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Saving Tarboo Creek

One Family’s Quest to Heal the Land

By Scott Freeman

with Illustrations by

Susan Leopold Freeman

Starting January 24, 2018, Saving Tarboo Creek will be available through local bookstores, as well as
and

A meditation on living a more natural life.

When the Freeman family decided to restore a severely damaged creek in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula—to transform it from a drainage ditch into a stream that could again nurture indigenous salmon— they knew the task would be formidable and the rewards plentiful.

In Saving Tarboo Creek, Scott Freeman artfully blends his family’s story with powerful universal lessons about how we can all live more constructive, fulfilling, and natural lives by engaging with the land rather than exploiting it. Equal parts heartfelt and empowering, global science and local action, this book explores how we can all make a difference one choice at a time.

In the proud tradition of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, Saving Tarboo Creek is both a timely tribute to our land and a bold challenge to protect it. Adding to the legacy, Leopold’s granddaughter Susan, an artist and matriarch of the Freeman family, created this book’s illustrations.

As a biologist and teacher at the University of Washington, Scott has authored the textbooks Biological Science and Evolutionary Analysis and is recognized as a world authority on innovative science education. His first published work for a general audience, the pages of Saving Tarboo Creek flow easily as the natural outgrowth of his life, his professional work, and his personal passions.

“A moving account of a beautiful project. We need stories of healing in this tough moment; this is a particularly fine one.”
—Bill McKibben, author of Radio Free Vermont and The End of Nature
“As Aldo Leopold so eloquently expressed, healing the damage done to land can be a family’s labor of love. In keeping with the Leopold legacy, Susan Leopold Freeman and Scott Freeman weave together art and ecology as they reflect on what it means to live well and ethically on this earth.”
—Dr. Christina Eisenberg, chief scientist, Earthwatch Institute; author of The Carnivore Way: Coexisting with and Conserving North America’s Predators
“Scott Freeman demonstrates a healer’s touch with his pen, just as his extended family of helpers does with the Tarboo Creek property. But what really stands out here is their willingness to put in the work, over the course of generations, then patiently step back and watch what happens to a planet much in need of special care.”
—Jack Nisbet, author of Sources of the River, The Collector and Ancient Places