Where is he?

During what turned out to be rather a protracted journey - one doesn't want them to hurry up fixing a problem with an airplane window exactly, but sitting in an airport with a mere "estimate" for delayed departure isn't fun either - I finished Richard Powers' The Overstory. It's an ambitious, expansive and unobtrusively didactic book, which does some remarkable things with characters, some of whom are trees and others of which are computer algorithms. But finishing it also means recognizing where it hasn't gone. Beyond the demographic limitations I spotted going in - it's a settler colonial story - it's just weird that a story which tries to plug into the million-year planetary rhythms of plants stays entirely within the geographical limits of the continental United States of America. On the other hand it does include a reference to the Book of Job - the tree-loving 14:7-10 I've been brooding over myself - which here appears in an account of the work of an activist artist.