Published in 2023 (first published 2023)
265 pages
9 hours and 9 minutes
Charlotte Gill was born in London, England and raised in the United States (upstate New York) and Canada. She spent nearly two decades working in the forests of Canada and has planted more than a million trees. Gill has received many accolades for her writing, including nominations for the prestigious Governor General’s Literary Award, Hilary Weston Prize and the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. Her story collection Ladykiller won the Danuta Gleed Award and BC Book Prize.
What is this book about?
A tree planter’s vivid story of a unique subculture and the magical life of the forest.
Charlotte Gill spent twenty years working as a tree planter in the forests of Canada. During her million-tree career, she encountered hundreds of clearcuts, 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 clearcuts, 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 that evolved over millennia into complex ecosystems. She looks at logging’s environmental impact and its boom-and-bust history, and touches on the versatility of wood, from which we have devised countless creations as diverse as textiles and airplane parts.
With eloquent insight into our slowest-growing “renewable” resource, Eating Dirt joyously celebrates the priceless value of forests and the ancient, ever-changing relationship between humans and trees.
