The Overstory

This week, I have been busy reading the five hundred page novel, The Overstory by Richard Powers. It was a challenging but worthwhile reading experience. The book is divided into four sections: roots, trunk, crown and seeds. The roots section introduces us to the lives of eight individuals. Each person has a relationship to trees on the earth.

The trunk brings together these individuals within the context of activism and the Timber Wars in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. It is a challenge to keep track of inter-twining of these individual stories (roots). The final sections play out the outcomes from their collective activist events (seeds).

The importance of trees, their inter-connectivity and their relationship to global climate change offers a sobering alternative to traditional scientific thinking.

My next book on the bookshelf is Sacred Soil: Biochar and the regeneration of the earth. On our small acreage, we need to develop a better understanding of the soils and their fertility.

Visiting the COGS Library, I discovered the biography of Dr. John Mitchell: The Man who made the Map of North America, written by Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley. Mitchell was a botanist, born in Virginia in 1711.

‘It was at the request of Lord Halifax and the Board of Trade that he made his famous map, one of the period’s outstanding cartographic achievements and perhaps the most important map in the history of North America.’

I thought that perhaps the book was part of the Walter Morrison collection at COGS. But apparently, that is not the case.

Acknowledgements

Andrew Hannam for his help at the COGS library. Heather for her empathetic reading. Edward for his graphics.

References

Richard Powers.2018. The Overstory. W.W. Norton and company.
Robert Tindall et al. 2017. Sacred Soil: Biochar and the regeneration of the earth. North Atlantic Books.
Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley. 1974. Dr. John Mitchell: The man who made the map of North America. University of North Carolina Press.