Though she has comparatively little narrative space compared to other characters, Olivia is one of the novel’s most important characters. Her activism and death motivate many other people and drive the plot forward. Her journey from being a spoiled, cynical college student to being an environmental terrorist is the transformative drive to action that the narrative demands from its characters and its audience.

Olivia, however, comes to the environmentalist project in a strange fashion. After briefly dying from an electric shock, she begins to hear voices in her head. These voices direct her to Nick and then to the giant redwood that becomes her home for a year. In a literal sense, these voices provide Olivia with the direction and purpose her life had previously lacked. Though she knows little about environmentalism, she feels compelled to fight for the rights of the environment, and this passion and energy soon begins to infect other directionless, lost people.

But the same conviction and ethereal bond with nature that gives Olivia’s life purpose is also her undoing. She does not fear death, going so far as to try and fight a helicopter with a tree branch to save a tree.