Charlotte Gill

In Eating Dirt, you discuss your experiences as a tree-planter, and delve into both the lifestyle and environmental questions associated with forestry. What prompted you to write a book on this subject?

I’ve always thought tree-planting is an unusual human experience full of unsung characters. Often it’s miserable, dirty work involving sweat and bugs and backache. I wondered why it was so appealing; to me and to thousands of other people who love it so much that other jobs don’t even come close to replicating the transcendent intensity. So I let that question drive the story: why would anybody want to make a career out of such grubby manual labour? I also wanted to investigate some of the bigger issues that are never too far from a tree planter’s thoughts. What exactly are we doing here? Can we really rebuild a forest this way? Will it heal the planet or are we just fooling ourselves?

What are the challenges associated with tree-planting and the accompanying lifestyle?

Tree-planting is a by-hand ritual that’s been around since it was invented thousands of years ago. Today, a dozen professionals can sow 30,000 seedlings or more, reforesting an entire clearcut in one day. The average worker bends over 1,600 times, lifts more than 2,000 pounds, walks ten miles, and consumes about 5,000 calories a day.

It’s high intensity work because we’re pieceworkers: the faster you go the more money you make. It fosters a kind of all-or-nothing, full-throttle consciousness.

When I look at it rationally, tree planting is a terrible job! The bugs drive everybody insane. You have to live in close quarters with roommates you don’t choose, and you eat whatever food is put on your plate. There is almost no privacy. You can be laid off with no warning. And then there is a certain sheen of absurdity that comes with attempting to replace a whole forest with just bare human hands. We can’t know if it’s working – not personally anyway – because we plant the trees and walk away.

So how can such a physically arduous task be so rewarding and enjoyable?

I hated tree planting but I loved it in equal measure. There was something about the task that always felt tangible and unmitigated, even after I’d done it a million times. It felt good to be sore at the end of the day and to look out over all the little seedlings I’d planted. The job might be rife with bad weather and discomfort, but those are neutral things, nothing at all like, say, getting harassed nonstop by your jerk boss. It taught me that misery and pleasure are relative, maybe even flip sides of the same coin.

How did you get started in tree planting?

When I was an undergrad I lived in a student house that was full of tree planters. They did it during the summers. I was instantly intrigued by their stories of bears and mud and adventure. Tree planters seemed like wild, resilient, open-minded people to me. I talked a friend into helping me get a job, but I didn’t really know what I was getting into. I don’t consider myself a particularly tough person. I’ve always loved creature comforts. But when I arrived in that camp in northern Ontario, it was as if I’d stepped through some kind of portal into a whole new way of being. It was one of those moments when life changes course. It’s been an adventure ever since.

How did your experience of tree planting influence your understanding of the current logging & forestry industry?

Modern logging happens behind locked gates, deep in the wilderness or high up in the mountains: places no regular citizen would ever have cause to go under normal circumstances. Tree planters are part of that industry. We live at the tail end of the logging process. Because we walk around all day in the ragged, clearcut aftermath, tree-planters have an intuitive sense of the scale of the cutting, and the size of the world’s appetite for wood. It’s tempting to fall back on that old cliché: logging bad, environmentalism good. But when you’re inside that system there are no easy answers. Lumber is Canada’s product. To a certain extent we owe our standard of living to every two-by-four and paper napkin that came out of a Canadian forest.

Part of your book questions the ability of conifer plantations to replace original forests that evolved over millennia into complex ecosystems. Can you tell us how this questioning affects your work?

When I sat down to write I began with a simple question: does planting trees work? Nobody wants to believe in planting trees more than me. But the short answer turned out to be this: not really. Or rather, it’s complicated. Trees are remarkable creatures. They consume sunlight. They feed on air. They require nearly no tending at all once they’re planted. They’re the scaffolding for rich, lush worlds where thousands of living things find shelter. But trees need time – whole centuries if not millennia – in order to do the work of rebuilding the forest. They’re much more patient than we are.