A new collection of essays that will engage readers, inspire change, raise awareness, nurture empathy, and reshape perspectives on environmental stewardship towards a sustainable future.

Travels Up the Creek intricately crafts stories of environmental awakening, drawing inspiration from Aldo Leopold, Stan Rowe, Wendell Berry, and Rachel Carson. This engaging journey confronts ecological challenges, advocating a shift in perspective and encouraging readers to embrace curiosity and scrutiny in contemplating the significance of our natural landscape. Urging environmental stewardship rooted in science, the book challenges groupthink, offering knowledge, motivation, and agency to those dedicated to creating a better world.

Exploring human-nature connections and stark realities, Lorne Fitch's new book underscores empathy, prompting readers to safeguard imperiled species and threatened places. A call to action in a world grappling with seemingly insurmountable issues, the book inspires change through education and a touch of righteous anger. A compelling guide for Earth stewards, it promises to contribute to a sustainable future for all.

Lorne Fitch has been a biologist for over 50 years. He has criss-crossed the province, learned the landscape, investigated fish and wildlife populations, and engaged with ranchers, farmers, industry, and bureaucrats over conservation. His insights are the result of much scar tissue. Lorne is a professional biologist, a retired provincial fish and wildlife scientist, and a former adjunct professor at the University of Calgary. He is also the co-founder of the riparian stewardship initiative called Cows and Fish. For his work on conservation he has been part of three Alberta Emerald awards, an Alberta Order of the Bighorn Award, and a Canadian Environmental Gold Award, with additional recognition from the Wildlife Society, the Society for Range Management, the Alberta Society of Professional Biologists, the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, and the Alberta Wilderness Association. His first book with RMB was Streams of Consequence: Dispatches from the Conservation World. Lorne lives in Lethbridge, Alberta.

Lorne Fitch's profile page

“Alberta’s master storyteller is back. In this collection of essays, Lorne Fitch takes
us on a tour of Alberta’s wilder places and helps us understand what we have,
what we’ve lost, and what we must do to protect the jewels that remain. His
decades of field experience, combined with a unique ability to both entertain and
enlighten, make this book required reading for anyone with an interest in nature
and a desire to learn more about its conservation.” —Richard Schneider, editor of Nature Alberta Magazine, author of Biodiversity Conservation in Canada: From Theory to Practice

“The great American essayist Wendell Berry once observed that the care of the
Earth is our most ancient, most worthy and most pleasing responsibility. It’s clear
that this responsibility has been abrogated too many times in Alberta. With a half
century of professional and personal observations in the field accumulated,
digested and processed in words and useful deeds, Lorne Fitch, in Travels Up the Creek, shows us, in the most eloquent and articulate of ways, where we have gone wrong and what we can do to reconnect the growing disconnect between ourselves and nature. The prophetic insights and storytelling here are Berry-esque and live up to Fitch’s
highly acclaimed earlier book Streams of Consequence. A must-read for those yearning for pleasing responsibility and a chance maybe to breathe in a rare fog in a
grassland setting and see for a fleeting moment a herd of antelope before the
animals are swallowed back up in the mist. So many lovely anecdotes like this.
Not to be missed.” —Edward Struzik, award-winning author of Firestorm, Future Arctic, The Big Thaw, Swamplands and several other bestsellers, and a Fellow of Queen’s University’s Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy

“Travels Up the Creek is a very timely, very readable scan of Alberta’s ecosystems.
Lorne Fitch trains his biologist’s eye on everything from cheatgrass to cutthroat
trout to combat biology, and he does it with humour and insight.” —Don Gayton, ecologist, author of Okanagan Odyssey, Man Facing West, The Sky and the Patio, The Wheatgrass Mechanism and Interwoven Wild among other books and numerous journal and magazine articles

“Travels Up the Creek is replete with highly readable and engaging meditations, ruminations, explorations and provocations. Lorne Fitch is in league with Aldo Leopold and Wendell Berry—an environmental trinity of gentle, angry voices. He has the blood-boiling passion of an Edward Abbey, the heartbreaking earnestness and profundity of an Aldo Leopold and the grounded wisdom of a Wendell Berry. Fitch understands the power of story and metaphor in shaping his impressive scientific knowledge into compelling narrative.” —Jeffrey A. Lockwood, professor of natural sciences and humanities, University of Wyoming, author of Prairie Soul and Locust

Travels Up the Creek is a testament to both the absolute necessity of science and the ultimate insufficiency of it in our struggle to live well on this planet. Fitch deeply
understands that science without values is lame, and values without science are
blind. One might well open an environmental dictionary to an entry called “Sense of
Place” to find this book. Lorne Fitch exemplifies ecological agape—the love of the unlovable, including obscure streams, lonely grasslands and overlooked fish.” —Jeffrey A. Lockwood, professor of natural sciences and humanities, University of Wyoming, author of Prairie Soul and Locust

“In this wide-ranging collection, Lorne Fitch issues a cri de coeur from the trenches of ‘combat biology’, entreating us to join him in defending Alberta’s broken beauty.” —Candace Savage, Fellow, Royal Society of Canada, multi-award-winning author of Prairie: A Natural History and A Geography of Blood

“Travels Up the Creek provides a perceptive view of environmental dilemmas in Alberta. This book successfully builds upon Fitch’s previous book, Streams of Consequence. The author’s extensive experience becomes evident through his fulsome descriptions and humorous anecdotes interlaced with cautionary tales. Everyone, no matter their prior knowledge of the topics covered, will learn something about Alberta’s history and its approach to conservation through reading this book. I never tire of Fitch’s candid storytelling.” —Debborah Donnelly, executive director, Alberta Wilderness Association

“Travels Up the Creek is a plea on behalf of our wild places and creatures, urging a better understanding of how more than a century of economic expansion has pushed many of those habitats and species over the edge, to the point where many may not survive at all. More than merely sending out a call for the application of science to guide our paths forward, however, Lorne Fitch is essentially issuing a spiritual call for open eyes, ears and voices to insist that a better way forward can – and must – be found. —Peter Kingsmill, publications editor for the Alberta Society of Professional Biologists and author of the novels Sunset at 20:47, Nobody Drowned, and The Awan Lake Experiment