Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine,

located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Meawak people of present-day Marin County.

Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Every once in a while, there comes a book that reweaves the fabric of our reality,

pulling at possibilities and un-stitching what we think we know.

The work offers a new way of understanding the world around us, as well as our place within it.

In 2018, author Richard Powers wrote such a book.

His poet's surprise-winning novel, The Overstory, radically inverts our human-centric narratives of control and technological transformation, and instead offers a story of kinship with the living world.

Through characters deep entanglement with the lives of trees, powers resurrects a plant consciousness,

in which our perceived dominion over nature is replaced with a sense of awe at her own relative insignificance within it.

This book deepened my understanding of our kinship with trees, and I know this was the experience of many, who after reading

the overstory felt called to be in conscious relationship with trees and the plants and creatures

around them. This week, we revisit my conversation with Powers, recorded in 2020, where we

discuss the kind of storytelling that acknowledges the reciprocal communal existence of all living things,

how life-changing these stories can be,

and how they might help shape our response to the ecological crisis. 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.

I had actually written on environmental subjects in the past, and in particular, my 2006 novel,

...