Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America’s Woods by Lyndsie Bourgon

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

by Lyndsie Bourgon

Greystone Books, 2022; 304 pages; $34.95

Reviewed by Jesse Donaldson

At first, tree poaching seems like a quaint subject for a book. The crime itself doesn’t sound overtly sensational. Set against a world of rising inequality, class struggle, environmental crisis, and existential unease, the stakes might sound low. But, as Lyndsie Bourgon’s Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America’s Woods quickly proves, such conclusions would be missing the forest for the trees.

For those on either side of the illegal timber trade — a one-billion-dollar-per-year industry in North America alone — the stakes are as high as the majestic redwoods that serve as the story’s main backdrop. For rangers, it’s an exceedingly thankless and dangerous job (as the book informs us, a park ranger is more likely to be assaulted on the job than an FBI agent), requiring informants, surveillance, and the potential to lose one’s life in the line of duty. For poachers, it’s about basic survival — feeding addition and staving off homelessness by staying one step ahead of law enforcement, in a world where economic prospects have been decimated, and betrayals by former allies are commonplace. While it often reads like a thriller (a technique that dove-tails perfectly with the subject matter), Bourgon’s book is able to transcend what could have been a simple cops-and-robbers narrative by viewing it through the lens of class struggle.

Organized into three sections — fittingly titled “Roots,” “Trunk,” and “Canopy” — it takes an expansive view of its subject matter, starting with the surprisingly progressive, 13th century “Charter of the Forest” (which established forests as a concept). But its most compelling portion comes in the middle, chronicling the cat-and-mouse game between law enforcement and a gang of poachers calling themselves “The Outlaws” which took place between 2010-2020, in California’s Redwood National Forest, and the neighbouring resource community of Orick.

Here, the forest and town serve as emblems for the duelling concepts at the core of the story: the battle between conservation, a pet cause of the wealthy, and resource extraction — often a matter of survival for the rural poor. Here, Bourgon’s nuanced approach pays the best dividends; through extensive interviews with the poachers themselves, she allows readers access to those with whom they may not ordinarily empathize. At the centre are Chris Guffie and Danny Garcia — clever, self-reliant men from logging families, whose struggles with intergenerational trauma, drug abuse (an estimated 90% of tree poaching is motivated by methamphetamine addiction), poverty, and loss of identity, led them to continue a way of life that the outside world had rendered criminal. By viewing environmental issues through an economic lens — as its characters do — the book takes readers into uncomfortable moral territory, forcing us to confront our preconceived notions of conservation and criminality; like the world around them, the characters at the heart of Tree Thieves are responding to rising inequality, class struggle, environmental crisis, and existential unease, in the only way they know how.

The book is at its best when it’s focused — a section near the end that abruptly changes locales, abandoning its central characters for vignettes exploring the global bootleg timber trade is less effective — and should be considered a worthy complement to books like The Golden Spruce (from which it takes clear inspiration). Briskly paced, engagingly written, filled with vivid characters and compelling — though occasionally (ahem) florid — prose, Tree Thieves pulls back the canopy on a fascinating and rarely examined world.