Big Lonely Doug
The Story of One of Canada’s Last Great Trees
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Finalist, Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing
Finalist, Banff Mountain Book Competition
Finalist, BC Book Prize
Globe and Mail best books of 2018
CBC best Canadian non-fiction of 2018
In the tradition of John Vaillant’s modern classic The Golden Spruce comes a story of the unlikely survival of one of the largest and oldest trees in Canada.
On a cool morning in the winter of 2011, a logger named Dennis Cronin was walking through a stand of old-growth forest near Port Renfrew on Vancouver Island. He came across a massive Douglas fir the height of a twenty-storey building. Instead of allowing the tree to be felled, he tied a ribbon around the trunk, bearing the words “Leave Tree.” The forest was cut but the tree was saved. The solitary Douglas fir, soon known as Big Lonely Doug, controversially became the symbol of environmental activists and their fight to protect the region’s dwindling old-growth forests.
Originally featured as a long-form article in The Walrus that garnered a National Magazine Award (Silver), Big Lonely Doug weaves the ecology of old-growth forests, the legend of the West Coast’s big trees, the turbulence of the logging industry, the fight for preservation, the contention surrounding ecotourism, First Nations land and resource rights, and the fraught future of these ancient forests around the story of a logger who saved one of Canada's last great trees.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
After reading the true story of Big Lonely Doug, you’ll never look at wooden furniture—or professional loggers—the same way again. The book’s hero is a 66-metre-tall Douglas fir, the sole survivor in a clear-cut swath of old-growth forest on Vancouver Island. In his exploration of environmental stewardship and its surrounding hot-button issues, journalist Harley Rustad introduces us to many larger-than-life characters, from passionate defenders of natural resources to Dennis Cronin, the logging-industry veteran whose epiphany saves Doug from the sawmill. No dry eco-tome, Rustad’s beautiful treatise puts you in the pine-scented heart of contested land.