Alisa

“Left alone—and there’s the catch—left alone to the air and light and rain, each one might put on tens of thousands of pounds. Any one of his starts could grow for the next six hundred years and dwarf the largest factory chimney. It could play host to generations of voles that never go to ground and several dozen species of insects whose only desire is to strip their host bare. Could rain down ten million needles a year on its own lower branches, building up mats of soil that grow their own gardens high in the air.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“There’s a Chinese saying. ‘When is the best time to plan a tree? Twenty years ago.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“The proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable. This is partly because until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of “us”—those who are holding rights at the time.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“A tree is a passage between earth and sky.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory