As befits someone who has sought to lead a "low carbon lifestyle" since 2006, Carrie Saxifrage embarked on her cross-Canada tour to promote her first book by bus and train in 2015. [See Review below]

With stops in Vancouver (week of March 23rd), Kamloops (April 1), Calgary (April 2), Edmonton (April 21), Winnipeg (April 6), Ottawa (April 13) and Toronto (April 15), she promoted The Big Swim: Ashore in a World Adrift (New Society $16.95), a collection of twelve personal stories about reaching beyond climate change despair towards hopeful solutions.

A former environmental lawyer in the US, Saxifrage likes to challenge herself. She has climbed mountains that include the Matterhorn and Chimborazo, and she opens her book with a gripping memoir that describes her completion of a marathon swim in the Salish Sea. She has contributed to the Vancouver Observer and worked with First Nation communities to help generate their responses to the proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline.

A life-long back packer and cyclist, she has homesteaded on Cortes Island but has since moved with her family to Vancouver.

J.B MacKinnon, author of The 100-Mile Diet and The Once and Future World, has recommended The Big Swim as "a handbook to living deeply in perilous times."

BOOKS:

The Big Swim: Coming Ashore in a World Adrift (New Society 2015) $16.95 9780865717985

[BCBW 2015]