fish

April 22 is Earth Day. Here are some great books about the environment by Canadian authors to commit to reading.

Cover of 'Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir' by Aaron Williams featuring a wildfire scene with smoke and flames among tall trees against an orange sky.

I live in the Pacific Northwest, where two things are ever-present on people’s minds: how bad the wildfires will be this summer and when the next big earthquake will hit. Although Aaron Williams (class of 2017) wrote Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir (Harbour Publishing, 2017) as a memoir of one summer (of many) on a firefighting crew in the dense forests of British Columbia, it wouldn’t be possible to write such a memoir without touching on the impacts of a warming planet on creating the conditions that are making wildfires worse every year (2023 was Canada’s worst season on record). From hectares of dry brush where forests were clearcut to fire seasons that begin earlier and end later each year, Chasing Smoke not only describes a wildfire fighter’s lifestyle but a problem that must be addressed if we don’t wish to see our planet go up in flames.

Book cover of 'On Borrowed Time' by Gregor Craigie featuring an urban skyline with yellow seismic wave graphics, emphasizing themes of earthquake preparedness.

One might not think climate change influences earthquakes, and that’s not where Gregor Craigie (class of 2019) focuses his attention in On Borrowed Time: North America’s Next Big Quake (Goose Lane Editions, 2021). But science acknowledges that as hurricanes, floods, and wildfires increase in frequency and severity, so too does global warming contribute to the frequency and severity of earthquakes. “As a result of the man-made global warming, the melting of land ice, mainly in Antarctica and Greenland, occurs in an accelerating process and sea levels are rising worldwide” as are increasing emissions of greenhouse gases. “Both phenomena also have an impact on earthquake risk since they lead to a small but notable increase in pressure on tectonic faults in the subsurface due to hydrostatic load….” And “sea-level fluctuations of just a few decimetres are enough to trigger earthquakes.” (https://www.gfz.de/en/press/news/details/mehr-erdbeben-durch-menschengemachten-klimawandel) Reading Craigie’s deeply researched book provides frightening insight into what can happen when the next Big One hits.

Cover of the book 'Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis' by Andrew Reeves, featuring illustrations of various fish on a light blue background.

In Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis (ECW, 2019) Andrew Reeves (class of 2016), an award-winning environmental journalist, tackles the eponymous environmental crisis head on. When I began reading Overrun, I’d never heard of Asian crap, much less the crisis they’ve caused. But as I read Reeves’ entertaining account of how, with all good intentions, this voracious and prolific fish was introduced to control invasive water weeds in aquaculture farms in the southern US, I became increasingly aware of just how dangerous it can be to import any species of life to any part of the world where it lacks natural predators. From a few fish in the 1950s, several species of Asian carp have taken over river systems from the mouth of the Mississippi River watershed north to where they’re a handful of miles now threatening the ecology of the entire Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River system. This is what happens when humans, with all the best intentions, believe they can improve on billions of years of evolution and try to take nature into their own hands.

Of the books I’ve reviewed to date, these three are the ones I’d recommend most highly as Earth Day reading. But they’re not the only ones to touch on environmental themes, even though the environment is not the main thrust of the book. I also highly recommend Ring of Fire: High-Stakes Mining in a Lowlands Wilderness (ECW, 2023) by Virginia Heffernan, which advocates for a different approach to resource extraction, one that is more environmentally safe and concerned with the welfare of Indigenous Peoples. The Fruitful City: The Enduring Power of the Urban Food Forest (ECW, 2018) by Helena Moncrieff (class of 2016) focuses predominantly on community sharing of the harvest of fruit trees within any city, but in so doing it also speaks to feed the human population by stopping our environmentally stupid wasting of nature’s bounty just because it sits on privately owned land.

Cover of the book 'The Fruitful City' by Helena Moncrieff, featuring colorful leaf illustrations and a subtitle about the urban food forest.

While Jenn Thornhill Verma’s (class of 2019) Cod Collapse: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Saltwater Cowboys (Nimbus Publishing, 2019) is a memoir of a family’s lost way of life, one that had endured for generations in many families, it’s also a tale of the consequences of overfishing, not only to the environment but to those who depend on the sea for their living. And for those of us currently living in the Pacific Northwest, it’s a cautionary tale about the way deal with dwindling salmon populations. And finally, The Tides of Time: A Nova Scotia Book of Seasons (Pottersfield Press, 2019) by Suzanne Stewart (class of 2016) is more directly about the link between different people’s food-producing labour with a particular month, it’s also a compelling series of essays about how people can and do choose to live in harmony with the seasons. And it’s hard to imagine anything more environmentally advantageous than that.

