Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe• Winner of the BC National Award for Non-Fiction • Nominated for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction and the 2011 Hilary Weston Writer's Trust Award. During Charlotte Gill’s 20 years working as a tree planter she encountered hundreds of clear-cuts, each one a collision site between human civilization and the natural world, a complicated landscape presenting geographic evidence of our appetites. Charged with sowing the new forest in these clear-cuts, tree planters are a tribe caught between the stumps and the virgin timber, between environmentalists and loggers. In Eating Dirt, Gill offers up a slice of tree-planting life in all of its soggy, gritty exuberance while questioning the ability of conifer plantations to replace original forests, which evolved over millennia into intricate, complex ecosystems. Among other topics, she also touches on the boom-and-bust history of logging and the versatility of wood, from which we have devised countless creations as diverse as textiles and airplane parts. She also eloquently evokes the wonder of trees, our slowest-growing “renewable” resource and joyously celebrates the priceless value of forests and the ancient, ever-changing relationship between humans and trees. |
Contents
| 1 | |
| 16 | |
Rookie Years | 46 |
Green Fluorescent Protein | 64 |
A Furious Way ofBeing | 88 |
The Town that Logging Made | 112 |
At the End of the Reach | 148 |
Extremophiles | 183 |
Sunset | 209 |
Exit Lines | 231 |
| 245 | |
Acknowledgments | 249 |
Other editions - View all
Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe Charlotte Gill No preview available - 2011 |
Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-planting Tribe Charlotte Gill No preview available - 2011 |
Common terms and phrases
Adam Amazon rainforest arrive bags bear boat boots breath Brian British Columbia bush camp can’t canopy cedar clear-cut climb clouds conifers creatures crew cut block David Suzuki dirt Doug Douglas-fir earth edge eyes feel feet fingers flagging tape forest grizzly ground grow hair hands he’s Helen helicopter human hundred inlet inside Jervis Inlet Julien kind land live loggers logging look mountains mycorrhizae never night ocean once ourselves Pacific Northwest planting trees Port McNeill push rain rainforest road rock roll salal says seedlings seeds shore shoulders shovel silvicultural slash smell snow soil someone Sometimes species stumps tell There’s They’re thing thousand tiny tires tree boxes tree planters tree-planting truck trunks turn Vancouver Island walk Wayne Grady we’ll we’re we’ve wearing weather wild wind window winter wood yellow cedar Ziploc