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Understory: An Ecologist’s Memoir of Loss and Hope
A deeply personal and evocative journey into the complexities of nature, grief, and the search for meaning in the autumn of life.
Drawing on a lifetime spent in the wilds of western Canada’s national parks and years of conservation work, Van Tighem reflects on a career spent protecting the natural world and the emotional toll of witnessing its decline. Freed from bureaucratic constraints after retirement, he turned to writing, activism, and politics, driven by a sense of duty to the landscapes and species he loves. But alongside his commitment to action came profound grief and the pressing how do we find hope amid environmental loss?
Van Tighem’s reflections are anchored in the “understory” of his life—the hidden, tangled layers beneath the surface of his experiences. Like the shadowed depths of a forest, these memories and insights are both beautiful and unsettling, revealing the challenges and rewards of engaging fully with the world around us. With unflinching honesty, he examines the joys of connection, the pain of loss, and the enduring value of caring deeply, even when the odds feel insurmountable.
Written with the lyricism of a naturalist and the candour of a seasoned storyteller, Understory invites readers to confront their own relationships with nature and consider how they, too, can find purpose and hope in uncertain times.
For anyone who cherishes the wild, grapples with environmental grief, or seeks inspiration to keep moving forward, this memoir is both a solace and a call to action.
Drawing on a lifetime spent in the wilds of western Canada’s national parks and years of conservation work, Van Tighem reflects on a career spent protecting the natural world and the emotional toll of witnessing its decline. Freed from bureaucratic constraints after retirement, he turned to writing, activism, and politics, driven by a sense of duty to the landscapes and species he loves. But alongside his commitment to action came profound grief and the pressing how do we find hope amid environmental loss?
Van Tighem’s reflections are anchored in the “understory” of his life—the hidden, tangled layers beneath the surface of his experiences. Like the shadowed depths of a forest, these memories and insights are both beautiful and unsettling, revealing the challenges and rewards of engaging fully with the world around us. With unflinching honesty, he examines the joys of connection, the pain of loss, and the enduring value of caring deeply, even when the odds feel insurmountable.
Written with the lyricism of a naturalist and the candour of a seasoned storyteller, Understory invites readers to confront their own relationships with nature and consider how they, too, can find purpose and hope in uncertain times.
For anyone who cherishes the wild, grapples with environmental grief, or seeks inspiration to keep moving forward, this memoir is both a solace and a call to action.
320 pages, Paperback
Published September 30, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
February 28, 2026
Understory by Kevin Van Tighem is not a polite environmental memoir. It is a reckoning written passionately by a man who has been paying attention.
Van Tighem does not merely attempt to critique Western religion or Western science practices, He places them side by side like two stern patriarchs at the head of a long table and asks what stories they have provided us. Genesis commands humanity to subdue the Earth. Secular science often proceeds with the same assumption of superiority. One waves a Bible, the other a clipboard, but both have ended up treating the living world as inventory.
His argument is not anti science, nor is it a sentimental plea for pagan nostalgia. It is more rigid than that, he suggests the problem is not knowledge but posture. When we approach rivers, forests, or each other with entitlement rather than humility, abuse follows as reliably as spring runoff. The same mindset that powered residential schools and cultural erasure, he argues, animates the damming of rivers and the bureaucratic shrug that lets woodland caribou slide toward extinction. Different arenas, same pathology. Power assumed. Superiority unexamined. Respect either completely absent or conveniently defined.
The memoir portions carry real weight. The figure of Frank, an abuser in the family who ages into lonely irrelevance, becomes a parable for isolation. A man who refused right relationship dies alone, ccut off from love. Van Tighem extends the metaphor outward. When we fail to form right relationships with land, water, and other beings, we sentence ourselves to a similar solitude. The reservoir behind the Three Rivers dam, silting up and evaporating thousands of Olympic pools into dry Alberta air, reads like ecological karma written in mud.
Yet the book is not an elegy. Its most beautiful captivating passages revolve around language and perception. Drawing on Robin Wall Kimmerer and her insights in Braiding Sweetgrass, Van Tighem experiments with seeing the world not as nouns but as verbs. Not river as object, but river being river. Not tree as future lumber but tree being tree, chloroplasts at work, seeds riding the wind, he effect is disarming. The world shifts from warehouse to communion. You cannot easily bulldoze what you experience as a relative.