I like to eat fish. That’s about the extent of my relationship with them. Before I married, I had a boyfriend who loved fishing and took me with him once; I couldn’t understand what he thought was so great about it. Before our children came along, my ex-husband had several large fish tanks where he bred African cichlids, which he sold to a pet store to support his aquarium habit.

Cover of the book 'Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis' by Andrew Reeves, featuring various fish illustrations against a light blue background.

But I’ve never been much interested in fish beyond what they taste like. So, when I first saw Andrew Reeves’s book, Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis (ECW, 2019) I wasn’t immediately drawn to it. I received it as a gift one Christmas after deciding to pursue this project to read and review all the books to come out of the University of King’s College Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Nonfiction Writing.

Overrun sat on my shelf for a year or three before I cracked the spine. And then, as happened with Karen Stiller’s The Minister’s Wife—another book I would not have chosen but thoroughly enjoyed—I found myself utterly absorbed. As author Maude Barlow reflects in her advance praise for the book, “A riveting, ‘can’t put it down’ book about fish? You bet!”

Reeves opens the story where the crisis began, close to the mouth of the Mississippi where, in the 1950s, an enterprising judge bought some land, created a lake, and stocked it with fish to be caught for a fee. When aquatic grass threatened to choke out the fish, the judge’s son, now in charge of the business, looked for a way to deal with it.

With the publication of books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in the 1960s, environmental awareness was growing. Importing Asian carp, which eat aquatic grasses like nobody’s business, seemed a better choice than trying to control it with chemicals.

That was before the environmental community began to appreciate the threat posed by invasive species—species deliberately or accidentally imported, many of which have caused untold damage to ecosystems because they didn’t evolve there, have no natural predators to keep them in check, and therefore threaten to choke out species native to an area. (As an avid gardener, plant species like dandelions, morning glory, and English ivy spring to my mind.)

Reeves follows the carp as it moves north, taking over lakes and rivers, leaving devastation in its wake. Incorporating research that must have seen him crawling through archives for weeks and conducting interviews that took him on land and water journeys south along the Mississippi and north to Illinois, he builds tension, eases off, builds more tension, and eases off again as he moves toward the climax like the author of a great mystery novel.

Reeves’s skill as a writer goes well beyond finding a compelling way to shape a CNF story and deep into descriptions of people and landscapes that hold readers’ attention between peaks in the narrative. Here’s a sample:

I had one last stop before leaving Arkansas. Ninety-two of the White River’s 720 miles flow through the White River National Wildlife Refuge, a 160,000-acre boomerang of land eight miles north of where the White River meets the Mississippi. Three hundred oxbow lakes are the dominant feature in the refuge. Here, the Mississippi shows signs of its constant movement: as the river erodes its banks, u-shaped meanders form that grow deeper with time. As the horseshoe becomes more pronounced, the neck of land between bends in the river grows narrower until it finally caves. Cut off from the river, the once-vibrant meanders sit dormant waiting, like lost children, for the river to come collect them.

I generally start my day by drinking coffee and reading for about an hour. While devouring Overrun, I had a hard time cutting myself off after two or three hours. At 330 pages, it’s a hefty book chock full of deep and thorough research crafted into a compelling narrative by a masterful storyteller.

As I work my way through this project I’ve created, I’m learning not to judge a book by its cover (which in this case is quite creative) or its subject matter, but to keep my mind open to whatever comes my way. What came my way this time was a completely unexpected but very welcome treasure that I can’t recommend too highly.

Books on environmental issues:

On Borrowed Time: North America’s Next Big Quake, by Gregor Craigie.

Ring of Fire: High-Stakes Mining in a Lowlands Wilderness, by Virginia Heffernan.

The Fruitful City: The Enduring Power of the Urban Food Forest, by Helena Moncrieff.

Cod Collapse: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Saltwater Cowboys, by Jenn Thornhill Verma.

Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir, by Aaron Williams.