Compared to the trees that had so impressed me, it was like Jupiter is to the Earth. It was the width of a house, the length of a football field, and as old as Jesus or Caesar. But one day, I came across a single tree that had, for whatever reason, escaped the loggers. These were the forests that had been clear-cut to build San Francisco, and it seemed to me that they had grown back wonderfully. When the scramble for the future down in the valley was too much for me, I would head up to walk in the woods. To the other side were the Santa Cruz mountains, covered in redwoods. Just to one side of me was one of the greatest concentrations of wealth and technological might in history: the corporate HQs of Google, Apple, Intel, HP, Facebook, eBay, Cisco, Tesla, Oracle, Netflix, and so many more.

I was teaching at Stanford and living in Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley. What inspired this gorgeous novel about the relationships between humans and nature? I recently spoke to Richard about what inspired The Overstory and what he sees as the legacy of the Pacific Northwest timber wars. This beautiful book, for all its literary merit, is also an ode to activism. Violence ensues, but so does their message that the natural world is worth fighting for. It culminates in the Pacific Northwest, where all nine convene to protest the destruction of the region’s redwood forests.

It follows the lives of nine unique protagonists (an artist, a Vietnam vet, and seven others) and their profound encounters with trees. This is the National Book Award-winning author’s twelfth novel, and it might be his finest. Then I read Richard Powers’s The Overstory, out this month from W. That alone, I thought, was a worthy objective-I did not hope to find stories that could literally change minds.

When I began this column a little over a year ago, my goal was to trace how contemporary writers are thinking about climate change. Subscribe to her monthly newsletter to get “Burning Worlds” and other writing about art and climate delivered straight to your inbox. Burning Worlds is Amy Brady’s monthly column dedicated to examining trends in climate fiction, or “cli-fi,” in partnership with Yale Climate Connections.

Richard powers the overstory