Unearthing the Roots: The Complex World of Illegal Timber Harvesting on the West Coast

A Discussion with "Tree Thieves" author Lyndsie Bourgon

The following interview was recorded for the Poor Proles Almanac podcast with guest Lyndsie Bourgon, a journalist, oral historian, Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, and National Geographic Explorer. She writes about the environment and its entanglement with history, culture, and identity.

Andy:

Awesome. All right, Lyndsie, thanks so much for joining us. You released a book last year about illegal timber harvesting on the West Coast. First off, how did you find yourself interested in this subject?

Lyndsie:

I found tree poaching and really kind of poaching in general in 2012. And that was when a short news story came out on the CBC here about an old-growth timber or an old-growth cedar, rather that had been stolen from a provincial park in British Columbia, on the West Coast Park in British Columbia, on the West Coast. And at the time it was, you know, a short news story.

I had seen people sharing it online and I was working as a magazine writer and I thought, oh, this might make a really good sort of magazine paper type story, and so I started calling around and doing interviews with people, and then it very quickly ballooned out into this much larger, more complicated story that I really wanted to tell, because people were kind of saying you know, this is a very sort of obvious daring crime that surprises people, but it's actually really not surprising in the context of the communities where this happens. Once I started digging into its history and sociology, that's where the book came from.

Andy:

Reading it, what I did appreciate is that you don't go, or at least you don't present yourself in the book as going in with a certain perspective, and you know you meet with these people honestly and try to understand why they're doing what they're doing. You know, I think when we talk about illegal harvesting of plants or animals, it's something that's very easily villainized, and to an extent, justifiably but that also means those same people are aware of that villainy, or at least that perception of villainy.

So for them to do it anyway means that it's a much more complicated question than just saying these are bad guys doing bad things because they're bad guys and no, not really.

Lyndsie:

I think, um, there are a few times in the book where that's laid out very bluntly to me, you know, like poachers, uh, in particular one timber poacher in Northern California. He very much identified with this sort of Robin Hood-esque element of what he does. There were also two other poachers who I profiled who had quite a nuanced perspective on why they committed this crime.

But you know, in going back and kind of going through my thought process for why I approached the story the way I did, I was looking at how people had shared the CBC story link that I just mentioned on Twitter and you know it was a lot of retweets and replies saying calling people scum, you know, calling people just monsters and killers, and all of this and, um, at the same time that I had seen that I had been reading a lot of history about, like the early forests and kind of how we've come to sort of see and manage conservation lands in this very sort of fenced off and closed way and this was all kind of muddling together in my mind and so, yeah, I appreciate, I appreciate what you said about my approach.

I think at first I would have, or I did even see it as. Here's my magazine story Bad person does bad things, police officers and rangers, and whoever investigates, here's how they catch them. And it's just not like that. You know, it's very. It's all wrapped up in identity and work and living on the land or trying to live on the land.

Andy:

Yeah, there's a certain cultural value to the way that they're what they're doing and the way they're engaging with it, on this very interpersonal way that I think is really displaced in our greater economic system, which doesn't value the inefficiencies that that creates in the thoughtfulness of choosing trees and things like that, and that might be being a little bit lenient towards some of these people that are doing it.

But I do think that there's this like nuance to it, not just in the traditional way of like; Yes, these are people in like, in many cases, communities that have been functionally abandoned by the greater economic system. But also like the, the cultural value of uh, and trying to restore some of the cultural value of like, having relations with the landscape is is messy, especially when it's got these layers of economic disenfranchisement, cultural disenfranchisement, and so on.

Lyndsie:

In North America, the push west and the act of logging and the act of building these communities is a huge part of how we see the country right. And so a lot of people you know in Oreck or in towns in Washington State or Oregon, northern California, they're saying to me my great, great great grandfather helped make this country and now I'm not allowed to do that job. And that might sound very blunt and it is very complicated, but from their perspective it's.

We helped clear land and displace people, of course, but we helped with this colonial project, this empire, empire. We, you know, the cities kind of grew up around it and through various reasons and measures we are now vilified for, for killing trees as opposed to being part of the expansion um, which was positive in their family history, right, yeah, and I think when we talk about this idea of, like, illegally harvesting or poaching, it implies that they don't care about the ecologic benefits that that ecosystem is providing.

Andy:

And that's not the case. They value it in a very different way and in some instances and I think there's merit in saying that, some of it is still a bit extractive, but I do think it offers a good linchpin in moving some of these conversations in a really good way, as long as people can come to the table with that understanding.

Lyndsie:

Right, which is very modern history that just hasn't been a priority or for whatever reason, that hasn't happened right. So when I was talking about tree poachers in Northern California, it was really in the context of the timber wars of the early 1990s, whether that's historically accurate or not.

