by Harley Rustad

In the midst of exploring Vancouver Island on the hunt for the oldest and largest trees, T. J. Watt, a photographer for an environmental organization, the Ancient Forest Alliance, stumbled upon a fresh clear-cut with an unusual feature: A solitary tree was left standing, and it happened to be one of the largest Douglas firs he’d ever laid eyes on––as tall as a twenty-storey building. Big Lonely Doug explores how the titular tree came to survive the loggers and became the poster tree for activists’ fight to save the region’s dwindling old-growth forests.

Throughout his book, Rustad takes readers through historical, cultural, and political issues that influence current logging practices and environmentalism on Vancouver Island, and this proves to be one of those pivotal decisions that greatly affects the direction the book goes and how readers experience it. The author’s choice in this respect makes Big Lonely Doug slow to start and gives it a choppy flow due to tangential information repeatedly cutting into the base narrative. On the flipside, however, readers are given great context for the subject and are able to better understand how things were able to become heated between loggers, activists, and the area’s indigenous population.

And Rustad’s even-handedness in this regard actually quite surprised me. Picking up Big Lonely Doug, I strongly suspected it would side with the environmentalists, but this is far from the truth. Though he portrays First Nations and the forest engineer who marked Doug to be left unmolested in a consistently positive light, the author makes clear that there’s good and bad with both extraction and conservation efforts, and that both sides are guilty of acting irresponsibly when it serves their own self-interest. What results is a nuanced look at a topic more frequently presented as black-and-white––one of those divisive topics where one man’s black is another one’s white, depending on their respective outlooks––and that alone is probably enough to make the book worthwhile.