Media Ecologies and Transcendent Technology in Richard Powers’s 'The Overstory'

Abstract

Often cited as a preeminent text of contemporary environmental fiction, Richard Powers’s The Overstory is a literary attempt to bridge the gap between the human and the nonhuman and reveal the entanglement of their shared ecological well-being. The novel carries out this project by providing vegetal lifeforms, specifically trees, with some communicative capacity. They are able to express themselves, both through chemical signals, relayed across networks of fungi and other organic lifeforms, and through an affective, transcendental mode of communication. Powers therefore evokes both the scientific discourse around the so-called ‘Wood Wide Web’, and the Romantic notion of nature as a vector for transcendent experience. However, through its emphasis on a nonhuman media ecology and on technology as a mode of communication, The Overstory also reveals how, in the context of the Anthropocene, technological mediation has become inescapable in any interaction with nature.