Charlotte Gill 
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.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

The Last Place on Earth

A Kind of Tribe

Green Fluorescent Protein

Beautiful Losers

A Furious Way of Being

The Town That Logging Made

At the End of the Reach

Extremophiles

Sunset

Exit Lines

Über den Autor

Charlotte Gill is the author of the story collection
Ladykiller, a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award. Her work has appeared in Best Canadian Stories, The Journey Prize Stories, and has been broadcast on CBC Radio. Her narrative non-fiction has been nominated for Western and National Magazine Awards. She spent nearly two decades working in the forests of Canada and has planted more than a million trees.