美国国家公共电台 NPR Novelist Richard Powers Finds New Stories Deep In Old Growth Forests

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Richard Powers likes to explore big ideas in his novels. He has written about artificial intelligence, game theory, genetics, music and a lot of other things. In his latest book, "The Overstory," Powers takes on trees and the lives of a small group of people determined 1 to save them from destruction. Writing the book led Powers deep into the forests of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which is where NPR's Lynn Neary met up with him.

LYNN NEARY, BYLINE 2: Richard Powers' house in Tennessee is perched on a hillside on the edge of the park. Driving up to it, you notice something immediately.

It's kind of a treehouse.

RICHARD POWERS: It's very much a treehouse.

NEARY: (Laughter).

POWERS: That's why I live here.

NEARY: Powers makes no apology for his current obsession 3 with trees, though he admits that for most of his life he knew little about them.

POWERS: I could probably name with some certainty maybe three or four trees.

NEARY: This is hard to believe because "The Overstory" is sprinkled with fascinating details - how the American chestnut 4 disappeared, how a huge banyan 5 tree grows from a small fig 6, how trees communicate with each other. Powers did extensive research and says these facts are a crucial part of this story about the fight to save old-growth forests.

POWERS: What a tree can do to transform the atmosphere, to transform the soil is absolutely part of the story of humans trying to give to these huge, ancient, incredibly diverse and incredibly supple 7 creatures the same kind of sanctity that we reserve exclusively for ourselves.

NEARY: Powers roots his book in the stories of nine people from a famous botanist 8 to a down-and-out Vietnam vet 9. All of them have some connection to trees. Some of them eventually meet as radical 10 environmentalists in the Pacific Northwest. Their struggle to save the old-growth forest ends in violence, but it begins with their reverence 11 for trees, especially one ancient redwood.

POWERS: The trick there was making the people come to see that tree and the magnificence of that tree. And to have these humans fall in love with that tree and want to protect it with their lives and fail to do so, that's something that a reader who's completely tree blind might sit up and take notice.

NEARY: Richard Powers is the very opposite of tree blind. Walking through the woods, he stops constantly to smell or touch.

POWERS: Look at this. Look at those leaf buds.

NEARY: Standing 12 on an overlook with a view of the mountains in the distance, Powers observes the scene with the keen eye of someone who understands forests.

POWERS: To a person who's not tuned 13 into trees it's just a kind of massive green. But as your eye attenuates 14, the mountains start to divide up into patches.

NEARY: Those patches are different kinds of forests. And Powers has hiked through all of them.

POWERS: I have these thrilling moments when I turn a corner and all of a sudden, from one step to the next, I go from one of these forest types to the other. It's the most dramatic thing. The ground under your feet changes. The smell of the air changes. The look, the color of the air changes.

NEARY: Writing "The Overstory" has changed Powers' life. He moved to Tennessee after first visiting the Smoky Mountains for research.

POWERS: The more I read about it, the more I thought, I have to see this if I'm going to write about these things. And I want to see what a forest looked like before Europeans came here. I want to see what America looked like 500 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 8,000 years ago.

NEARY: We head up to see such a forest, which is just a short walk off a winding 15 mountain road.

Oh, this is beautiful.

POWERS: So this is quite different than anything you've seen so far.

NEARY: Yeah.

It's like walking into the primeval forest of folk tales, shrouded 16 in fog with patches of snow here and there. Huge tree trunks and branches sprawl 17 on the ground while living trees rise high above. Blankets of thick moss 18 and lichen 19 cover everything. A giant root system stands on its side, towering above us. A forest like this, Powers says, can't be tamed and should never be lost.

POWERS: There's something about an old-growth forest that flies in the face of management and rationality. It's crazy. It's messy. It's dynamic. It's brutal 20. But once you ease into it, that mess becomes part of the beauty.

NEARY: These trees have been here for centuries, Power says. To save them and ourselves will require a shift in human consciousness, a new way of thinking. And literature, he believes, will have a role in bringing that change about.

POWERS: There's a whole new kind of story that we're going to have to learn how to tell. And we won't be dispensing 21 with the social or political, not by a long shot. But to add in this environmental drama, that's going to be a marvelous task and a great source of meaning for the writers of the future.

NEARY: Richard Powers - his new book is "The Overstory." Lynn Neary, NPR News, Washington.

(SOUNDBITE OF ISATO NAKAGAWA'S "MEGA TOP")