FINALIST for the 2021 Oregon Book Award. Rooted in the Pacific
Northwest, the essays in Ruby McConnell's Ground Truth: A Geological
Survey of a Life cover the vast terrain of this region - from volcanoes
to city parks, the eroding shorelines along the Oregon coast, badlands,
lush forests, and city parks. Combining her background as a registered
geologist, McConnell's essays also weave in personal landscapes composed
of grief, loss, and optimism for the future of our environment. "The
Pacific Northwest that you see today is the result of forty years of
radical changes in the culture and economics of what was once a
resource-extraction and agriculture-driven region. They are changes so
fundamental in nature and scope...that, for those of us from this place,
will always be marked by the cataclysmic eruptions of Mt. St. Helens on
May 18, 1980." --Ruby McConnell In this collection of 17 essays,
geologist Ruby McConnell opens her part natural history, part
memoir-in-essays about the Pacific Northwest with the cataclysmic
eruption of Mt. St. Helens in May of 1980. She was two years old.
"Everything that I have stood direct witness to since, everything I know
about this place, happened after we watched the mountain crumble... I
was born to a region digging out." In poignant and wide-ranging essays
that include the wondrous annual return of salmon, "the lifeblood of the
Pacific Northwest people," to working at an elementary school evaluating
soil and wondering how many kids have cancer, Ground Truth is an
extended eulogy to a rapidly changing land, population and society
awakening to the realities of logging, climate change, land-use and
pollution. The book illuminates the central role of landscapes in our
ideas of home and self despite the growing disconnect between modern
lifestyle and the environment. McConnell's timely and significant work
reveals how the landscapes we inhabit can also help us better understand
ourselves.
