With a lot of great reviews The Overstory had a lot to live up to, and it mostly did. I was not engaged by the final part of the story as much as I was by the middle, but maybe that’s by design, and after reading some other post-read reviews I realize that there is a certain beauty to the final section that I had missed in my reading.
Thing I learned that shocked me most is that clearcuts are doused with herbicide after they’re cut to kill all plant life. This allows the forest managers to plant stands of single species of trees, which are easier to harvest in the future. As an avid gardener this sounds suspiciously like the mono crop agriculture that has been sucking the life out of farmland for the last century. I hoped at first that using herbicides on forests was an invention for the novel, but sadly its not, not even in Canada.
The Overstory leaves me wanting to do something about how humans treat the natural world and forests especially. I don’t have concrete plans yet to do anything, but maybe there is some guerrilla tree planting in my future. I did get The Secret Life of Trees from the library read that next.
