Ground Truth

Book excerpt: FINALIST for the 2021 Oregon Book Award. Rooted in the Pacific Northwest, the essays in Ruby McConnell's Ground Truth: A Geological Survey of a Life cover the vast terrain of this region &– from volcanoes to city parks, the eroding shorelines along the Oregon coast, badlands, lush forests, and city parks. Combining her background as a registered geologist, McConnell's essays also weave in personal landscapes composed of grief, loss, and optimism for the future of our environment. "The Pacific Northwest that you see today is the result of forty years of radical changes in the culture and economics of what was once a resource-extraction and agriculture-driven region. They are changes so fundamental in nature and scope...that, for those of us from this place, will always be marked by the cataclysmic eruptions of Mt. St. Helens on May 18, 1980." --Ruby McConnell In this collection of 17 essays, geologist Ruby McConnell opens her part natural history, part memoir-in-essays about the Pacific Northwest with the cataclysmic eruption of Mt. St. Helens in May of 1980. She was two years old. "Everything that I have stood direct witness to since, everything I know about this place, happe