Tree Thieves

The first case of tree theft I ever encountered occurred within the stands of ancient old-growth on the southwest shores of Vancouver Island, in Ditidaht territory. One day in the spring of 2011, a hiker in British Columbia's Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park noticed the smell of fresh sawdust in the air, and as he walked he spotted felling wedges—tools used to guide a tree's fall in a particular direction—thrust into the body of an 800-year-old red cedar. With the right wind, the tree, rising about 160 feet tall, could easily tip over. The wedges had shifted the tree from towering sentinel in lush rainforest to teetering public danger. BC Parks rangers were forced to down the cedar themselves. They left the tree on the forest floor to decompose, recycling back into the earth over the next hundred years.

It wouldn't last anywhere near that long: just 12 months later, most of the trunk was gone. After the tree was felled, poachers entered the park and sawed the trunk (or "bucked" it) into portable pieces, leaving a trail of sawdust and abandoned equipment behind. Ironically, by honoring their mandate of safety and conservation, BC Parks had made it easier for the tree to be stolen.

A local environmental group, the Wilderness Committee, sounded a public alarm about the poaching, and a press release sent out to journalists landed in my in-box. A decade later, no one has been charged under British Columbia's Forest and Range Practices Act with the crimes that took place in the Carmanah Walbran that night: unauthorized timber harvest from public property, and vandalizing timber. The cedar is long gone—sold to a local sawmill in the dead of night, or to an artisan who kept it in their shop, or turned it into shingles, or a clock, or a table.

Since then, I have watched a spate of wood poaching sweep North America: in the Pacific Northwest, the lush forests of Alaska, and the timber stands of the eastern and southern United States. Timber poaching happens everywhere, on vastly different scales, throughout the seasons—one tree taken here, another there. It has become "a problem in every national forest," according to forest officials, and it runs the gamut from the seemingly minute—cutting down a small Christmas tree in a park near your city, for example—to the large-scale devastation of entire groves.

In North America, the scale of timber poaching varies by region: In eastern Missouri, timber theft has become a frequent problem in Mark Twain National Forest, where in 2021 a man was charged with cutting down 27 walnut and white oak trees inside the park over the course of six months, then selling them to local mills. In New England, the primary victims are cherry trees. In Kentucky, the bark is stripped off the slippery elm tree for use in herbal remedies and diet supplements. Bonsai have disappeared from a museum garden in Seattle, palm trees from Los Angeles yards, a rare pine from an arboretum in Wisconsin, ancient alligator junipers from Prescott National Forest in Arizona. In Hawaii, koa trees—prized for their fine-grained red wood—are stolen from the rain forest. In Ohio, Nebraska, Indiana, and Tennessee, I found the stumps of black walnut and white oak. None of these trees were rooted in logging land—all had been afforded some measure of protection, meaning they mattered to someone and some place.

Deep in the woods, there is other natural theft, too. Moss is sold to florists for about $1 per pound; in one case a poacher was caught with 3,000 pounds in the bed of his pickup truck. Across the southeastern United States, poachers rake up and sell the needles from longleaf pine, a resource dubbed "brown gold." Boughs off tree limbs, mushrooms, grasses, ferns—all are illegally traded forest products. Sometimes the very tops of spruce or fir trees are lopped off and sold as Christmas trees, or the tips of branches removed and turned into potpourri.

Forests are managed on stratified bureaucratic levels that, at points, overlap and collaborate. There are private property owners and forests managed by logging firms. There are also regional forests that fall under the jurisdiction of municipalities, states, or provinces. Then there's the National Park Service, the Forest Service, the National Monuments; in Canada there are Crown lands, national parks, and nature reserves. In the United States, most forests are privately owned and managed as forests or timber land. But in the western half of the country, most forest land is held by the federal and state governments—70 percent of the forests there are publicly owned, compared with just 17 percent in the East.

It's easiest to understand these protective layers by considering the larger entity each organization falls under. For instance, the Forest Service is nestled within the Department of Agriculture. As such, the trees on Forest Service land are managed like a crop—a product that is grown and harvested and consumed. Other American agencies (the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the US Fish & Wildlife Service) fall under the Department of the Interior. But even beneath that umbrella, things get complicated—for instance, selective logging does take place on National Park and BLM lands. The US Fish & Wildlife Service protects fish, wildlife, and their natural habitats—but those fish might pass through a national park or national forest via a stream, their migration blurring the boundaries of responsibility. The poaching from these conservation areas is the most shocking—trees meant to be protected through their entire life cycle and beyond brought down, a stark example of the ways in which conservation can fail.

