Non-Fiction Spring 2026

Eating Dirt - Charlotte Gill, 2011

We didn’t get snow this year where I live just outside of Vancouver. And with every passing week that it didn’t come we celebrated not getting hit with the cold and then whispered “fire season is going to be so bad this year.”

2003 was the first year I remember the fires. I had just started working for the phone company that summer and people were calling in to cancel their service because they didn’t have houses anymore. Nearly twenty-six thousand hectares burned in the Okanagan. Twenty years later here in BC we experienced the worst wildfire season on record with 2.8 million hectares burned in 2023.

I wasn’t exactly sure what kind of book I was looking for just that I wanted something to do with nature when I came across this 2011 book published with the David Suzuki Foundation. While normally I wouldn’t pick a non-fiction book that’s 15 years old I think it will be interesting to read about what life as a tree planter was like. Especially as BC’s forestry industry is once again at the heart of many trade discussions. And as we continue to face the reality of living in a rainforest that spends a lot of time catching fire.

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.

Eating Dirt also eloquently evokes the wonder of trees, which grow from tiny seeds into one of the world’s largest organisms, our slowest-growing “”renewable”“ resource. Most of all, the book joyously celebrates the priceless value of forests and the ancient, ever-changing relationship between humans and trees.