Kinship becomes his central theology. We are stardust, but not in a bumper sticker kind of way. The air we inhale was exhaled by others. The food we eat becomes us. Life flows through us, not to us. To exploit the world and frame it as progress is to carve slices from one’s body and call it dinner. The metaphor is blunt because the reality is blunt and it’s the first thing that came to me.
Van Tighem is honest about reciprocity. We must cut trees to build shelter. We must kill to eat. The question is not whether we take, but whether we give back with reverence. He is skeptical of conservation that simply secures future supply. True reciprocity, in his telling, looks like community members actively restoring creeks they fish, ranchers altering grazing to make room for falcons and bears, communities treating land ownership as a duty of care rather than a license to take.
Grief threads through everything. The disappearing birds. The silenced streams. The aging naturalist’s particular heartbreak when familiar songs go missing from the morning air. Losing parents is expected. Losing curlews and cutthroat trout feels like a different category of death. He likens it to the cultural apocalypse experienced by the Niitsitapi when the bison vanished. An ending of world, not just species.
And still he resists despair. Hope, he insists, is not bestowed but It is made. Made from love and from anger transformed into fierce determination. The kind of anger that rises when a child is threatened. The kind that defends rather than dominates.
Understory asks for something difficult. Not better policies alone, not more efficient dams or smarter forestry models, but a reimagining of who exactly we think we are. If we are family with rivers and caribou, then respect becomes self respect. Reconciliation expands beyond human politics to include land and water and the quiet beings we have treated as furniture.
Van Tighem closes by listening to Old Man’s River, the water still moving despite everything done to it. The river has not given up. That line lands with force. In a time thick with ecological elegy, this memoir insists that grief can become promise. We make the stories we live, he writes, and then those stories make us.
Understory invites us to choose a different story. One rooted not in dominion, but in belonging and kinship
Van Tighem does not merely attempt to critique Western religion or Western science practices, He places them side by side like two stern patriarchs at the head of a long table and asks what stories they have provided us. Genesis commands humanity to subdue the Earth. Secular science often proceeds with the same assumption of superiority. One waves a Bible, the other a clipboard, but both have ended up treating the living world as inventory.
His argument is not anti science, nor is it a sentimental plea for pagan nostalgia. It is more rigid than that, he suggests the problem is not knowledge but posture. When we approach rivers, forests, or each other with entitlement rather than humility, abuse follows as reliably as spring runoff. The same mindset that powered residential schools and cultural erasure, he argues, animates the damming of rivers and the bureaucratic shrug that lets woodland caribou slide toward extinction. Different arenas, same pathology. Power assumed. Superiority unexamined. Respect either completely absent or conveniently defined.
The memoir portions carry real weight. The figure of Frank, an abuser in the family who ages into lonely irrelevance, becomes a parable for isolation. A man who refused right relationship dies alone, ccut off from love. Van Tighem extends the metaphor outward. When we fail to form right relationships with land, water, and other beings, we sentence ourselves to a similar solitude. The reservoir behind the Three Rivers dam, silting up and evaporating thousands of Olympic pools into dry Alberta air, reads like ecological karma written in mud.
Yet the book is not an elegy. Its most beautiful captivating passages revolve around language and perception. Drawing on Robin Wall Kimmerer and her insights in Braiding Sweetgrass, Van Tighem experiments with seeing the world not as nouns but as verbs. Not river as object, but river being river. Not tree as future lumber but tree being tree, chloroplasts at work, seeds riding the wind, he effect is disarming. The world shifts from warehouse to communion. You cannot easily bulldoze what you experience as a relative.
Kinship becomes his central theology. We are stardust, but not in a bumper sticker kind of way. The air we inhale was exhaled by others. The food we eat becomes us. Life flows through us, not to us. To exploit the world and frame it as progress is to carve slices from one’s body and call it dinner. The metaphor is blunt because the reality is blunt and it’s the first thing that came to me.
Van Tighem is honest about reciprocity. We must cut trees to build shelter. We must kill to eat. The question is not whether we take, but whether we give back with reverence. He is skeptical of conservation that simply secures future supply. True reciprocity, in his telling, looks like community members actively restoring creeks they fish, ranchers altering grazing to make room for falcons and bears, communities treating land ownership as a duty of care rather than a license to take.
Grief threads through everything. The disappearing birds. The silenced streams. The aging naturalist’s particular heartbreak when familiar songs go missing from the morning air. Losing parents is expected. Losing curlews and cutthroat trout feels like a different category of death. He likens it to the cultural apocalypse experienced by the Niitsitapi when the bison vanished. An ending of world, not just species.
