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

• 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