Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life With the Tree Planters (Greystone Nature Classics)

Winner of the BC National Award for Non-FictionShortlisted for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction and the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for NonfictionA 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