The Martlet

Charlotte Gill’s tree-planting career spanned 17 years. Ten years into her silvicultural work, Gill knew she wanted to write the “untold story” of tree-planting life.

In the short winter months between planting seasons, Gill lived in Vancouver and worked on her book, Eating Dirt, which was published in 2011. This non-fiction story journeys across mountain roads, ocean swells and raw Canadian wilderness, unearthing the unique subculture of tree planters. On Tuesday, Feb. 7, Gill will make two appearances in Victoria to speak about the book, which has been nominated for multiple awards. At 1 p.m., she’ll appear at UVic’s Cornett Building (B111); at 7 p.m., she’ll speak at Cabin 12 on Pandora Avenue. At the Cabin 12 event, local author Barbara Stewart will also speak about camp life.

Gill will also speak on camp life and her other experiences as a tree planter — about how each day, reforestation is a test of strength and stamina.

“We’re just outside all day in all kinds of weather,” Gill explains. “It’s often really, really cold or really hot. It’s grimy, dirty, back-breaking work.”

Tree planting is classified as piecework. That means a worker’s pay is determined by how many trees he or she can plant.

“I think it’s appealing because it’s hard,” says Gill. “You’re forced to go into something and you don’t know if you can pull it off, and then the body just amazingly responds and adapts.”

After retiring from nearly two decades of hard manual labour in some of Canada’s harshest wilderness, Gill admits that she still misses planting trees.

“It’s just a very primary way of doing your work,” she says.

Gill now writes full time. Both a fiction and non-fiction author, she spends her time teaching creative writing at the University of British Columbia and will also be teaching at the Banff Centre for the Arts this fall. But when she was a tree planter, she spent most of her time in clear-cuts.

“When I first started planting trees, I found clear-cuts really heartbreaking. The scale of them was so incredibly huge,” she admits.

Yet, over the years, Gill acclimatized.

“I got used to being in clear-cuts because it was my office.”

Every day, Gill questioned if replanting trees truly made a difference.

“I think all tree planters feel really mixed up about the job we’re doing, because we can see the ironies involved with planting trees,” she says. “They’re the newspaper and toilet paper of tomorrow.”

When researching for her book, Gill learned the ecology behind reforestation.

“If all we want tree-planting to do is just replace a wood supply and give a future generation raw materials to build their houses and make Kleenex out of, then I think we’re doing a pretty good job,” she says. “But if we want forests the way that they used to be in all their complexity and biodiversity, I don’t think that planting trees is going to do that. That’s why ancient rainforests are as magnificent as they are, because they’ve been growing undisturbed for thousands and thousands of years.”

Gill worked around the Great Bear Rainforest on the coast of British Columbia. Noting that parts of the region were logged in the past, Gill still describes it as “the world’s last great-scale, intact coastal rainforest.” If approved, the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project would construct pipelines through the Great Bear Rainforest to carry crude from the Alberta tar sands to Kitimat, B.C., for international transport.

“Any kind of industrial intervention like that in a place that’s wild is obviously going to create some kind of problem sooner or later. If you have crude in a water supply, it’s not a local problem,” says Gill. “We’re dealing with a global treasure just for the sake of making money.”