Eating Dirt - (Greystone Nature Classics) by Charlotte Gill (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Winner of the BC National Award for Non-Fiction

Shortlisted for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction and the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction

A vivid, intimate look at the life of a tree planter on the Pacific Northwest coast, exposing the brutal, exhilarating realities of modern reforestation, a unique subculture, and the importance and wonders of forests.

In the remote rain-drenched forests of Cascadia, an eclectic group of tree planters rises before dawn to replace the trees loggers have felled. Over Charlotte Gill's 20-year, million-tree career, she came to know these clearcuts as a collision site between human civilization and the natural world--a working frontier where chainsaws go quiet and a different kind of crew moves in to stitch the ground back together.

In Eating Dirt, Gill offers up a slice of tree planting life in all its soggy, gritty exuberance. She traces the life of a seedling from cone picker to greenhouse to helicopter sling, and asks what is really restored when a razored hillside is replanted in tight ranks of conifers. Along the way, she braids in the deep history of forests from ancient redwoods and Indigenous cedar cultures to the clear-cut empires of Rome, Britain, and North America. She looks at logging's environmental impact and its boom-and-bust history, and reveals how thoroughly our cities, wars, and daily comforts have been carved from wood.

More than a memoir, Eating Dirt is a meditation on resilience: of ecosystems, of seasonal workers, and of trees themselves. Gill celebrates the wonder and stubborn beauty of forests and confronts the moral tangle of trying to mend them. Most of all, the book joyously celebrates the priceless value of forests and the ancient, ever-changing relationship between humans and trees.

Review Quotes

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 Writers' Prize for Nonfiction
Shortlisted for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction

"This is a deeply researched, beautifully written book."
--Emily St. John Mandel

"In prose that is at once lyrical, nuanced, and sharp-edged, Gill examines a trade and a way of life."
--Maclean's

"Gill's is a book you can live in. You come to speak its language and to feel as she feels."
--Globe and Mail

"Charlotte Gill cuts to the bone with words so taut and commanding they expose the toughness required to march through life in the forestry business."
--Foreword Magazine

"An arresting look into another world. ...What sets "Eating Dirt" apart is the vividness of the writing. Gill's prose puts the wasp in your shirt, the weariness in you at the cellular level, the grizzly too close for comfort."
--Seattle Times

"Never have I read such a beautiful book with such a dull premise: what it's like to plant tree seedlings in the wake of logging companies' destruction. ...Gill turns a subject that might seem narrow and confined into a lyrical essay about labor and rest, decay and growth."
--Smithsonian Magazine

"Charlotte Gill gets my enthusiastic vote as the best nonfiction book of 2012. ...highly readable ...Gill's narrative is by turns gripping, funny, informative but always tactile."
--John Sledge, Alabama Press Register

"The humility that lies in the title of Charlotte Gill's extraordinary Eating Dirt is more than borne out in this astonishing chronicle of work, the elements, and place. ...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

"The trees they plant each year "shimmy in the wind. There, we say. We did this with our hands. We didn't make millions, and we didn't cure AIDS. But at least a thousand new trees are breathing." For that, she can be proud--and it makes for a good story."
--Publishers Weekly

"An inspired narrative in a unique topic that is half memoir, half magic. ...A radiant piece of non-fiction by a talented writer, whose descriptions will make your back ache by the time you finish reading."
--Sacramento Book Review, 5 stars

"In language as sharp as obsidian, as unsentimental as a clear-cut, Charlotte Gill tells the story of her tree-planting tribe, men and women who spend their lives atoning for the deeds of the rest of us who, to this day, continue to sacrifice the greatest temperate rainforest on earth on the altar of our prosperity."
--Wade Davis

"Charlotte Gill is everything you could want from a storyteller: honest and wise, leanly lyrical, tough and tender in equal measure. In this exquisite book about a gnarly occupation, we come to appreciate the resilience of nature and humans both."
--Philip Connors, author of Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout

About the Author

Charlotte Gill was born in London and raised in Canada and the United States. Her book Eating Dirt was a national bestseller that won the B.C. National Award for Canadian Nonfiction and was also shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize and the RBC Taylor Prize. She is also the author of Almost Brown, a mixed-race family memoir, and Ladykiller, which was a Governor General's Award nominee. She lives on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, Canada.

Claire Cameron is the author of multiple bestselling and award-winning books, including How to Survive a Bear Attack: A Memoir and The Last Neanderthal. Claire has led canoe trips in Algonquin Park and worked as an instructor for Outward Bound, teaching mountaineering, climbing, and whitewater rafting in Oregon and beyond. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Guardian, and she is a monthly contributor to The Globe and Mail. She lives in Toronto.