Highballer: True Tales from a Treeplanting Life
By Greg Nolan
Published by Harbour Publishing
In 1983 when he was 19, Greg Nolan was hired by a tree-planting contractor in Northern British Columbia. His crewmates didn’t know what to think of the wide-eyed kid whose mom drove him the 750 kilometres to hook upwith his first job. But within a week, Nolan was hitting the thousand-trees-a-day mark. By the end of his first rookie season, he gained the status of top producer among a crew of extraordinary young men and women. But surviving in some of the more remote, isolated, and technically challenging regions in Western Canada proved trickier, often requiring resourcefulness and luck.
Nolan all but lost his mind supervising his first project deep in the wilds of Northern Alberta. He was nearly mauled by grizzlies while tenting out in the wilds of Bute Inlet. Nolan survived hurricanes, landslides, hostile loggers, whirlwind romances, and life-threatening situations of nearly every conceivable kind. Despite many escapes, Nolan was not immune to tragedy and he grappled with guilt over his own indirect role in a multiple-fatality vehicle accident, throwing him into a deep depression. Only by returning to the challenge of planting trees in remote wilderness settings did he manage to find peace. Highballer is an exuberant record of a time in the silviculture arena when the industry was largely unregulated, and the wilderness was still wild.
Nolan planted more than 2.5 million trees in some of the most challenging regions of BC and Alberta. With forests comprising 40% of Canada’s landscape, the forestry sector is a major contributor to our national economy, contributing roughly $24.6 billion. Nolan draws from his 27 years of industry experience as a tree planter, foreman, project manager, and company operator to speak to the realities and challenges of tree planting at every level.
Greg Nolan previously served as co-owner and operator of Rainforest Silviculture Services Ltd. He resides in Victoria, BC.
The Anthropocene Disruption
By Robert William Sandford
Published by Rocky Mountain Books
Rocky Mountain Books is pleased to announce the upcoming publication of The Anthropocene Disruption, by Robert William Sandford, available October 2019. This latest RMB manifesto is an important and timely book that addresses some of the most challenging questions of our time as humanity continues to march past the dawn of a new, human-influenced epoch.
In what is now being heralded as the Second Copernican Revolution, Earth scientists have discovered that our self-regulating planetary life support system is a single, dynamic integrated system, and not a collection of ecosystems as we once thought.
The view that the planet needs to be understood as a unified, complex, evolving system that is more than the sum of its parts has led to three linked breakthrough concepts in Earth system science:
- The Anthropocene, which suggests we have entered a new geological epoch defined by human influence on Earth system function.
- The Great Acceleration, the extraordinary increase in human impacts on Earth system function since the end of the Second World War.
- Planetary Boundaries, limits within which we need to stay if we are to create a safe and viable planet for humanity to survive.
Robert William Sandford is the EPCOR Chair for Water and Climate Security at the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment, and Health. He is the co-author of the UN Water in the World We Want report on post-2015 global sustainable development goals relating to water. He is also the author of some 30 books on the history, heritage, and landscape of the Canadian Rockies and co-author of The Columbia River Treaty: A Primer, The Climate Nexus: Water, Food, Energy and Biodiversity in a Changing World, and The Hard Work of Hope: Climate Change in the Age of Trump. Robert lives in Canmore, Alberta.
