Eating Dirt

Winner of the BC National Award for Non-Fiction

Shortlisted for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction and the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction

A 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 is really restored when a razored hillside is replanted in tight ranks of conifers. Along the way, she braids in the deep history of forests from ancient redwoods and Indigenous cedar cultures to the clear-cut empires of Rome, Britain, and North America. She looks at logging's environmental impact and its boom-and-bust history, and reveals how thoroughly our cities, wars, and daily comforts have been carved from wood.

More than a memoir, Eating Dirt is a meditation on resilience: of ecosystems, of seasonal workers, and of trees themselves. Gill celebrates the wonder and stubborn beauty of forests and confronts the moral tangle of trying to mend them. Most of all, the book joyously celebrates the priceless value of forests and the ancient, ever-changing relationship between humans and trees.