Parks and Wrecks

The space between the canopy and the forest floor is made up of shadows and “awkward tangles,” where “shy flowers” hide. “There is light in the understory,” Kevin Van Tighem writes, “but darkness too.” The former superintendent of Banff National Park turns to this hidden place to explore the grief and the “love, joy, and brilliant moments” that have marked his life.

In Understory, Van Tighem grapples with the environmental loss that can lead him to despair. He describes his father’s death as “the end of remembered things,” but he mourns too the idyllic wild places of his childhood, growing up near the Bow River in Calgary. As he reflects from his autumn years on a lifetime spent learning from nature, he laments the legacy of “a culture that feels entitled to destroy and devour the best things about itself.” In search of meaning and hope, he follows his own “back-trail” through decades dedicated to conservation and activism, all the way to when his ancestors...