Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America's Woods

by Lyndsie Bourgon

Hardcover, 2022

Call number

333.75 BOU

Publication

Little, Brown Spark (2022), 288 pages

Description

Weaving together investigative reporting, colorful characters, logging history, political analysis, and cutting-edge tree science, this gripping account reveals the complexity of the illegal timber market.

User reviews

LibraryThing member breic
I couldn't dredge up any sympathy for the tree poacher main characters. Banal evil.
LibraryThing member bangerlm
It was apropos that I was listening to the audio version of this book while driving out to hike in WA state on National Forest Service land, past clear cuts on NFS and Weyerhauser land, while following a car with the bumper sticker "Put public lands back in public hands."

This was an interesting
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account of tree poaching, and the societal culture around it. It was much more sympathetic towards the poacher's than I expected. I didn't realize how rampant tree poaching is. :/ I just find it frustrating that the large scale corporate greed essentially allows anonymous individuals to get away with large scale destruction and enrichment from exploiting public resources, but the vitriol is focused on the smaller scale individual park rangers, environmentalists, loggers and former loggers.

If you enjoyed this book I recommend The Golden Spruce by John Vaillant being about the same issues.
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LibraryThing member JBD1
Basically a case study of tree poaching on public lands. A bit overly sympathetic to the criminals, in my view, though I understand that she was trying to get at the background issues that can lead some to commit desperate acts.
LibraryThing member Gwendydd
This is a book about tree poaching, focusing on the last 30-40 years in the Pacific Northwest and Northern California. Poaching has become a huge problem: people cut down trees from protected forests because they can earn a lot of money from the wood, and it is very hard to catch people in the act.
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Bourgon does a good job of portraying this complex issue from all sides. For a lot of people, logging has been a way of life for generations, and environmentalists have turned the the forests that used to provide their living into a protected resource without providing any alternative means of making a living or defining their identity. The park rangers who are tasked with enforcing poaching laws have very few resources and are not exactly law enforcement officers. The whole system has created a lot of conflict. Drug use complicates the whole situation.

There is hope for better solutions. In recent years, new technology, especially DNA identification, have made it much easier to determine whether wood has been poached. Bourgon also uses the Sunshine Coast Community Forest as an example of a system that works to both preserve the forest and let people access its resources.

All in all, this is an interesting read about a very complex topic. Bourgon focuses a bit too much on the biographies of a few poachers and park rangers for my taste.
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Awards

Nellie Bly Book Award (Finalist — 2022)

Pages

288

ISBN

0316497444 / 9780316497442
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