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Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize
Vancouver, BC - May 14, 2012. Greystone Books is delighted to announce that Charlotte Gill's Eating Dirt (Greystone Books in partnership with the David Suzuki Foundation, Cloth ISBN 978-1-55365-977-8, Ebook ISBN 978-1-55365-793-4, $29.95) has won the 2012 Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize.
Established in 1985 to celebrate British Columbian writers and publishers, the B.C. Book Prizes are administered by the West Coast Book Prize Society. Winners were announced on Saturday, May 12, 2012 at SFU Woodwards, Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, Vancouver. Each category winner was rewarded with a prize of $2,000.
About Eating Dirt: 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 clear-cuts, 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 a tiny seed 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.
Established in 1985 to celebrate British Columbian writers and publishers, the B.C. Book Prizes are administered by the West Coast Book Prize Society. Winners were announced on Saturday, May 12, 2012 at SFU Woodwards, Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, Vancouver. Each category winner was rewarded with a prize of $2,000.
About Eating Dirt: 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 clear-cuts, 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 a tiny seed 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.
Submitted on May 14, 2012 in By David.