That is the sort of memory of when things started to be difficult in that region for a lot of families. And so the Forest Service and the National Park Service they, you know, they're still distrusted because of that time and there's a lot of examples of the government, you know, particularly when Redwoods National Park was first founded and then expanded a decade later, holding community events, not even within small communities but within local cities nearby, and listening and receiving comments from all sorts of leaders and people that live there and not doing anything with what was told to them. And there's a lot of deep sort of memory around what that felt like to have, you know, a senate subcommittee come visit your town and you tell them exactly what you're thinking about things that we still deal with now, right, so they were saying, expanding the park. We're not fully against that because we understand, but you cannot expect that tourism is going to keep my town alive.

Andy:

You cannot expect that a service economy is going to step in where this, where logging might, might be diminished or leave entirely, and that is on the record and then kind of bound up neatly and put in a library somewhere and not, uh, not acted on. That’s something that you drive home in the book is, you talk to these and a lot of them do infer that they wish that there was a different way they could live, but it just doesn't exist and infrastructure for something doesn't exist, and when they have tried things, it seems like they generally just they're topical, they don't really address any of the issues, so they eventually flounder and fail.

Lyndsie:

Yeah, or they come with funding that's tied to a cycle that you know that's maybe five years long and they work for three of those five years and then that funding doesn't continue anymore and it hasn't sort of had the foundation to boost up and create its own sort of sustainable economy.

Andy:

It often comes from a good place, I think, from you know, from governments or organizations. But it isn't sustainable when they can’t be self-determined or to have any agency in some of those conversations to decide that, yeah, my life, you know my myself or my father may be the last person who did this, but I'm okay with that because I'm choosing to make that decision.

Lyndsie:

Right.

Andy:

That. That seems to be like very clearly lacking.

Lyndsie:

Oh yeah, I think that's a really great point and I think, you know, it's interesting, when I was, when I was doing my interviews for this book and I really was speaking very widely to all sorts of people, and I think someone had said to me you know, there was a bit of sort of government funding that had come down from the federal government to kind of help certain people that qualified get by, and that funding was undersubscribed so people didn't want to take it.

And I kept thinking, well, yeah, you know, I don't. A lot of the folks I was speaking to, like first of all, they would never really whether I agree with it or not they wouldn't really see social funding as their social money, as something that they wanted to to take. It came with the stigma of a handout, and it, you know, the responses to this sort of crisis or these issues of de-industrialization.

They were never presented on an even playing field. It was always don't worry, we'll give you something to get through, and not what do you need— what would you like to see? And that really fosters a lot of anger and it also prevents a fair number of people from moving forward because there is still a lot of clinging on. Well, what we need is the mill, what we need is work in the woods.

Andy:

I'm really interested as a writer and researcher about this whole process of working with and getting people to go along with you, basically going along as they do illegal stuff. And kind of how did that process go, and you know what was it that you did to get them to basically buy into. You know that maybe the story is more important than my own personal safety, or maybe they just felt fully safe with you.

Lyndsie:

Well, I appreciate the implication. So I should say that I never went out on any sort of poaching mission with anyone and the cases that I wrote about. But I did interview people extensively and sat in their homes and spoke to them very, very, you know, consistently.

Andy:

But and the cases, that I've been there were some that you went and actually saw the sites that were recently poached.

Lyndsie:

Yeah, and those were shockingly close to any sort of public trail. So you know, I was not going out in the dead of night or anything like that. You know, some of them were very, very easy to find, while they all were very easy to find, I think, in general, when it came to the time that I spent with the poachers and the broader communities within the town as well and I've said this before and I hope it doesn't sound too glib, but I think I was the only person that had approached them to ask about it and some of these stories were quite well-known. I mean, they were in magazines and they were written about. But I just went up to them and asked you know, I've lived in rural towns. I grew up in a very rural area. I lived in a rural area until a month ago, you know, and I've recently kind of moved, but anyway.

So I knew that showing up was very important. I asked around, you know. So I said I'm looking for X person, you know, do you think they'd be OK if I went to their house? Yeah, sure, you know, just go knock on their door. I didn't presume to be invited in anywhere. I just kind of stood on porch and introduced myself, said what I was writing about, and I had very few people say no. Even when they did say no, they were really kind about it.

There wasn't much anger on that front, and so I really think it did come from the fact that perhaps they had been in a broader way, stereotyped as like they won't speak, that they're not going to want to talk to me, uh, or they might have. You know, it might feel a bit scary to go to somebody's property and knock on the door, but I just went and did it because I felt like well, I felt like, you know I certainly I wasn't going to not do it and I also knew that there were some.

