- 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