Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe

Charlotte Gill
$16.11 $18.95
- Winner of the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction
- Winner of the 2012 Foreword Magazine Editor's Choice Prize Nonfiction
- Shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Prize
- Shortlisted for the Charles Taylor Non-Fiction Award

"Charlotte Gill writes with a dexterity and nobility that soars. This is the best book, on several fronts, that I've read in a long time."-Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Company

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


Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 07/24/2012
ISBN: 9781553657927
Pages: 247
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.80d
Award: Libris Awards - Winner
Award: RBC Taylor Prize - Finalist
Award: IndieFab awards - Winner
Award: Hilary Weston Prize for Nonfiction - Finalist

Review Citations: Quill & Quire 09/01/2011 pg. 27
Quill & Quire Books of the Yr 12/01/2011 pg. 16
Publishers Weekly 09/03/2012
Foreword 07/23/2013