Cashing out the inventory: Capitalocene, metabolic rift, and slow violence in The Overstory

Abstract

Richard Powers’s the Overstory (2018) has attracted a large body of criticism for its trees, its multispecies awareness, and its environmental ethics, most of it concerned with questions of ontology and representation. Although the novel has a tendency to reappear in forests, it does not reappear as often in the economic mechanisms of environmental degradation, which it depends on, as it does in the courtrooms and the corporate takeover mania. This article takes up that omission, reading the novel through three ideas from Eco-Marxist thought: Jason W. Moore’s Capitalocene, John Bellamy Foster’s metabolic rift, and Rob Nixon’s slow violence. Powers, I argue, assembles his critique of capitalism out of three formal habits. He reduces living systems to the language of value, compresses ecological time into human time, and lets institutions reproduce harm while they look neutral. Ecosystems strive to become diverse; markets strive to become uniform when a gas-station attendant refers to the “beauty strip” in a forest that hides a clear-cut, the novel itself is playing economic roles, not just providing a landscape description. The reading is contextualized alongside the other scholarly traditions of reading the novel, such as ecocriticism, plant studies, posthumanism, and environmental justice, and provides a mobile tool for seeking out the economics embedded in the novel today.