Loggerheads: A Memoir

“For a decade, the issue of forest and land use in British Columbia raged like a forest fire . . .”

Shamed by demonstrators as a “tree-killer,” Clayoquot Sound tree faller Bruce Hornidge faced soul-searing losses of identity and family livelihood. This gripping, irony-laden memoir of a life spent harvesting in the beauty of the forest deals frankly with the nearly invisible human fallout of the inevitable move away from a resource-based economy and the impact on one man’s psyche.

Hornidge recalls his career as a faller in the West Coast forestry industry from the unique and sometimes irreverent point of view of the many loggers in Ucluelet and Tofino whose forestry careers were cut short on the other side of the demonstrators’ picket lines amid government and company doublespeak.

Three decades after The War in the Woods, we think we know what happened, and we’ve been told why. Here’s what we were never told.