I’ve been thinking about the trees I’ve lost in my life.

A pair of cottonwoods used to stand in front of my childhood home, and there were three or four 60-foot pines in our backyard, including the first base and home plate trees. The second and third base trees, which I never identified but my dad says were cherries, had low branches and sap that would congeal along the bark. Behind our shed there was a flowering cherry that was perfect for climbing when it wasn’t full of bees.

The cottonwoods were the first to go. They would rain down resin-covered buds that stuck to cars, lawns, shoes and then living room carpets, and I didn’t give it a second thought when my family decided to have them cut down. The backyard pines towered over our house, and after a good-size branch dropped on the roof over my parents’ bedroom, they were taken out. A huge section of the cherry almost fell on my brother when he was doing yard work a few years ago, and the others had trouble with some kind of rot or another. I returned home recently to find that three more trees had vanished, including one that grew at least 45 feet high at a 45-degree angle, trying to grab sunlight unreachable under a nearby cedar. The cedar is still standing for now.

These lost trees came to mind this summer as I read Richard Powers’ remarkable new novel The Overstory. It was a fantastic summer read: An expansive ensemble piece with tragic deaths, mystical forces (possibly hallucinations), requited and unrequited love, strained families, the intrigues of academia, adultery, science, psychology, technology, politics, ecoterrorists and on and on.

But for all these things, The Overstory is really about trees. The characters interact with, take on the names of, and are enchanted by different varieties of trees. They think about the trees of their childhoods, and they worry about the trees of the future. And though the novel ends with something much larger than a moral, it is a story about our responsibilities, and the crisis we are approaching by not marveling at and protecting the astonishing world and works around us.

That kind of thing can get tedious quickly (says the guy who spent three paragraphs on childhood trees). As a skeptical behavioral scientist says in the novel, “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” Fortunately, Powers, a National Book Award winner for his 2006 novel The Echo Maker, is a master storyteller. His people are as fascinating as any tree — which is saying something, because trees are incredibly fascinating. We tend to think of them as wood or shade or simply “there.” But trees are our world, near-silent creators of things humans require. In a 2005 TED Talk, the architect William McDonough proposed a thought experiment: imagine designing something “that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, accrues solar energy as fuel, makes complex sugars and food, creates microclimates, changes colors with the seasons and self-replicates.” That inventory alone is enough to show us what we’re taking for granted. And there’s more: Recent science has discovered evidence that trees are far more active than we ever knew. They communicate with each other, warn each other about threats, tell time and share resources. In some cases, scientists have found trees that provide nutrients to nearby trees that are sick or damaged, helping sustain them and preventing the death of a neighbor. In other cases, trees that are dying will pass their resources on to their own children. They recognize their own families.

A woman working at The Bookstore Plus in Lake Placid, New York told me that The Overstory would change my life. She wasn’t wrong. Like the trees we see every day, there is an easy and accessible magic to this book, if we want to see it. For the first time in a long time, I enjoyed a novel without reservation, with a sense of joy and wonder that I used to feel when, as Powers put it, my “mind was a greener thing.” From when those trees in my yard were still standing.

-Michael Moats