize for themselves the trees are creating you know hydrocarbons and sugars that they're feeding the fungus with the fungus which is expert at extracting nutrients secondary metabolites from the soil is giving them back the trees but get this the you know they're wired up together throughout a forest and not just inside one species but between different species and these trees are feeding each other and and giving each other medicines and you know sometimes these large trees what-what Simran calls the mother trees will keep an understory tree alive for 75 or 80 years in the tree you know never goes anywhere it just stays there while it's being well it's being nurtured by this you know socialist decom sorry to say that word California underground the economy literally right and and and the fungus is acting like this banker you know figuring out how the health of the forest can be preserved through this massive act of cooperation and so that's that's in the heart and so they look to that somehow in our intensely individualist commodity culture we've set this up we've adopted this notion that meaning is an altogether private thing it's only something that you manufacture for yourself right right and in our our it's purely personal and individualistic predicated on the idea the bonds between us are not important well in our obligations or interdependence with things that aren't us aren't aren't at all right or even less important all of this is predicated on a kind of huge gross miss reading of evolution right as driven almost exclusively my competition right what's interesting to have Stanford and Silicon Valley and you know the sort of libertarian hotbed on the other side of the day effectively from from the forest where all these things are so tightly tightly bound and interdependent so it's as you say sort of two different ways of looking at my that's right all for something that's right and and the book is it is an attempt to articulate through narrative and through story I mean it is event-driven this character do but it's driving toward this notion that we need to think about what is actually happening in the world beyond our world in a different way that for every act of competition there are many many acts of cooperation and reciprocity and we learned we need a new way of thinking about that because it could it could have a profound difference in the kind of society that we create from here on I want to open up to the audience in a second my last question something we haven't talked about a lot just pick one or two that you're interested in this wonder which writers whether the distant past or your contemporaries or whatever novelist poet's whatever you feel are feeding into this book or whatever your your thinking about these days okay that's good I hadn't hadn't actually prepared for the question but there are made one great non-fiction discovery I mean it's stupid to call it discovery because this guy in his day was like the widest read naturalist in America or one of them his name is Donald Kalra Speedy's anybody ever oh I mean I think he's almost unknown now but he wrote he wrote two great books on trees in the I want to say 50s yeah early 50s and they've been combined and abridged a little bit and brought out as a single volume called a natural history of North American trees what I love about it is he's writing as a naturalist he's really writing as a scientist with with the information that's that was current up to his moment but but he writes like a poet you know and in this idea that we have now where where science writing has to be somewhat dispassionate or impersonal you just didn't have it and there's these marvelous passages and he you know I wish I could quote from them at length but you know page after page says these deeply deeply resonant you know it'll do each each tree species in turn and he'll make it it's stupid to say him make it come alive because they were alive before he was his thing as for fiction writing are one of the things that was just so thrilling for me when when Barbara Kingsolver wrote her review in The Times I felt like I'd come across you know our felt in her a kind of kindred spirit someone who she trained as a biologist that's right yeah and her writing has always been and deeply informed with all of the superstructure of living things that keep us keep us going so for her to see that in this book was especially gratifying for right great well um let's I love this before you even add up exactly that's a good crowd raring to go um I can barely see but let me tell you can somebody have a question I'll build out a new frame a microphone to you yeah she's around here generally start with a w or an H and sometimes a D they were typically short only Scott timber gets to ask follow-up questions thank you launched on warning you talk about sort of the intelligence of plants you know Darwin wrote about this kind of extensive Lee he wrote a book called the power of motion in dance and to give you two examples he talks about look at it look at a tree that's thick with stems and branches they don't run into each other yeah they know how to avoid each other and then also down in the roots the radicals are those little filaments that negotiate the pebbles in the soil and find their way to nutriments and water they find their way he considered the intelligence of a root in a radical yet to be equivalent probably to a worm absolutely right and so he analyzed how cleverly these well that's there's more to be said I was with you as you read that first page and a half I trot I hiked the troncos Creek Trail above Palo Alto two or three times a week for years fantastic all the seasons there's luscious fantastic yeah that's I'm so glad you mentioned that admit and that notion that if if there were a brain in the tree it would be in the in the tip of the root but in fact I think now almost the sense that if there are brains if there is intelligence in plants it's also aggregate it's it's not limited to the individual which this it's this distributed network that's that's producing these complicated sets of signals back and forth among individuals but this notion of the behavior of trees being a supple response to a changing environment and you and you and you pointed out his observation about you know the way in which the Arbour essence of the tree is controlled if you're interested you know go home tonight or later you know tomorrow and do a google image search for something called crown shyness it has to do with trees that simply stop growing when their branches are about to touch other branches and and you'll see amazing images of this phenomenon that that will give you pause about what what exactly that force that drive freeze with really good manners yeah more human excuse