Building Forests

Charlotte Gill’s Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe runs against the grain of existing descriptions of Canada’s reforestation industry. Whereas many accounts of tree planting are romantic or overly sentimental, Gill’s narrative reads as a sincere treatment of everyday life in the industry. Partly autobiographical (she worked in the tree-planting industry from the early 1990s onward), the book is also an unwitting ethnography of the tree-planting community, which results in rich descriptions of the planting crews Gill worked with in Ontario and Alberta, but mainly in British Columbia’s coastal regions. Eating Dirt is the richest literary account of tree planting I have encountered.

Gill’s years of experience make her a veteran of the industry—what she describes as a “crusty.” For Gill, tree planting “is thankless and boring, which is to say it is plain and silent. It is also one of the dirtiest jobs left in the...