Outside the Hive
(WorldNews Environment)

ShareTweetPrint Richard Powers` The Overstory is a big novel of ideas about humans and the natural world that will keep me thinking long after turning the final page. Here I just want to pick up on one among many of its themes and offer a few brief reflections on it, perhaps as the final curtain to the present trio of posts on collapse. In response to an episode of (male) violence between strangers, followed by a linked episode of (male) domestic violence, Powers puts this thought into the mind of one of his protagonists: “Humankind is deeply ill. The species won`t last long. It was an aberrant experiment. Soon the world will be returned to the healthy intelligences, the collective ones....