In Chasing Clayoquot, David Pitt-Brooke makes a distinctly poetic analysis of a place he clearly loves, an ecologically unique region that gained a precarious degree of government protection only after fierce environmental protests in the 1980s and ’90s.

Borrowing his structure from Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, Pitt-Brooke divides the book into 12 chapters, each representing one physical journey taken through the calendar year. The chronological narrative also traces epochal time: a trip to weather-wreaked Lennard Island through January’s storms swirls into a discussion of the natural phenomena that form the basis of meteorology, while February’s kayak trip to Lemmens Inlet inspires a discussion of plate tectonics.

Pitt-Brooke, who has worked as a wildlife researcher and an educator for Parks Canada, becomes increasingly candid in revealing his passionate concern for environmental causes as the fictional year unfolds, and increasingly poetic in his presentation of hard scientific information. “If Earth was alone in the universe we would have no tides,” he muses during June’s exploration of inter-tidal pools. “But we are not alone. For one thing, we have a sister: the Moon. Earth and Moon orbit each other, ponderously, every 27.13 days. We like to say that the Moon orbits the Earth, but this is pure chauvinism. Both bodies are in motion, revolving around their common centre of mass.”

The Clayoquot year wraps up with a history of the region and its people since European contact, crammed into a fictive hour. The sheer artifice of Chasing Clayquot’s structure reinforces Pitt-Brooke’s assertion that to get a grasp on reality one must invoke imagination.