July 10, 2019

I just finished reading two books that I would highly recommend to anyone concerned about the environment and global climate:

—  The Overstory, a novel by Richard Powers.  It won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

—  Underland, a 2019 non-fiction “deep time journey” by Robert Macfarlane.

Each book is exceedingly sweeping in scope and chock full of scientific information and details that even I (a political science and English major) could essentially understand and find captivating.   An overriding theme of each book is that humans aren’t doing much good for this planet.

Each book may fairly be called a magnum opus, and I can’t even begin to describe their full sweep in a blog like this.   So I urge you to do a little googling for reviews.   I am linking a good review of each here:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/richard-powers-the-overstory/559106/

https://www.npr.org/2019/06/03/729156788/underland-connects-us-to-dazzling-worlds-beneath-our-feet

The Overstory is mainly about trees and people — how trees interact with each other, how people interact with each other, and how people interact with trees.   Lots of bad things get done by some people, some good things get done by some people, and lots of good things get done by trees.

After reading the book, I am paying a heck of a lot more attention to trees than I ever did before.  In fact, my current iPhone wallpaper is a close-up of a beautiful redwood I recently photographed in northern California.

Underland primarily focuses on what goes on under the earth’s surface — today, for millions of years before today, and projectively for eons to come. The author relates how humans have used the “underland” over history in various positive and negative ways for all kinds of storage, disposal, and extraction.  He describes intriguing and dangerous underground “journeys” of his own in several places around the world.  His last journey is to a repository being readied for nuclear waste way under Finland.

Each book is laden with concerns about the future for the global environment and climate.   The Overstory hits hard on deforestation, Underland hits equally hard on melting ice.

I am retired now and have more time to read books like these.   But I encourage those of you still practicing to find the time.