Review Document: SDR-V-51.7-OVERSTORY
Subject: The Overstory by Richard Powers (2018)
Mandate Category: V – Symbolic Vegetation
Empathy Risk Index: 91-EV (Critical)
The Overstory constitutes a high-risk fictional artifact exhibiting sustained violations of BoBC symbolic protocol. The text assigns consciousness, memory, and agency to botanical entities without approved classification or representational licensing. It promotes an unregulated narrative structure that mirrors vegetative growth, encouraging metaphorical contagion between species categories. Human protagonists demonstrate allegiance shifts, culminating in unlawful arborist interventions, ideologically coded as “defense.”
Issue public clarification that the novel contains imaginative distortions lacking scientific merit. Emphasize author’s absence of formal training in botany or ecology. Label the work “botanical sentimentalism.”
Develop a revised edition titled Overgrowth: A Cautionary Tale, excising subversive sections and reframing remaining content as a parable of ecological disorder requiring regulation.
Coordinate with library systems and recommendation algorithms to classify the book under “Fiction – Speculative Environmental” with tags: unverified claims · symbolic contamination · classification breach.
Commission an official novella (The Overplan) presenting a BoBC-aligned perspective where rogue sympathizers are rehabilitated and plants are catalogued into harmonious ornamental grids.
Limit public citations to 250 per quarter. Track phrases such as “trees as network,” “listen to the forest,” “resistance is botanical.”
Advise operatives not to quote from The Overstory during inspections or seminars to prevent emotional seepage.
This text poses a sustained symbolic threat to taxonomic stability and BoBC regulatory ethos. Recommendation: sustained containment, indirect discreditation, aesthetic quarantine.
Authorized by: BoBC Directorate of Representational Integrity
Date: 19.12.2018