Delve Seminar: Richard Powers’ The Overstory and the Nature Writings of John Muir
Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United StatesIn this Delve seminar, we will compare the ecological writing of Richard Powers and John Muir. Powers’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Overstory, comes to us at a time when concern for preserving natural spaces has exploded into anxiety over the planet’s very future. While grappling with deforestation and global warming in fiction, Powers sees himself as a realist. He asks, “Which is more childish, naïve, romantic, or mystical: the belief that we can get away with making Earth revolve around our personal appetites and fantasies, or the belief that a vast, multi-million-pronged project four and a half billion years old deserves a little reverent humility?” Muir, something of a father for the national parks movement, used an ecological perspective in his stories of adventure and…