In North America, it's estimated that $1 billion worth of wood is poached yearly. The Forest Service has pegged the value of poached wood from its land at $100 million annually; in recent years, the agency estimates, 1 in 10 trees felled on public lands in the United States were harvested illegally. Associations of private timber companies gauge the value of wood stolen from them at around $350 million annually. In British Columbia, experts put the cost of timber theft from publicly managed forests at $20 million a year. Globally, the black market for timber is estimated at $157 billion, a figure that includes the market value of the wood, unpaid taxes, and lost revenues. Along with illegal fishing and the black-market animal trade, timber poaching contributes to a $1 trillion illegal wildlife-trade industry that is monitored by international crime organizations such as Interpol.

Timber poaching is legally classified as a property crime, but it's unique in its bounty and setting. Poachers prefer the term take to poach when it comes to trees, and it is indeed that: a taking of an irreplaceable resource. In North America, trees are our deepest connection to history, our versions of cathedrals and standing ruins. When they are poached, though, they become stolen goods, and are investigated as such. But it is one thing to link a stolen car back to its owner via paperwork or plates, and another to link poached wood to the stump it once stood on. In lush forests, those stumps are usually hidden behind a curtain of trees, or covered in moss, or buried in branches—in all cases next to impossible to find.

Placing a value on poached wood is likewise complicated: the effects of timber poaching quickly become more nuanced, complex, and devastating than property crime when considered ecologically. Public lands enclose some of the oldest remaining trees in the world. Their ability to store large amounts of carbon—the redwoods alone hold more carbon per acre than any other forest in the world, and British Columbia's Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park contains twice the biomass of lush, Southern Hemisphere tropical forests that are widely considered the Earth's lungs—make old-growth trees a key species in our fight against climate change. As well, when old-growth disappears, the foundation from which it grew is destabilized, leaving landscapes more prone to flooding and landslides. Even if dead-standing (termed snag in the logging industry), old-growth provides an incomparable ecosystem for endangered species across the continent. When the trees disappear, so too do the animals, birds, and smaller flora and fungi that rely on them. Tree poaching, even on a small scale, has a far-reaching impact, contributing to a decline in environmental health and weakening our forests, leaving marks on the Earth that will persist for hundreds of years.

In the world of conservation-law enforcement, though, an invisible line seems to divide flora and fauna. Arguing (and fundraising) to protect animals, especially "charismatic megafauna" such as elephants and rhinos, from poaching and illegal trade tends to be easier than advocating to guard plants. But of the 38,000 species protected by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES)—the global registry of plants and animals that are exploited or endangered through trade—over 32,000 are flora.

The very nature of old-growth provides an opportunity to transcend that invisible line: in Redwood National and State Parksi in California, chief ranger Stephen Troy says, the trees are "the rhino horn of the American West." The same can be said of cedar and Douglas fir ecosystems, their branches dripping with spools of moss and their trunks towering into the sky. These are trees that invoke awe, through height and age and circumference. It is very difficult to stand in a grove of Sequoia and not be bowled over by their beauty.

This book primarily investigates tree poaching from national and provincial parks and forests in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and Canada. These trees are only hours from my backyard in British Columbia's interior, and I have spent years trying to understand why someone might steal one. My curiosity brought me face-to-face with a form of deforestation rarely discussed, which springs from some of the most pressing social issues of the 20th and early 21st centuries.

What draws me to this story is not the amount of money that the missing wood is worth, nor even the knowledge that a single missing tree has a negative impact on climate change, though both are crucial considerations. Instead I wonder how someone who lives surrounded by the crushing beauty of a redwood forest can simultaneously love it and kill it; can see themselves as so entwined with the natural world that destroying part of it comes to feel like another stage in its life cycle. Timber poaching is a large, physical crash of a crime, and it is rooted in a challenge that stretches across North America: the disintegration of community in the face of economic and cultural change.

Studying timber poaching quickly opens a window into the trickle-down effects of environmental and economic policies that disregard and marginalize the working-class people who not only live among the trees but rely on them to survive. It's a difficult tale—one tinged with both anger and beauty, arising from rampant expansion and desire. The forest is a working environment, and displacing that work deprives many people of money, community, and a uniting identity. Many tree poachers express a longing for something that a tree represents: the deep-rooted underpinnings of home. The ancient Greeks called this feeling nostos, the root word of nostalgia—a searching homesickness that comes from wrenching separation.