I think maybe you have some experience in this, but you know rural areas people don't like always have the same phone number. They don't always, you know. So I knew that showing up and doing it myself was really important because there's probably no way anyone was going to answer my phone call from an unidentified number, if that was even still their phone number, you know especially an out of zip code number.

There are just so many reasons why a phone and whatever wasn't going to work. So yeah, and I felt like if I showed face, that they, that they could see my you know, see myself, and get a little bit of the approach that I bring to things which is just talking to people, that I bring to things which is just talking to people. I do approach things with more of a historian's mindset as opposed to a journalistic kind of here's my recorder in your face, sort of thing, and I think that was helpful. So all of our interviews started off with you know hours talking about the town and like family history before we got into sort of the criminal element.

Andy:

Yes, that's interesting.

Lyndsie:

Because that was actually my interest, right? I mean, like I have this hook of poaching and why it happens and blah, blah, blah. But really very quickly it became this kind of socio-historical thing.

Andy:

Yeah, the book ended up really being this narrative about like what, how do we deal with these, these communities? And I'm saying that kind of haphazardly. But you know, how do we collectively address the fact that we've created communities when we needed materials, resources, this colonial project to expand, and then just not recognize the needs and the autonomy and the care that communities deserve. And the issue of poaching is really just a byproduct of that.

Lyndsie:

Absolutely yeah. And an abilified one I think you're right in saying in a way I mean, I don't want to imply that I think like going out and just taking down a redwood or taking down smaller cedars or you know, out here it's black walnut I don't think that's okay. Well, anyway, I just can really understand the precedent for it and the need to do it.

Andy:

So yeah, well, what's the quote? Ask for work. If they don't give you work, Take.

Lyndsie:

That word take is fascinating to me because I, you know, I would say to folks say I was going to a poacher's house, not Danny Garcia, but you know his uncle. I went to his house and I said I'm writing this story about you know tree poaching and you know what, can you tell me? And he said we don't poach trees, we take trees. And this is that word, is a line through history, I mean you'll, you'll read it in early, early documents about, um, like poaching from the king's forest, we took deer, we, you know, and um, I just think it's fascinating, even just that linguistic desire.

Andy:

Yeah, it speaks to like an empowerment, you know, decision making, and I do think it is very much, broadly speaking, kind of like a poorer class ethos and that's something that I take to heart in a lot of ways, because it's part of my childhood of like, what if you can't get it and there are no resources for you? There's no ethical issue with doing what you need so that you can survive, and that ability to survive for another day superimposes itself over any other ethical requirements other than as long as you're not physically harming anyone or so on.

Lyndsie:

You know right those caveats, but for the most part but I, and don't you think it's an interesting question, then? And and this is some pushback I've received as well is, but are you not harming the tree? Are you not harming the forest? Are you, you know? Particularly with these folks that were were taking cedars from parks and and things like that that are supposed to be protected areas? And there are there are some real thorny questions around how we value um human life and the natural world, and obviously we know that it is all very interlinked, but I think a fair number of folks that I spoke with in in the Pacific Northwest would tell you that they felt that trees were valued over their own lives.

Andy:

Yeah.

Lyndsie:

That's hard to justify.

Andy:

From an abstract perspective, you could see the kind of straw man argument for that case of like, well, if there are no trees, then none of us live and you're not more valuable than you know, all of us collectively. And of course, that's kind of like false and misleading and I think their concerns are very valid, like if our trees worth more than us. But again, you know, I want to use another quip. You know, if you're a hammer, you know everything looks like a nail and I think, for communities that are so specialized in certain skills, of course they're going to when, when they take, it's going to be a very specific way and like, without the infrastructure to be able to retool, to be more diverse in their skill set, to maybe better utilize the trees.

Because you do talk a bit about sometimes, because they're going in, sometimes at night, they're hastily taking down these trees and getting them out as soon as possible. There is a lot of waste because of the way they're doing it and you know the collateral damage is significant because, again, the way they're doing it. You talk about, like, some of the burrows that they take out and like that they're not always the most ethical ways to do it. Again, it's because of that context. It's not because they don't care or they can't do those things, but because of this greater, you know, infrastructure that kind of limits their capacity.

Lyndsie:

There is like also this real undercurrent of between poachers, of like that guy cuts a burl in a really nasty way and like I do really clean cuts that you know aren't going to hurt the rest of the tree, and blah, blah, blah. So I mean this is something that people are thinking about. You know, it's not just I don't give a crap about a tree and I'm going to take it down. You know they're able to assess the values of certain woods and the grains in certain woods, because that's really where the, the financial value, is coming from. So, yeah, it's, it's I don't know, it's so complicated, I guess in that way, but it's also really, I mean, fascinating, right. I mean it might be that there's like tons of duff left behind. So you know, branches and thaw, dust and big piles and areas where they've dragged out a log is being completely trampled down and it does look messy and it does look like a crime. It also grows over so quick.

