Time has always been an imaginary concept, and it matters who imagines it. For most of history, time has been governed by our relationship to the more-than-human world: the rising of the sun and the turning of the seasons. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, time was separated from the earth, and suborned by industry for its own

Nature is imagination itself. Let us not re-imagine it, then, but begin to imagine anew, with nature as our co-conspirator: our partner, our comrade and our guide.

We need the mental models provided by our technology, the words we make up for its concepts and metaphors, in order to describe and properly understand that analogous processes are already at play in the more-than-human world.

Every discipline discovers its own ecology in time, as it shifts inexorably from the walled gardens of specialized research towards a greater engagement with the wider world. As we expand our field of view, we come to realize that everything impacts everything else – and we find meaning in these interrelationships. Much of this book will be

No wonder we keep turning again to chance-producing tools – dice, cards, roulette wheels, astrology and the I Ching – in order to let off steam, get out of our own heads and perhaps provide alternative narratives to a sterile, decomplexified, abstract world, one created apparently and occasionally for our benefit, but in actuality to stupefy us,

Intra-action is not interaction, where two phenomena or bodies, already in existence, act on one another. Rather, it is the process of becoming-phenomena and becoming-bodies, which takes place when the two touch one another.

The achievement of The Overstory is to make these revelations meaningful at human scale, building the connections between us and the trees around us. Powers uses the scale of arboreal life – its extent in time, as well as its size – to tell a new kind of epic story: multi-generational, planetary-scale and ecological, in the sense of deeply

In the moment that animals and natural entities are declared legal persons, our whole definition of, understanding of and relation to life changes. These things, these objects, are remade into – or rather, recognized as – subject beings, possessing agency, needs, desires and vitality. Suddenly, whole new communities of agential life leap into view.

If our inability to tell meaningful, actionable stories about our changing planet is part of the problem, then we need to rethink the tools we use to make culture itself.