The Green Shadow

Simon Dalby is an assistant professor of geography at Carleton
University in Ottawa.

This humorous look at life on B.C.’s West Coast in the shadow of the
controversy over logging the Clayoquot Sound shows a lighter side of a
very serious issue. It is autobiography written as

both self-indulgent and simultaneously self-deprecating humor. The
author, a one-time would-be mayor of Tofino, mixes together Jungian
psychology, the occasional whiff of marijuana, a little romance,
cartoons, and telling anecdotes from both the “hippie”
counterculture of the Coast and the harsh life of workers in the fishing
industry. With these ingredients he paints an evocative, ironic, and
always irreverent picture of a divided community caught up in the events
of the early 1990s. The description of his “non-campaign” run for
mayor of the town provides insight into the dynamics of small-town life
in the glare of media publicity.

In telling his story Struthers humorously reveals much about the
cultural and environmental politics of British Columbia. Beyond its
considerable entertainment value, this is very much a book of its time
and place, and it is interesting because of this—assuming, of course,
that it is not taken too seriously!