me right here oh I'm going to switch subjects I wonder what the path was from something like plowing the dark which really set the stage and inspired Phil Rosendahl to make second life or an alternate reality and virtual reality which is I would say the opposite or the Nate you know very different than the forest you're describing so could you talk something about those two visions and how you connect them thank you and give me an opportunity to mention one other character in the book who's name is Mila Mehta who grows up as the son of an immigrant you know South Asian immigrant who ends up working for Intel base in in Silicon Valley and follows his own career through a kind of second life gaming world he's he's crippled and confined to a wheelchair and he is a kind of personification of this migration that that we humans are enacting into symbol space into into digital spaces for better or for worse and yet he also has a kind of conversion moment where he realizes that these these massive multiplayer games that he's devoted his life to have what he calls a Midas problem they're just kind of recreating the that the the runaway success of commodity capitalism in miniature and and he turns toward the end of the book toward a project that repurposes that that the digital program and his dream is that somehow these these prosthetic extensions of ours are descendants if you will might be the key toward that they might somehow teach us to understand or interpret those creatures from whom with parted ways you know most recent common ancestor a long time ago it's been a frame that that puzzles the die-hard naturalist readers you know those those those who were looking only for an affirmation of the green world I stand by the frame in in a number of ways I mean it's interesting to point out that the environmental movement and ecological thinking actually don't emerge in human history until we have large-scale computation because we can't solve problems on the scale and complexity of natural interactions without that massive prosthetic extension of our ability to simulate the model so the all those themes of plowing the dark the notion of setting up a virtual recreation of an external or natural world come back in this book in that frame of the book and it's it's it's a strange it there are people who feel that the only way forward is backwards right that we have to somehow completely stop the direction of culture and and technology and and abandon them and go back into a kind of pre technological relationship to other living things I don't see that happening I know I also but up but I think that there is a way in which life selected for and produced consciousness that culture select for and produces a growing awareness of what lies beyond culture and that somehow if we are to move forward it's going to have to be through the best of what we've been able to create and and that means taking these incredibly powerful tools that I mean think of the ways that we use these almost you know unthinkingly now big data and and artificial intelligence in our in our search engines and in in our and how quickly we can find out things about the living world our I did I did something at the at Harvard a couple of days ago and they brought me out to the to the Arboretum the Arnold Arboretum there are sensors on every tree not every tree but they're you know and they're and they're doing their phenology now they're doing their they're gathering their data rapidly and effectively and in a way that can be used to set up a deeper understanding of these intensely complicated systems so we're gonna have to do it with the best of ourselves you know all these tools have have many affordances but in addition to some of the less fortunate on folk affordances like our increasing willingness to commodify even ourselves and our and our friends in social networking and so forth we also have to to understand and and leverage and and emphasize the positive affordances of Technology sort of to jump off that answer like I haven't read the book I promise I will regardless of what you say do you do you find hope given how dire the situation is and what where do you get it from yeah this book really raises that question of hope versus despair and one of the early reviewers said something like I've never seen books so unrelentingly pessimistic and yet so filled with hope that's a little line that I'm walking I like I like Gramsci's formulation you know pessimism of the intellect optimism of the will but I also think it really I think what you need to remember is hope for what I mean the question is if if if you ask me how hopeful I am for these you know three three to four hundred million year old creatures who have survived mass extinctions I'd say that's a pretty good bet if you're asking you know how how what's my hope that Los Angeles will look like it does a hundred years from now that's a different question so so I suppose I suppose if I were to interpret your question in in the way that's most interesting to me it would be do I have hope that we are going to be able to find ourselves our way back into the world I would say it's gonna happen the question is will it happen violently and catastrophic Lee will be forced on us in a way that you know does not broke any other answer or can we use this astonishing capacity for for foresight and and and modeling to make it happen without an almost unthinkable amount of death and destruction depends on what day I want to be hopeful and and and their their the the force of human culture is so immense that if we could learn to see if we could learn to look if we could learn to take the nonhuman world seriously we connect very quickly and for those of you who are looking for more specific hope to more cataclysmic immediate problems I've recently become aware of of this project drawdown does anybody else just google that word drawdown you know the the the the idea is that it's it's gonna be very difficult to change our carbon behaviors on the on the consumption and production end but it might not be as difficult as we think to solve or offset a lot of that problem by sequestering and it's it's fascinating they know these are scientists throughout the world you know an international Armada of scientists who are looking at the most possibly effective ways of dealing with climate change and what's amazing to me as you look at these top 80 solutions for drawing down carbon for sequestering carbon and you'll be amazed at how many involve trees and forests you know and modifications to our agricultural system that involve intercropping and permaculture and other tree related so what hopeful or not you know the necessary first step is to start taking these creatures seriously and to know what what kind of