Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Von Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

Each week we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting

ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Richard Powers is the culture, and spirituality.

Richard Powers is the author of 12 novels.

His most recent, The Overstory, won last year's Pulitzer Prize.

He is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the National Book Award,

and has been a four-time National Book Critic Circles Award finalist. I spoke with Richard about the overstory, and his intention

to tell a story in which humans are not separate from the living world around them. As the lies of his

human characters are shaped and directed by the lives of trees, they are forced into a

reckoning, that their very existence is contingent on water, soil, and other creatures.

At a time when the dominant narrative is one which upholds the promises of technological transformation

and lods humans as the sole heroes, Richard advocates instead for a plant consciousness,

in which we replace the life of commodity with the life of community.

All the characters in the overstory have encounters and experiences with trees that greatly impact them,

and lead them on life-changing journeys that we follow during the course of the book.

As I understand it, the seed behind the overstory was an unexpected encounter you had

with a redwood tree here in California.

I wonder if you could start off our conversation by sharing this experience and how it

led you to want to write a book about trees.

I'd be happy to...

...