People have "taken" wood for centuries, but wood has also been taken from us, cloistered within fences and marked boundaries on maps. Throughout history, removing land from community use often caused a wreckage, and while every poacher's story is unique, they all act out of the simmering need that followed. So why might someone steal a tree? For money, yes. But also for a sense of control, for family, for ownership, for products that you and I have in our homes, for drugs. I have begun to see the act of timber poaching as not simply a dramatic environmental crime, but something deeper—an act to reclaim one's place in a rapidly changing world, a deed of necessity. And to begin to understand the sadness and violence of poaching, we need to consider how a tree became something that could be stolen in the first place.

One spring day in April 1615, eleven people entered a stone building at the edge of a forest in England's Midlands and took their places in front of an assembled court. The group was there to answer for their crimes: all had stolen wood from the Forest of Corse, which they had used for things like brewing beer and baking bread. Having been caught, they reported to this swanimote, a court established for regulating, policing, and conserving the forest. In front of them sat 18 jurors; surrounding them, 22 commoners, villagers, and farmers watched the day's events. One by one, the accused answered for their crimes: cutting wood from pear and apple trees, lopping branches from a hazel, and in one case cutting chunks of wood from a tree known as Goblins Oak. Inklings of today's timber poaching ripple out from here.

The English word forest shares a root—for—with forbidden and with the Latin term foris, meaning outside. This makes sense: forest did not initially refer to a stand of trees or woodland, as it does today, but rather to a parcel of land that had been appropriated in the 11th century by William the Conqueror as a place where he and his compatriots could go hunting, and where others could pay for the privilege to do likewise. A sort of medieval country club, forests included more than woodland, and in some cases encompassed farmland, fields, or even entire villages or towns. When a forest was established, strict rules were placed on anyone who happened to live there: in order to preserve trees that could support a strong deer population, for instance, wood would no longer be free for the taking.

To counteract these land grabs, the 13th century brought the Charter of the Forest, a companion to the Magna Carta. Ushered in after King John, who disafforested land at the behest of wealthy barons who wanted easier access to land held tight by the monarchy, the Charter of the Forest outlined a way of life for commoners and woodlands, and allowed access to the essentials of life: food, shelter, water. "Every free man shall agist his wood in the forest as he wishes," the charter proclaimed. It was a manifesto for the commons, pushing back against the spread of royal acquisition.

By today's standards, the Charter of the Forest is a radical document, standing against the privatization of common land by the powerful, be they royalty or government. The charter placed limits on use and was one of the first environmental laws in history: it included animal rights and regulated hunting with dogs. Through it, the monarchy was required to return enclosed land to its subjects. Men who had been jailed for forest crimes up until that point were released, provided they pledged never to "wrong" the forest again. For centuries, all churches in England were required to read the charter aloud to the public four times a year.

Through the charter, the forest was defined as a common source of commodities or privileges known as mast, herbage, marl, turbary, and estover. It guaranteed permission to feed pigs from the forest floor (mast), to let sheep graze on herbage throughout, and to harvest honey. It granted the right to dig clay and sand (marl); to mine coal and peat (turbary) for fuel; and to build sawmills. The forest thus outlined was a place of refuge, with trees used as sanctuary, as waypoints, and as boundary markers—there was an acknowledgment that trees were an integral part of the commoner's life, and the forest was dubbed "the poor's overcoat," under which all means of survival could be found, including dead wood or entire trees from which to build houses, furniture, doors. The Charter of the Forest also outlined the bounds of estover—the right to collect firewood and timber for everyday needs. It referred to coppicing, a form of logging that cuts trees down to ground level, encouraging healthy regrowth.

By the time of the swanimote meeting in April 1615, however, the charter had long since been ignored—indeed, its promises had never been fully kept. The commons had dwindled through continued enclosure of private land, primarily by wealthy landowners who removed access to communal use. Even the word commoners had lost its power, becoming something of a pejorative instead.

As a result of these trends, taking wood had become a folk custom by the 17th century, and timber poaching had emerged as the most common form of property crime. Forests were now a place of folk crime, where estover was routinely exceeded and trees illegally harvested and made into charcoal. "Foresters" became "gamekeepers"—de facto security guards over private property that was formerly open for common use. (Whereas the story of Robin Hood has him dodging the Sheriff of Nottingham, in reality he most likely would have been slipping the grasp of a gamekeeper.)

Keepers used methods such as snares, tripwires, and mantraps concealed in hedges to keep poachers out. Anyone caught taking wood from private land—not only in the form of trunks and branches, but also fences, posts, and bark—would be punished, and cruelly at that: seven years in prison, or hands severed, or death by hanging. Poachers were sentenced and fined by "verderers" (who held lifetime appointments) at swanimotes held every 40 days. The crimes on which verderers passed judgment ranged from cutting branches to uprooting an entire oak.