It would be easy, watching him identify the plants, fungi and mosses around him, to think he had been a botanist all his life, as opposed to a man who spent a frustrating 12 months learning to tell oak from ash.īut then Powers’s ability to absorb and comprehend a subject is one of the cornerstones of his writing. Their behaviour – the ways they help and provide for each other, and other living things too numerous to count – is a direct rebuke to the way we live today. With scientific precision, Powers’s new novel portrays the interconnected lives trees lead. What I was taking seriously for the first time in this book was: they’re not our resources and we won’t be well until we realise that.” “‘ Environmentalism’ is still under the umbrella of a kind of humanism: we say we should manage our resources better.

He had addressed environmental issues before in The Echo Maker, but this time was different. The result was, in his own words, a “religious conversion”: not in the theistic sense, but in the sense of “being bound back into a system of meaning that doesn’t begin and end with humans”. They are not our resources and we won’t be well until we realise that Richard Powers “But once I started looking, I realised it’s not about the size and scale … it’s that I’ve been blind to these amazing creatures all the time.” We say we should manage our resources better. “When they’re as wide as a house and as tall as a football pitch you don’t have to be particularly sensitive to be wowed by it,” he says. Powers hadn’t particularly considered trees until his first encounter with a giant redwood a few years ago, while he was in California teaching on Stanford’s creative writing fellowship course. “Delightful isn’t it, and somewhat familiar? Put it in a glass with bubbles and a couple of ice cubes … root beer!” A yellow birch gives off woozy waves of muscle relaxant (“wintergreen!”) rare sourwood avoided the settlers’ axe, because it made great honey. His wry self-titled “smells of the Smokies” tour includes regular stops to rub leaves and scratch bark. He has been described as “the best novelist you’ve never heard of” for so many years that ignorance is no longer much of an excuse.Īt the moment, however, this softly spoken man is enjoying his role as forest guide. Whether neuroscience or nuclear warfare, the result is usually a profound new take on what it means to be alive. Over a 30-year career his invigorating intellect has scoured artificial intelligence and virtual reality ( Galatea 2.2, Plowing the Dark), music and genetics ( Orfeo, The Goldbug Variations). Photograph: Mike Belleme for the GuardianĪt 60, with numerous accolades, including a National book award (for The Echo Maker), Powers has long earned the right to tackle any subject he pleases. ‘The book was like a five-year-long therapy session where I let all my multiple personalities off the leash’ … Richard Powers.

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