Richard Powers on What We Can Learn from Trees
About this episode
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Powers discusses his new novel 'Bewilderment' and what trees can teach humans about attention, humility, and survival. Powers describes how research into forest ecology — how trees communicate, share resources, and sustain whole ecosystems — upended his sense of human exceptionalism and reshaped his fiction after 'The Overstory.' He and Klein talk about the limits of storytelling as climate activism, the tension between wonder and grief in confronting ecological collapse, the moral status of nonhuman life, and whether expanding our circle of empathy to other species might change how we treat the planet. Powers also reflects on craft: how science reshapes a novelist's imagination, and why he writes to enlarge our sense of kinship with the living world.