Lorne Fitch, Travels Up the Creek

For complicated reasons, these last weeks have been melancholic at best for me, and this hasn't made me a more attentive or sympathetic reader. As a result, I distrust elements of my response to Lorne Fitch's 2024 book Travels Up the Creek: A Biologist's Search for a Paddle.

The short version of this unhelpfully long post is that although I found Travels Up the Creek a good read, with lots of Alberta-specific context that helps me extrapolate from my own mostly BC-specific context, I'm not entirely sure who this book is for. I've felt similarly about other titles from Rocky Mountain Books (and environmentally themed books generally), but not as much as I did this time. As I say, though, I'm not the most attentive reader these days, and your mileage may vary.

There's often something really likeable about genuinely curmudgeonly prose, and you'll find plenty of that here even if none of it rises to the level of his article for the weekly newspaper Shootin' the Breeze about UCP public policy: "putting the manure spreader before the horse." At times, though, I find myself worrying that Travels Up the Creek features more curmudgeon than is strictly necessary. When Fitch wraps up narrating the debacle of how Hidden Creek was logged, for example, he remarks that "The best we can hope for ... is the Forest Service going extinct before many of the biodiversity indicators of enlightened, sustainable forest management do" (p95).

Now, Alberta isn't the only province whose Forest Service has been captured by industry, much like the regulatory bodies for most other resource extraction industries. The temptation to wish them ill is great indeed, and I've done more of that myself than I'm proud of. If there was no Forest Service, though, what are the chances that the Province of Alberta would replace them with a more robust, critical, ecologically focused organization? Of course there's no chance whatsoever. Contrary to Fitch's comment, the best to hope for is that the Forest Service's good people (and Fitch does later acknowledge that there are some, because of course there are) can have a better effect than could unfettered corporate raiding of the province's forests.

Mind you, if there was no Forest Service, then the citizenry might have better access to legal tools through which to interrogate, interrupt, and stop precisely that unfettered corporate raiding of the province's forests. Fitch doesn't make that claim, though. Because he stops with the not incorrect allegation that the Forest Service functions as a rubber stamp for industry, then as I say, I worry about this type of curmudgeonry.

On the other hand, Fitch's precise, combative phrasing is a strength of the book. At one point, Fitch muses about reaching consumers by adapting cigarette warning label photos of diseased lungs, gum disease, and so on to the forest industry: a photo of a clearcut on the end of a 2x4, for example (p109). In a later chapter, he suggests that governments should be required to "conduct a comprehensive survey of all mines ... to capture what was said in initial impact assessments, versus what actually happened" (p143). I can't tell you how exciting I found that proposal! Or rather, I could tell you, but then I'd prove myself to be even more bloody-mindedly nerdy than I've yet revealed on this blog, and that's saying something.

Anyway.

My point is that in amongst the chapters about bull trout, caribou, other species, and special places, Fitch keeps dropping practical suggestions that come from his blend of practical experience and the academic, professional expertise of a biologist. Those bits hit me as critically inspiring, in part because he just writes so very clearly.

In terms of style and approach, it's clear that Aldo Leopold is a personal and literary hero for Lorne Fitch. That's mostly a very good thing, especially in the chapter entitled "Meditations" with its opening section "Thinking Like a Leopold." Fitch's writing can come across as a little scattered at times, because he hasn't knitted together all the sections as tightly as he might have. The sections stand on their own, as do the sections of Leopold's Sand County Almanac, but in both books the sections don't always lean comfortably on the sections preceding or succeeding them.

There's more to say about Travels Up the Creek, particularly Fitch's ability to tell engaging stories about field research projects, but I'm going to close this commentary by thanking Fitch for devoting several pages to a concept that to me was worth the whole price of admission, and that's "combat biology." I'm going to have to find a copy for myself of Doremus and Tarlock's 2012 book Water War in the Klamath Basin: Macho Law, Combat Biology, and Dirty Politics. I've heard dimly of the concept, but I'd never explored it in any detail, so I found Fitch's discussion very useful. In essence, it's the idea that biologists should know the levers of social power that need pulling in order to lead politicians and corporations toward ecological responsibility: not activism, but science determined to force decision-makers into using genuinely factual evidence in order to make good decisions. As a humanities scholar rather than a scientist, I don't have access to the same tools as combat biologists, but I've really appreciated learning more about them here.

In part, Fitch derives this particular ethic from Ellen Meloy's argument that everyone should know their "biological address" (qtd in Fitch p302). As Fitch approvingly quotes, Meloy wants everyone to know their biological neighbours, to know intimately the place's weather patterns, and to "Write it down" (p302).

The responsibility for environmental matters is individual and collective, and although Fitch doesn't directly state that point, it's visible throughout Travels Up the Creek. With Meloy, he wants each of us to know our places well, but he also wants governments and corporations to do better, under the galvanizing influence of the public.

Most of this commentary sounds like praise, so you may be wondering why at the beginning of this post, I remarked that I don't know who this book is for.

Transparently it's for me, and people like me: my Alberta-based friend and colleague Pamela Banting, for example. Someone unlike me will never read all 300 pages, but I come away mostly with the sense that I've found another fellow traveller, someone I'd cheerfully work with in defense of the environment. That's not nothing, but if I'm reading a manifesto, and at this point every title from Rocky Mountain Books should be a manifesto even if it's not in their informal manifestos series, I want strategies and suggestions and plans.

The reading experience reminded me of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, in that although I don't want to know how to blow up a pipeline, I was nonetheless disappointed that the book didn't give me those skills. I was much more critical of Andreas Malm's objective than I am of Fitch's, in that Malm gave me "everything I need to remain intellectually disengaged from direct action, thus leaving the risks and dangers to everyone else." But still: I did want something more strategic. If we're not getting that from a book about fighting for the environment, then what are we reading, and what is the book for?

It's a good read, Travels Up the Creek, but I'm not sure who it's for, and I wanted more.