asset you know in them you know when we stop thinking of them as a consumable resource and start thinking about them as a there's a symbiotic on this planet time for a couple questions having read a bunch of your books and and really loving them the one thing that always strikes me is in addition to being lyrical and and smoothly delivered and and beautiful they seem like back-breaking mind twisting amounts of research and I know you were starting to talked about research before but it's it's such an experience to read the the span of what you take on and I'm just wondering if you could talk a little bit about research and where that mountain of research is for you is it is it usually at the beginning and that teaches you interesting characters and gives you senses of shapes of stories at the whole time are you is is the fun of it for you going between research and and writing things up I'm just curious yeah good question it's a lovely question and and the first is to say that it's never back-breaking because it's just so compulsive I mean that you you used also the word fun you know I read well over a hundred books for this one but you know it's just it was a joy it was it was all I wanted to do and in fact I'm still reading about trees now it's you know sort of the first time in my career that that one subject for a book hasn't passed into another I just want to stay here you know I just want to keep keep writing about this and you know because I was a a beginner on the topic I had to start with really rudimentary field guides and work my way outwards from there but the literature is amazing and not just about trees as biological things but trees as as cultural artifacts and historical and you know the histories of people's relationship with trees and because because redwood summer and the and the timber Wars played such a big role in the book many many very specific political histories of trees are I just couldn't get enough of it you know it's I wonder if you found that that almost every culture I think one of your characters says is but almost every culture on the planet started its religion built around trees or for us yeah I mean I I don't know if I could you know how broadly you could make that generalization but the reading that I did just let let me on and on into into you know the centrality of trees to the the foundational cultures of pretty much you know most areas of the earth yeah yeah I mean it would have been for ancient people whether they were in China or South America or Ireland or wherever trees as they are in this book they would have been the biggest most amazing most intricate and complex thing that that ancient man or prehistoric man had seen right so it's very natural thing that they say if there's a sent a bunch of gods there somehow in these things connected through these things very good observation then the number of times and that's why I'm it is so important to the right plant all turning into trees you know that that kinship that seems somehow weirdly apparent to us when we look at look at these creatures but the other fun thing about the research on this one in addition to the print was traveling around talking to people talking to people whose job it is to to take care of her nurture or or work with trees but also just everyday everybody you know I would tell people yeah I'm writing a novel about trees and after that initial moment of slight embarrassment they always had a story or many stories you know once once you unleash a person's private sense of what what those you know what what trees mean to them you know that note-taking was never-ending and our final question for the evening good evening I want to thank you so much for your conversation and forgive me because I've never heard it you were read any of your books I was a call to this because of the the emphasis on trees I often say to people they asked me for a business card I said you know I don't have those I'm in a long-term relationship with some trees they get it you know they kind of get it but I wanted to I was up at the redwoods also this year and I wanted to know whether or not they spoke to you the way they spoke to me and whether you were able to create a dialogue in the book that conveyed to humanity that they're not really saving the trees and they're not really as you said saving the planet they're really saving themselves by their own interconnectedness that they're ignorant of because as the trees the different species of the trees have different treasures for our pleasure we as races of people on this planet have different pieces of the puzzle that's necessary for our evolution in harmony that's exactly it how do you expect me to think that you were able to convey in that book that would cause people like when I say to someone know I'm in a long-term relationship with some trees I don't I don't do that yeah I want that flow to continue they get it immediately if there is some some you know methodology that was capable to strategically implant the feet yes allow for us to finally get along with each other in a way that will save ourselves from ourselves yeah precisely they did give me something and I hope that I have given it back through the book and and that will depend upon the stories that individual readers bring to the book but you know I don't know about your experience but one one of the most profound for me especially under that in in those forests under those trees you know I'm apprehending them with what I can learn you know through my intellect I'm also just apprehending them visually just smelling them and feeling them and and incensing them but everything depends upon changing your time scale you know just just standing still long enough to see not what you think is in front of you what you'd like to be in front of you or what you wish were in front of you but what it actually is in front of you so so more than anything I think when when the tree spoke to me and you know they are I learned it in the redwoods and I went back out east to the trees that I thought I knew for my child but childhood but now I had to see again for the first time it all had to do with that stillness it all had to do with simply looking not expecting but but looking until you had an answer to that question what is that tree in front of me doing that no other tree is doing right and it's that particularization I think that that put me into a different relationship with with trees and that and that our hope comes out in the story all right well thanks very much [Applause]

Channel: LiveTalksLA

Views: 11,643

Rating: 4.7119999 out of 5

Keywords: w.w. norton, Richard Powers, Live Talks Los Angeles, fiction, trees, The Overstory

Id: HQXHnmi3qj0

Length: 66min 47sec (4007 seconds)

Published: Wed May 23 2018