It is an enchanting and - my God - it is a devastating book.Īnd it speaks, as does this conversation we have, to something I’ve been wrestling with on the show over the past year, and probably before that, too. It’s about the limits of our cognitive empathy and what it would take to change them and what we do to those among us who aren’t so limited.

It is about our cognition, our brainwaves, the way we can live in a time of wonders, but a time also of horrors - of climate crisis and mass extinction and poverty that doesn’t need to be there and violence - how we can live in that time and see nothing but normalcy, sometimes see nothing but ourselves.

And “Bewilderment,” by contrast, is the inner story. “The Overstory” is about the world beyond us - the slow, powerful life of the trees and the forests and the way all of that shapes us. Powers has a new book out, “Bewilderment.” And I think “Overstory” and “Bewilderment” should be understood as a couplet. When I interviewed him earlier this year and asked for his three books, former President Barack Obama recommended “The Overstory.” And he said, quote, “it changed how I thought about the Earth and our place in it.” Hell of an endorsement. I’ve never walked through a forest the same way again. Richard Powers is the author of 13 novels, including, famously, “The Overstory,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019. Sometimes I finish these conversations, and I feel I’ve been given a gift.

I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.” Transcript Richard Powers on What We Can Learn From Trees The Pulitzer Prize-winning author asks whether we can reimagine our relationship with the natural world before it’s too late.

The overstory