Travels Up the Creek

“Alberta’s master storyteller is back. In this collection of essays, Lorne Fitch takes us on a tour of Alberta’s wilder places and helps us understand what we have, what we’ve lost, and what we must do to protect the jewels that remain. His decades of field experience, combined with a unique ability to both entertain and enlighten, make this book required reading for anyone with an interest in nature and a desire to learn more about its conservation.” —Richard Schneider, editor of Nature Alberta Magazine, author of Biodiversity Conservation in Canada: From Theory to Practice

“The great American essayist Wendell Berry once observed that the care of the Earth is our most ancient, most worthy and most pleasing responsibility. It’s clear that this responsibility has been abrogated too many times in Alberta. With a half century of professional and personal observations in the field accumulated, digested and processed in words and useful deeds, Lorne Fitch, in Travels Up the Creek, shows us, in the most eloquent and articulate of ways, where we have gone wrong and what we can do to reconnect the growing disconnect between ourselves and nature. The prophetic insights and storytelling here are Berry-esque and live up to Fitch’s highly acclaimed earlier book Streams of Consequence. A must-read for those yearning for pleasing responsibility and a chance maybe to breathe in a rare fog in a grassland setting and see for a fleeting moment a herd of antelope before the animals are swallowed back up in the mist. So many lovely anecdotes like this. Not to be missed.” —Edward Struzik, award-winning author of Firestorm, Future Arctic, The Big Thaw, Swamplands and several other bestsellers, and a Fellow of Queen’s University’s Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy

“Travels Up the Creek is a very timely, very readable scan of Alberta’s ecosystems. Lorne Fitch trains his biologist’s eye on everything from cheatgrass to cutthroat trout to combat biology, and he does it with humour and insight.” —Don Gayton, ecologist, author of Okanagan Odyssey, Man Facing West, The Sky and the Patio, The Wheatgrass Mechanism and Interwoven Wild among other books and numerous journal and magazine articles

“Travels Up the Creek is replete with highly readable and engaging meditations, ruminations, explorations and provocations. Lorne Fitch is in league with Aldo Leopold and Wendell Berry—an environmental trinity of gentle, angry voices. He has the blood-boiling passion of an Edward Abbey, the heartbreaking earnestness and profundity of an Aldo Leopold and the grounded wisdom of a Wendell Berry. Fitch understands the power of story and metaphor in shaping his impressive scientific knowledge into compelling narrative.” —Jeffrey A. Lockwood, professor of natural sciences and humanities, University of Wyoming, author of Prairie Soul and Locust

Travels Up the Creek is a testament to both the absolute necessity of science and the ultimate insufficiency of it in our struggle to live well on this planet. Fitch deeply understands that science without values is lame, and values without science are blind. One might well open an environmental dictionary to an entry called “Sense of Place” to find this book. Lorne Fitch exemplifies ecological agape—the love of the unlovable, including obscure streams, lonely grasslands and overlooked fish.” —Jeffrey A. Lockwood, professor of natural sciences and humanities, University of Wyoming, author of Prairie Soul and Locust

“In this wide-ranging collection, Lorne Fitch issues a cri de coeur from the trenches of ‘combat biology’, entreating us to join him in defending Alberta’s broken beauty.”  —Candace Savage, Fellow, Royal Society of Canada, multi-award-winning author of Prairie: A Natural History and A Geography of Blood

“Travels Up the Creek provides a perceptive view of environmental dilemmas in Alberta. This book successfully builds upon Fitch’s previous book, Streams of Consequence. The author’s extensive experience becomes evident through his fulsome descriptions and humorous anecdotes interlaced with cautionary tales. Everyone, no matter their prior knowledge of the topics covered, will learn something about Alberta’s history and its approach to conservation through reading this book. I never tire of Fitch’s candid storytelling.” —Debborah Donnelly, executive director, Alberta Wilderness Association

“Travels Up the Creek is a plea on behalf of our wild places and creatures, urging a better understanding of how more than a century of economic expansion has pushed many of those habitats and species over the edge, to the point where many may not survive at all. More than merely sending out a call for the application of science to guide our paths forward, however, Lorne Fitch is essentially issuing a spiritual call for open eyes, ears and voices to insist that a better way forward can – and must – be found. —Peter Kingsmill, publications editor for the Alberta Society of Professional Biologists and author of the novels Sunset at 20:47, Nobody Drowned, and The Awan Lake Experiment