Literary prize won’t save grassland birds
REGINA, SK—On November 17 Trevor Herriot will let out his breath. He'll learn whether or not he is the winner of one of Canada's top literary prizes for his book about vanishing grassland birds.
The nailbiting will end, but Herriot's other fear won't.
Grass, Sky, Song, a 250-page book about the feathered inhabitants of Canada's prairie, is on the non-fiction shortlist for the Governor General's Award.
A naturalist and theologian of sorts, Herriot wasn't expecting such attention for a book "ostensibly about a bunch of small birds that are rather obscure."
"I think people are seeing that it's more than that; it's about our engagement with creation and where that has taken us as a civilization," he told ChristianWeek over the phone from his hotel room in Edmonton where he had been invited for a writers' festival.
Writer
Getting shortlisted for Governor General Award—a $25,000 prize presented by Michaelle Jean—takes a writer's ego on a bit of a roller coaster ride, says Herriot. He's trying hard not to care if he wins or not. Grass, Sky, Song is jostling for the title with three other works including M. G. Vassanji's memoir.
But more than he frets about fame and fortune, Herriot worries that the songs of birds he loves are being threatened as more and more of Canada's natural grassland submits to the plough.
Sprague's pipit, the ferruginous hawk, the chestnut-collared longspur, the piping plover—these birds and others Herriot has learned to spot against the blue Saskatchewan sky are "grassland obligate," meaning they survive only in grassland ecosystems.
"It's a fool's dream, but a part of me can't stop imagining that if enough people would discover all that is good and holy in these birds, we might be able to turn things around before it's too late," Herriot writes in his preface. His wish for this book is that others would "see the spirit made flesh in such birds."
Naturalist
Herriot writes as a naturalist who draws threads of theology into his study of nature. His fascination with prairies ecosystems began in his early 20s when he began roaming the Qu'Appelle valley with a pair of binoculars and a field guide. "As soon as you start doing that you see that the world—even as you start to fall in love with it—is dwindling and disappearing," he says.
His first article on birds appeared in Canadian Geographic in 1989. Seven years later he started writing River in a Dry Land, a portrait of the Qu'Appelle valley and an invitation to others who live there to become "dwellers in the land in the way that the first peoples always were," he says. "That means paying attention to what's here, what are its gifts and invitations, what is hospitable about this place, what allows us to dwell here in a hospitable way."
River in a Dry Land established Herriot as a student of nature. His second book, Jacob's Wound, marked him as a theologian. Here he reinterprets the ancient story of Jacob and Esau as a watershed moment in humankind's relationship with creation.
Herriot sees environmentalism as "a profoundly Christian movement."
"We have to take our lead from nature, from real world around us we've been so alienated from," he says. "You can learn a lot from grass—its sense of economy, its abiding character. It stays here as a perennial sequestering carbon from the air."
Ploughing our grassland and cutting our forests contributes to climate change, he points out. Why not graze cattle on grass in such a way that it grows back instead of turning grassland into grainfield and feeding cattle on grain?
Roman Catholic
Herriot grew up Roman Catholic. As an adult he left the church for a period of five years. What drew him back was "a longing for an experience of God beyond me sitting and meditating in my bedroom," he says. "The Eucharist is so central to the Catholic faith. I still believe that is the moment where we set aside all our pettiness and foolishness as humans and we do become something like the body of Christ. I missed that."
Going to church is like walking a bedraggled stretch of prairie grass along the railroad tracks in Regina, he says. "You stand there amongst the remnant of the glory of the world but also face to face with our sins and the mistakes we have made in our use of the world."
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