Eating Dirt, Charlotte Gill
Eating Dirt, Charlotte Gill
List: $16.95 | Sale: $11.87
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Eating Dirt
Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe

Author: Charlotte Gill

Narrator: Asha Vijayasingham

Unabridged: 9 hr 9 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Viking

Published: 08/29/2023


Synopsis

Winner of the BC National Award for Non-Fiction

A tree planter's vivid story of a unique subculture and the magical life of the forest.

Charlotte Gill spent twenty years working as a tree planter in the forests of Canada. During her million-tree career, she encountered hundreds of clearcuts, 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 clearcuts, 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 that evolved over millennia into complex ecosystems. She looks at logging's environmental impact and its boom-and-bust history, and touches on the versatility of wood, from which we have devised countless creations as diverse as textiles and airplane parts.

With eloquent insight into our slowest-growing "renewable" resource, Eating Dirt joyously celebrates the priceless value of forests and the ancient, ever-changing relationship between humans and trees.

About The Author

CHARLOTTE GILL is a bestselling and award-winning writer of fiction and narrative nonfiction. Ladykiller, her first book, was the recipient of the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for short fiction. Eating Dirt, a tree-planting memoir, was a #1 national bestseller in Canada. Her work has appeared in VogueThe GuardianOprah Daily, and many other newspapers and magazines. Gill is a Cohort Director in the School of Journalism, Writing & Publishing at the University of King’s College. She lives in British Columbia, Canada.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Ali on July 04, 2011

I couldn't read this book fast enough. Reminiscent of John Vaillant's The Golden Spruce (he also endorses this book), Eating Dirt tells the story of one full year of tree-planting in the 20 year career of author Charlotte Gill. The description of her year forms the narrative arc, while interspersed......more

Goodreads review by Pooker on March 10, 2013

I am so excited to win this book. Can hardly wait for it to arrive. Thank you Charlotte Gill, Greystone Books & David Susuki Foundation, Goodreads "first reads" and anyone else responsible for bringing this book to my hands! Arrived in the mail today, Tuesday, after the long weekend Tuesday, October......more

Goodreads review by Tricia on February 02, 2013

This book deserves the accolades and awards it has received. I felt the exhausting tedium of tree-planting work -- "bend, plant, stand up, move on" -- as well as the conflict Gill (and others) feel between wanting/needing the work and hating the clear-cutting that precedes it. "Because we plant tree......more

Goodreads review by Ruth on October 22, 2011

An exciting new entrant into the even-more exciting coalescing genre of creative nonfiction, in which the author is also a character in a work of narrative nonfiction. This is not only Charlotte Gill's personal history of two decades as one of a very few female tree planters, but of the odd 'tree-pla......more

Goodreads review by Emily on November 20, 2012

I feel a little torn about this book. I thought the parts that were actually about tree planting were very interesting and gave me a look into a profession that I really admire but would never do (because I'm not THAT crazy). I have mixed feelings about all the interspersed bits of extra knowledge,......more