And still he resists despair. Hope, he insists, is not bestowed but It is made. Made from love and from anger transformed into fierce determination. The kind of anger that rises when a child is threatened. The kind that defends rather than dominates.
Understory asks for something difficult. Not better policies alone, not more efficient dams or smarter forestry models, but a reimagining of who exactly we think we are. If we are family with rivers and caribou, then respect becomes self respect. Reconciliation expands beyond human politics to include land and water and the quiet beings we have treated as furniture.
Van Tighem closes by listening to Old Man’s River, the water still moving despite everything done to it. The river has not given up. That line lands with force. In a time thick with ecological elegy, this memoir insists that grief can become promise. We make the stories we live, he writes, and then those stories make us.
Understory invites us to choose a different story. One rooted not in dominion, but in belonging and kinship
November 1, 2025
Wonderful storytelling! It made me cry so hard and laugh so hard. It’s a heartwarming feeling to know better the veins and bones of where I live, and it’s such a relief to know there are people who care and are aware. What a great way to live, to contemplate and PRACTICE being one with nature. Rather than live by slogans, hashtags, mindlessly herding, lazily settling on some -ism, Mr Van Tighem leads an example of humble and open way of life. Thank you! What keen eyes to catch the beautiful little moments of one’s life! Knowing the same physical locations adds another layer of relativity and closeness. However, I almost turned away from it at the beginning!
I also appreciate the honest and insight into the how Canadian organizations, governments, whatever that have to manage other people, operate. It’s reassuring that men with integrity are scarce but do exist in bureaucracy.
Reading the introductory part of chapter 1, I couldn’t help feeling the author’s melancholy. Knowing a bit of the city’s short contemporary history, I’m aware of the booming economy since the discovery of the black diamond in the 50s. I immigrated here myself 6 years ago, following by yet another great influx of immigrants that has multiplied the city’s population. However, just this morning, on a rather warm fall sunny day, I went to Dale Hodges Park for the first time. I was amazed and feeling privileged to live in a convenient modern city where in 15 mins drive from the city center, I can be in a wetland. The wetland is partially manmade but no less beautiful, no less sanctuary for the birds and tired human beings. It’s my perspective. I had so much to complain about being an immigrant in a bad economy, but this city park, not even a more majestic Rocky Mountains wildness, is enough to bring me back to the beautiful NOW, to remind me the joy of simple things. (PS I saw a red-winged blackbird! I just read about it on one of the park’s knowledge boards and then I saw one! It sang to me while dancing around the cattails!) For the writer though, it must have been a different experience. Growing up middle class in the 50s and 60s, witnessing the exploitation of nature, discovering dark parts of the local history and being reminded of the guilt, witnessing the world’s material growth and seemingly declination of faith, he has the same pessimism shared by many other well educated Canadians. This is also a very different read from another local book about where we live: Senescence by Amal Alhomsi, a 24-year-old Syrian living in Banff. I sure see myself again tangled by my own history when I read a local writer, and I’m burdened by my judgment and my emotions. I better remind myself of this morning, of the power of NOW, and read with an opener mind. I do enjoy sentimental language and family history, so I’d better be here and now with this book. And yes, as I read on, I can totally relate to the sense of loss.
I also appreciate the honest and insight into the how Canadian organizations, governments, whatever that have to manage other people, operate. It’s reassuring that men with integrity are scarce but do exist in bureaucracy.
Reading the introductory part of chapter 1, I couldn’t help feeling the author’s melancholy. Knowing a bit of the city’s short contemporary history, I’m aware of the booming economy since the discovery of the black diamond in the 50s. I immigrated here myself 6 years ago, following by yet another great influx of immigrants that has multiplied the city’s population. However, just this morning, on a rather warm fall sunny day, I went to Dale Hodges Park for the first time. I was amazed and feeling privileged to live in a convenient modern city where in 15 mins drive from the city center, I can be in a wetland. The wetland is partially manmade but no less beautiful, no less sanctuary for the birds and tired human beings. It’s my perspective. I had so much to complain about being an immigrant in a bad economy, but this city park, not even a more majestic Rocky Mountains wildness, is enough to bring me back to the beautiful NOW, to remind me the joy of simple things. (PS I saw a red-winged blackbird! I just read about it on one of the park’s knowledge boards and then I saw one! It sang to me while dancing around the cattails!) For the writer though, it must have been a different experience. Growing up middle class in the 50s and 60s, witnessing the exploitation of nature, discovering dark parts of the local history and being reminded of the guilt, witnessing the world’s material growth and seemingly declination of faith, he has the same pessimism shared by many other well educated Canadians. This is also a very different read from another local book about where we live: Senescence by Amal Alhomsi, a 24-year-old Syrian living in Banff. I sure see myself again tangled by my own history when I read a local writer, and I’m burdened by my judgment and my emotions. I better remind myself of this morning, of the power of NOW, and read with an opener mind. I do enjoy sentimental language and family history, so I’d better be here and now with this book. And yes, as I read on, I can totally relate to the sense of loss.
