Beyond Anthropocentrism: Dwelling, Apocalypse, Wilderness, and Nonhuman Agency in Richard Powers' The Overstory

Abstract

This article examines how Richard Powers' The Overstory reconstructs the relationship between human beings and the natural world through Greg Garrard's ecocritical concepts of dwelling, apocalypse, wilderness, and animals or nonhuman life. The study responds to a critical gap in literary scholarship in which environmental themes are often discussed in broad terms without a closely specified conceptual frame and without a systematic mapping of those concepts across one primary text. A qualitative textual design was adopted, and the novel was read through close analysis supported by a structured coding dataset derived from the article outline and organized into thirty analytical units. Each unit identified narrative segment, character or focal emphasis, ecological issue, anthropocentric system under critique, ecocentric perspective, nonhuman element, narrative technique, and interpretive finding. Descriptive summaries were then developed from the coded units in order to clarify recurrent patterns without reducing the analysis to a statistical study. The findings show that apocalypse and dwelling operate as the dominant conceptual pair, while wilderness and nonhuman agency serve as concentrated sites of ethical intensification. The novel repeatedly turns forests from passive scenery into active presences, exposes anthropocentric institutions as forms of perceptual and moral failure, and reimagines home as coexistence rather than possession. The article argues that The Overstory does not merely depict environmental crisis. It reorganizes scale, attention, memory, and obligation in ways that promote an ecocentric understanding of human-nature relations. Through Garrard's framework, the novel emerges as a sustained literary response to ecological devastation and as an imaginative model for environmental ethics grounded in attentiveness, interdependence, and shared planetary accountability.

Keywords: Ecocriticism, Richard Powers, The Overstory, Greg Garrard, environmental crisis, anthropocentrism, ecocentrism, nonhuman agency