On Feb. 23, bestselling author Richard Powers prompted an audience of nearly 800 people in Campbell Hall to consider the environment as more than just a literary backdrop but a living, breathing and ever-changing character.
The conversation was hosted by UC Santa Barbara Arts & Lectures and moderated by author Pico Iyer as a part of the “Speaking with Pico” series. Powers is currently on tour for his newest novel “Playground,” and audience members all received signed copies of the book.
A prolific author of 14 novels and winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel “The Overstory,” Powers has long explored the intersections of humanity, technology and the environment within the pages of his books. From Chicago to the Silicon Valley to French Polynesia, “Playground” follows a diverse set of characters as they experiment with the viability of “sea-steading” while contending with emerging artificial intelligence technologies and extractivist colonial legacies against the backdrop of the deep Pacific.
The conversation began with the story behind his dedication of “Playground” to his older sister, Peggy Petermann, who passed away in 2022. Powers recalled how, for his 10th birthday, Peggy, aware of her younger brother’s ongoing obsession with the natural world, gifted him a book on coral reefs. At the time, the Powers family was living on the North side of Chicago.
“The world that I lived in was so different from the world in this book,” Powers said. “It felt like there were two Earths, and one was all in straight lines with a lot of brick and the other was surreal and psychedelic and otherworldly. And I thought, ‘I wanna live on that Earth.’”
Powers mentioned how, about half a year later, in 1968, his father took a teaching job in Bangkok, Thailand, and his family moved across the world. At the age of 11, Powers had the opportunity to witness this “surreal and psychedelic” world firsthand as he snorkeled in the South China Sea. He recalled how, for about five years of his childhood, he wanted to be a marine biologist.
After moving back to the United States in 1973, Powers faced the dilemma of having to choose what to study in college – what he described as a troubling choice for “a generalist” with such a diverse set of interests. About three-quarters of the way through his undergraduate career studying physics, Powers decided that he would go to graduate school to study literature. His desire to synthesize his interests led him to a career as a writer, enabling him to explore his fascinations across scientific disciplines and eventually bringing him back to marine biology.
“It was my sister’s death a few years ago that made me revisit that childhood gift and to remember that kid who wanted that future and, in many ways, this book is my chance to go back and be that person that I never became,” Powers said about “Playground”.
After school, Powers worked as a computer programmer before moving to Holland in his late 20s to write his earliest novels. Eventually, Powers made his way to Silicon Valley to teach at Stanford University.
While living there, Powers would venture up into the Santa Cruz Mountains, where he would walk around second-growth redwood forests. He remembered the first time he stumbled upon an old-growth tree, “one of the ones that somehow missed the clearcutting.”
“To see a tree half the width of this stage, as tall as a football field is long and as old as Charlemagne or older,” he described. “It just changes your whole sense of nature.”
These giants would go on to serve as the inspiration of “The Overstory,” a novel as much about trees as “Playground” is about coral reefs.
“Once I realized that all of these forests had been cleared, it dawned on me that Silicon Valley was down there because these trees were up here,” said Powers. “These trees paid for the foundations of Silicon Valley; all of the capital that was spent on these mountains created and financed the digital revolution.”
Powers has lived in proximity to other prominent forests as well. His 2021 novel “Bewilderment” is set in the Great Smoky Mountains, where he currently resides in Eastern Tennessee.
“I used to think my work was to get up in the morning and stay at my writing location until I had 1000 words. Now, I realize that my job is to wake up and see what’s going on out there. That’s the day job, to be in the world, to be where I live,” said about his life in the Smokies.
Powers spoke about the long history of human storytelling, both oral and written, and how its emphasis shifted from fables with “living place as an essential part” to those with a focus on human exceptionalism. He recalled his realization in his 30s that the mention of other species was largely absent from 19th-century Western literature.
“We tell a funny story, we tell the story that we did this all by ourselves, but it’s by the grace of all other forms of life that we’ve gotten away with it as far as we have,” he said.
Powers questioned the beginnings of this phenomenon, considering that most literature for most of human history, particularly in Indigenous cultures, included descriptions of the natural world. He describes his own works as his attempt to rejoin this form to the long history of Indigenous fictions.
Additionally, he recognized the sudden resurgence of contemporary authors’ willingness to take on the natural world as a part of the greater cultural conceptualization of environmental degradation and climate change.
“Now, slowly, people have come to understand that we are living at this incredibly precarious moment where we need to live in the world in a new way,” Powers said.
Just as his books invite readers to reflect on the past, value the present and reimagine the future, Powers also urged the audience to think about the ways in which our species must evolve to be able to coexist sustainably with the rest of the living world.
“People ask me, ‘Do you have hope for the future?’ and I just want to say, ‘What are you hoping for?’ You tell me first, because if you’re saying, ‘Do you hope that we can keep living like this?’ The answer is no.”
A version of this article appeared on p.13 of the Mar. 6, 2025 edition of the Daily Nexus.
