{"id":3526,"date":"2022-07-12T10:13:52","date_gmt":"2022-07-12T10:13:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3526"},"modified":"2022-07-22T10:22:13","modified_gmt":"2022-07-22T10:22:13","slug":"you-wouldnt-stop-here-for-gas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3526","title":{"rendered":"You wouldn\u2019t stop here for gas"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Reading Lyndsie Bourgon’s Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in the Woods for the Telegraph, 12 July 2022<\/a><\/p>\n

Worldwide, the illegal timber trade is worth around 157 billion dollars a year. According to oral historian Lyndsie Bourgon, thirty per cent of the world\u2019s wood trade is illegal, and around 80 per cent of all Amazonian wood harvested today is \u201cpoached\u201d (a strange term to apply to timber, which would struggle to fit into the largest poche or pocket — but evocative nonetheless). $1 billion worth of wood is poached yearly in North America.<\/p>\n

Bourgon focuses her account on thefts from public lands and forest parks of the Pacific North-West. There are giants here, and Methuselahs. \u201cOld-growth\u201d trees, more than two hundred years old, are intagliated with each others\u2019 root systems, with fungal hyphae and with other soil systems we\u2019ve barely begun to understand. Entire ecosystems may stand or fall on the survival of a single 800-year-old red cedar — an organism so huge it may take weeks or months to saw up and remove from the forest, leaving a trail of sawdust, felling wedges and abandoned equipment.<\/p>\n

That the trade in such timber was not sustainable has never been a secret, and to save some of the world\u2019s oldest and biggest trees, the Redwood National Park was established in 1968.<\/p>\n

But while the corporations received compensation for their lost profits, the promised direct government relief for workers never materialised. \u201cDo you know what it\u2019s like to work 20 years, then sleep in a pick-up truck?\u201d asked Seattle\u2019s archbishop Thomas Murphy, at a 1994 summit attended by the new president, Bill Clinton; \u201cA way of life is dying.\u201d<\/p>\n

North America\u2019s oldest timber companies were founded near the town of Orick, on the banks of the Redwood Creek in Humboldt County, California. Orick\u2019s first commercial sawmill opened in 1908. Orick is now home to just under 400 people. You wouldn\u2019t stop here for gas on your way to a luxury cabin on US Forest Service land, or a heated yurt by Park Canada.<\/p>\n

To live in Orick is to feel the walls closing in: one woodsman turned poacher, Danny Garcia, likens the sensation \u201cto having your car break down in the middle of nowhere — you\u2019ve no cash to fix it and no way out.\u201d<\/p>\n

This, says Garcia, is where his \u201ctree troubles\u201d started, but he wasn\u2019t the first to go sawing chunks out of giants. His partner in crime Chris Guffie says: \u201cI\u2019ve been at it for so doggone long. It\u2019s like Yogi Bear and the park ranger.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTo begin to understand the sadness and violence of poaching,\u201d says Bourgon, \u201cwe need to consider how a tree became something that could be stolen in the first place.\u201d Like it or not, conservation has patrician roots: in the 1890s, organisations like the New York Sportsmen\u2019s Club lobbied to ensure access to game and fish for its members. Dedicated hunting and fishing seasons suited their sporting clientele, but as a letter to a Wyoming paper put it: \u201cWhen you say to a ranchman, \u2018You can\u2019t eat game, except in season,\u2019 you make him a poacher, because he is neither going hungry himself nor have his family do so…\u201d<\/p>\n

Remove land from a community, Bourgon argues, and you make poaching \u201ca deed of necessity\u201d. So why not buy the land and give it back to its people, along with the tools to protect and manage it. Going by the experiences of the 59 community forests that now dot the province of British Columbia, community forests create twice as many jobs as those run by independent industry.<\/p>\n

Of necessity, however, Bourgon spends more pages explaining the workings of a solution more palatable to central authority: an ever-more interconnected system of police surveillance, involving cameras, magnetic plates, LIDAR and, most recently, genetic testing. Even as Bourgon wrote this book, a genetic map was being assembled to make wood products, at least in the Pacific North-West, traceable to their original growing locations. The brilliance of this effort, spearheaded by Rich Cronn at the Oregon State University at Corvallis, cannot hide the fact that it is facilitating an age-old mistake: substituting enforcement for engagement.<\/p>\n

Bourgon gives a voice both to the rangers risking their lives to save some of the planet\u2019s oldest trees, and to poachers like Danny Garcia whose original sin was his unwillingness to leave the home of his ancestors. Full of the most varied testimonies, and by no mean fudging the issue that timber poaching is a crime and an environmental violation, Tree Thieves nonetheless testifies to the love of the woodsman for the wood. Drive through Orick sometime, and you will discover that communities are an ecology, too, and one worthy of care.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Lyndsie Bourgon’s Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in the Woods for the Telegraph, 12 July 2022 Worldwide, the illegal timber trade is worth around 157 billion dollars a year. According to oral historian Lyndsie Bourgon, thirty per cent of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617,78],"tags":[739,331,997,287,998],"class_list":["post-3526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-reviews-and-opinion","category-reviews-and-opinion","tag-crime","tag-environment","tag-forestry","tag-telegraph","tag-trees"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3526"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3526\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3529,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3526\/revisions\/3529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}