November 6, 2025
By an ex-superintendent of Banff National Park, a memoir of how he got there - from a love of fishing and birding as a youngster, through the hippy years, and many jobs within the parks and wildlife services - and what he learned along the way. Very well written.
April 11, 2026
A profound and beautifully written memoir tracing how Van Tighem evolved from a boy growing up in Calgary and going fishing with his dad, through a career working in ecology culminating in a brief stint as Superintendent of Banff National Park. It was a career full of the frustrations due to competing agendas about the use of parks, and sadness as wildlife disappeared, even from supposedly protected areas. And over time he began to recognize the worldviews of western science and the Christian church were both at fault because they separate humans from the rest of creation.
To quote him:
What do I know. So much less than I might once have thought. I was born into blindness and deafness, surrounded by white noise I mistook for meaning. I learned the wrong names for the places in my world. My education and religious institutions isolated me from the kinds of relationship with other beings that could have made me more fully human. I chose a life in biology to learn my way into intimacy but the very nature of that science built up barriers….And the things I did know, the things I was sure of, the stories of a life I still find myself reflecting upon with grateful nostalgia - they weren’t true. At the very least, they were only partly true. Even when there is light in the treetops, the understory if full of shadow.
To quote him:
What do I know. So much less than I might once have thought. I was born into blindness and deafness, surrounded by white noise I mistook for meaning. I learned the wrong names for the places in my world. My education and religious institutions isolated me from the kinds of relationship with other beings that could have made me more fully human. I chose a life in biology to learn my way into intimacy but the very nature of that science built up barriers….And the things I did know, the things I was sure of, the stories of a life I still find myself reflecting upon with grateful nostalgia - they weren’t true. At the very least, they were only partly true. Even when there is light in the treetops, the understory if full of shadow.
September 26, 2025
Kevin Van Tighem asks if one could be recognized by the land. In Understory he explores the shifting light of understanding our place in the natural world: "I was born into blindness and deafness, surrounded by white noise I mistook for meaning. I learned the wrong names for places in my world. … When animals and plants offered me understanding, I didn’t know the language being spoken."
Even though the land is becoming too quiet, where the growing silence is violence, Van Tighem weaves stories, both professional and personal, that integrate our lives within Creation. "Perhaps one can only truly know a place through the spirits that linger there, and the stories they inhabit."
A thoughtful and thought-provoking book.
Even though the land is becoming too quiet, where the growing silence is violence, Van Tighem weaves stories, both professional and personal, that integrate our lives within Creation. "Perhaps one can only truly know a place through the spirits that linger there, and the stories they inhabit."
A thoughtful and thought-provoking book.
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March 11, 2026Kevin Van Tighem is one of Alberta’s most prolific and influential conservation writers. His latest book, Understory, however, is his deepest, most profound work yet. The book is a searingly honest journey into the author’s life from boyhood to adolescence to a young man coming up the ranks of Parks Canada to become the superintendent of Banff National Park. Visceral and poetic, it delves beneath the surface, exploring Van Tighem’s own family history as settlers in southern Alberta, a wider culture of patriarchy and violence, and the tangled legacy that Judeo-Christianity, national parks and resource economy politics have left on Alberta’s landscape....
Review by Trina Moyles
Full review at https://albertaviews.ca/understory/
Review by Trina Moyles
Full review at https://albertaviews.ca/understory/
January 26, 2026
What a beautifully written book! Mr Van tighem goes to show you don't need to travel the world to have a fascinating life. I could not put this book down! Not only is it a memoir but its a meditation on how we impact the natural world. It makes you think, its not a book that should be rushed. I would recommend this book to anyone because it applies to everyone who wants to enjoy living on this planet. I am so glad I purchased it since I will read it again and again!
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April 24, 2026Sadly this one has languished on my device - but I really did enjoy what I read.
I have to let it go for now - but will put it on my list of titles to return to at some future date.
I have to let it go for now - but will put it on my list of titles to return to at some future date.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews