"The Overstory"

There's so much urgency in the mid-section, which chronicles the activitists' doomed attempts to save trees. The outlaws remind me of the kidnappers in Ann Patchett's "Bel Canto", and naturally things end up no better.

• She must still discover that myths are basic truths twisted into mnemonics, instructions posted from the past, memories waiting to become predictions.
• The store is a drag show of well-being and mirth.
• The sky does amazing things. It bruises a little in the freedom of the west, while to the east it spills open like a pomegranate.
• Art and acorns: both profligate handouts that go mostly wrong.
• She takes a course in Renaissance art, night courses in modern poetry, all the Holyoke stuff she tossed to become an engineer.
• It’s neither vanilla nor turpentine, but replete with highlights of each. A shot of spiritual butterscotch. A sprig of pineapple incense. It smells like nothing but itself, pungent and sublime. She breathes in, eyes closed, the tree’s real name.
• But he can’t stop the questions: What do I do now, for the next forty years? What work can’t the efficiency of unified mankind chop into pure fertilizer?
• Tonight’s ride, though, is error-free. The seat of the wheelchair must be adjusted, the wheels repositioned, but he sticks the landing. There, in the chair, he reverses all the steps, detaches the winch, hangs the bag, and like Houdini, slips free of the sling underneath him without ever lifting.
• How long does it take to know anyone? Five minutes, and done. Nothing can move you off a first impression. That person in your life’s passenger seat? Always a hitchhiker, to be dropped off just down the road.
• Now his life has a luxury he’s never had: a destination, and someone to head there with.
• It depends on a person’s ability to say nevertheless, to do one small thing that seems beyond them, and, for a moment, break the grip of time.
• The game seems childish, at first. But all of art is childish, all storytelling, all human hope and fear.
• One family of distress hormones used by her trees—jasmonate—supplies the punch to all those feminine perfumes that play on mystery and intrigue.
• The solitary act of sitting over the page and waiting for her hand to move may be as close as she’ll ever get to the enlightenment of plants.
• He looks across the kitchen at her. “Call it Forest Salvation. Then you don’t have to commit to who’s saving what.”
• all trying to bail out the ocean of capitalism with an acorn cap.
• Righteousness makes Mimi nuts. She has always been allergic to people with conviction. But more than she hates conviction, she hates sneaky power.
• Mimi watches the foreman make all kinds of cost-benefit calculations. It’s a funny thing about capitalism: money you lose by slowing down is always more important than money you’ve already made.
• It’s the not having babies, he thinks. The bloom still coursing through her, the pure lure, as if ridiculous loveliness still had a job to do, this far past youth.
• This is what people do—solve their own problems in others’ lives.
• when she isn’t lying the lazy lie of decency.
• It’s a grand, luxurious act of self-deceit, an outright lie, that claim of Kant’s: As far as nonhumans are concerned, we have no direct duties. All exists merely as means to an end. That end is man.
• Seconds pass before Nick coughs up a name: salamander. How did a damp-seeking creature with inch-long limbs climb two-thirds of the length of a football field, up the side of dry, fibrous bark?.. The only plausible explanation is that his ancestors got on board a thousand years ago and rode the elevator up, for five hundred generations.
• Creation in all its extravagant waste.
• The Van Eyck brothers painted 75 different kinds of identifiable plant species into the Ghent Altarpiece.
• These slow, deliberate creatures with their elaborate vocabularies, each distinctive, shaping each other, breeding birds, sinking carbon, purifying water, filtering poisons from the ground, stabilizing the microclimate. Join enough living things together, through the air and underground, and you wind up with something that has intention. Forest. A threatened creature.
• A tap on her right shoulder, and she turns to face the opposing expert witness. “You’ve just made lumber a whole lot more expensive.” She blinks at the accusation, unable to see how that might be a bad thing. “Every timber firm with private land or existing rights is going to cut as fast as they can.”
• The trunk tips several feet off the vertical, then swings back as far the other way. Nick swings like a sliding weight on the world’s tallest metronome.
• Watchman smiles, tired. “We don’t make reality. We just evade it. So far. By looting natural capital and hiding the costs. But the bill is coming, and we won’t be able to pay.” Adam can’t decide whether to smile or nod. He knows only that these people—the tiny few immune to consensual reality—
• “It’s so simple,” she says. “So obvious. Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse. But people don’t see it. So the authority of people is bankrupt.” Maidenhair
• Consciousness itself is a flavor of madness, set against the thoughts of the green world.
• Adam recalls something he learned in graduate school: memory is always a collaboration in progress.
• Something has broken in him. His appetite for human self-regard is dead.
• a tremendous wave that feeds on itself, jetting out refuse behind it: bubbles, genocides, crusades, manias from the pyramids to pet rocks—the desperate delusions of culture
• The Northwest has more miles of logging road than public highway.
• “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”
• He shares a cookout with the four friends who strike him as a Jungian archetypal family: Maidenhair, the Mother Priest; Watchman, the Father Protector; Mulberry, the Child Craftsman; and Doug-fir, Child Clown.
• Gentleness is the deputy of her fatigue.
• He can’t remember when the Web wasn’t here. That’s the job of consciousness, to turn Now into Always, to mistake what is for what was meant to be.
• The product here is not so much books as that goal of ten thousand years of history, the thing the human brain craves above all else and nature will die refusing to give: convenience. Ease
• But liking and not liking—the rod and staff of commodity culture—mean little to him. He wants only to fill as many of these walls as possible with something that can’t be walled.
• The books diverge and radiate, as fluid as finches on isolated islands. But they share a core so obvious it passes for given. Every one imagines that fear and anger, violence and desire, rage laced with the surprise capacity to forgive—character—is all that matters in the end.
• To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.
• a carpet of trees so thick it’s impossible to believe that the world is, in fact, frayed to the point of snapping.
• She gives them Chico Mendes. She gives them Wangari Maathai.
• 213 distinct species of tree in a little over four hectares, each one a product of the Earth thinking aloud.
• Myths are old miscalculations, the guesses of children long ago put to bed.
• Enlightenment is a shared enterprise.
• The whole urgent calculus of need—what she called her life—shrinks down to a pore on the underside of a leaf, way out on the tip of a wind-dipped branch, high up in the crown of a community too big for any glance to take in.
• “Yes! And what do all good stories do?” There are no takers. Neelay holds up his arms and extends his palms in the oddest gesture. In another moment, leaves will grow from his fingers. Birds will come and nest in them. “They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren’t.”
• This is her freedom. This one. The freedom to be equal to the terrors of the day.
• Durkheim, Foucault, crypto-normativity: How reason is just another weapon of control. How the invention of the reasonable, the acceptable, the sane, even the human, is greener and more recent than humans suspect.
• It’s the lone species of the only genus in the sole family in the single order of the solitary class remaining in a now-abandoned division that once covered the earth—a living fossil three hundred million years old that disappeared from the continent back in the Neogene and has returned to scratch out a living in the shadow, salt, and fumes of Lower Manhattan... The fan-shaped leaves with their radiating veins are said to cure the sickness of forgetting. Adam doesn’t need the cure. He remembers. He remembers. Ginkgo. The maidenhair tree.
• He’s reached the age when dead is the new normal.
• The single best thing you can do for the world. It occurs to her: The problem begins with that word world. It means two such opposite things. The real one we cannot see. The invented one we can’t escape. She lifts the glass and hears her father read out loud: Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.
• How life managed to add imagination to all the other tricks in its chemistry set is a mystery Dorothy can’t wrap her head around.
• The day is two-thirds done when animals and plants part ways. And still life is only single cells. Dusk falls before compound life takes hold. Every large living thing is a latecomer, showing up after dark. Nine p.m. brings jellyfish and worms.
• In a few short seasons, simply by placing billions of pages of data side by side, the next new species will learn to translate between any human language and the language of green things.
• Baucis and Philemon. And their reward for opening their door to strangers was to live on after death as trees—an oak and a linden—huge and gracious and intertwined.
• That’s the scary thing about men: get a few together with some simple machines, and they’ll move the world.
• In fact, he read once, back in Iowa, the night the woman came to trouble him into life, that the word tree and the word truth come from the same root.