Banff Mountain Book Festival 2006

Thursday , November 2, noon – 1:00 p.m.

Banff Centre Dining Room, tickets $20 (includes buffet lunch)

John Vaillant — The Golden Spruce

For an article he was writing on kayaking, journalist John Vaillant travelled to the Queen Charlotte Islands off the coast of British Columbia. He did not anticipate that his trip would result in producing nothing about kayaking, but rather a book about politics, anthropology, mythology, adventure, and West Coast ecology.

Vaillant is drawn to stories about collisions between the natural world and human ambition. While in the Queen Charlottes, he found a perfect subject in Grant Hadwin, a logger turned activist. In a 1997 act of protest, Hadwin cut down a 300-year-old golden spruce, a botanical rarity and a tree sacred to the Haida people.

The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed is Vaillant’s first book. Originally written as an article for The New Yorker in 2002, it was expanded into a full-length work and published last year, winning the 2005 Governor General’s Literary Award in Nonfiction. “The Golden Spruce is a multi-layered tale that both rebukes and questions Canada’s management of its forests,” the Governor General jury wrote. “Meditative and powerful, this book is both a mystery and a lament about greed and the Canadian character.” Vaillant also won the Pearson Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize for The Golden Spruce.

“I wanted to write a story that a forester could read, a member of the Haida Nation could read, a member of the David Suzuki Foundation could read,” he has said, “to broaden the conversation.”

Vaillant has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic — Adventure, Outside and Men’s Journal, and is also a pioneer at heart. Born and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he was drawn to the wilderness at a young age. After hitchhiking to Alaska and travelling to the remote fishing village of Egegik along the western coast, he spent three years building boats and salmon fishing. Vaillant now lives in Vancouver, B.C., with his wife, an anthropologist and a potter, and their two children.