Actually there's a recent case in the UK where, two people have been charged now and I, you know, I don't know if they've been found guilty or what, but of taking down this huge tree that was known as the Robin Hood tree because it was in Robin Hood, prince of Thieves, this famous movie. And yeah, it was cut down in the middle of the night and the site was left a little bit of a mess and it was an iconic, you know, cultural thing. People are incredibly enraged as they, you know cultural thing. People are incredibly enraged as they, you know, as they have a right to be. And already there are new trees growing from that site, which is also puts, you know, the words of poachers into reality, which is a lot of them were saying to me that tree's not dead, that you know there's new growth coming. It looks bad it's going to move. New, there's new growth coming. They’re both correct.

Andy:

Were there any stories that maybe were a little bit too hairy to put into the book, or not?

Lyndsie:

I tried very hard to keep it to cases that were closed. I would say that, without naming them, you know I did speak to poachers that did not appear in the book and there were cases that were shared with me, you know, of trees being down that I know that have not been reported, that no one has been charged with that theft, because it's incredibly hard actually to to to charge somebody with stealing a tree because you need to match the wood in their possession to to the stump. So there were poachers that had, you know, had detailed to me trees that they had stolen in places that I know that there were no cases and those did not make it in.

And I felt that the cases that that did make it and that were sealed everyone was on a level playing field there as well. There were no surprises because everyone had had seen the documents that were used to create those cases. So, yeah, it's interesting, but I suppose there is an argument that I could have put more in, but anyway, it's kind of like the greater good of the story versus how jam-packed with detail you want to get.

Andy:

Yeah, yeah for sure. Did you come away with any surprising thoughts about what we should be doing differently, what a solution actually looks like, if we'll ever see a solution in our lifetime?

Lyndsie:

I think that there were something that really surprised me was the articulation within the community and amongst poachers that the law enforcement wing of the National Park Service and the Forest Service that often that those employees were not local, they had not grown up in the community, nobody knew them, and that community folks had really found that to be very frustrating, that they felt that it impeded communication and understanding.

And so there was a real, there was just a really strong point of view of like I don't know these people, they don't know me, they don't know my context, they don't know why I might be driving somewhere. You know their responsibility is to perhaps the federal government and not to the town outside the boundaries of the park. And that was a really I think I had perhaps known that a little bit, but to hear people voice it so consistently across contexts, you know these are people, not just poachers, people that run town businesses, people that run nonprofits in the region.

You know, and they're all saying we have an issue with turnover in these agencies and at these parks and what that means for community stability. So I think that was a really important thing for me to hear in particular, just how important it was to the people that live there that that maybe they work within the system like what you know, why are we not being hired, basically? So I thought that was that was important.

A big surprise for me, like just in my own perspective, is I came away with a much more nuanced understanding of the drug crisis in the Pacific Northwest and actually, I think, everywhere. I think methamphetamine use, for instance, is across all sorts of communities and a lot of people had said to me when I first started you know, people steal trees because they're meth heads. You know like that, you know often very blunt, like they'll just be like, well, it's about drugs. That is true, that's not a lie.

A lot of them are users, for various reasons, and I came away with a different perspective on why that is, and a lot of it is historical. You know, I guess I did not know a ton about the history of how meth was introduced to a lot of communities, and so that was really good for me to learn. The poachers who I interviewed were so generous and open with me about something that I think is otherwise quite what they might see as being shameful, and it changed the way that I view drug use in those communities and just how kind of messed up it is, how it arrives in the community and how it stays. You know, 20 years, 30 years later.

Andy:

Yeah.

Lyndsie:

Yeah, and how hard it is to. I mean I don't have any solutions for that. I mean it's just, it's something that has taken over rural communities in particular across Canada and the United States. I think and is really quite a shameful thing that we've allowed to take place.

Andy:

Yeah, I don't know if you want to go in a little bit more detail about that.

Lyndsie:

Yeah, I mean, I think the stories would be similar to familiar sorry to anyone who listens to this podcast about how people sort of get into that. I mean one poacher in particular. This was very much a sort of part of his family life. So, you know, many people have heard sort of about the, the sort of trickle down trauma of drugs and drug use. Two of the three poachers that I profile and that I spent much time with for this book, you know are, were, or are still regular users of meth. One of them preferred it over his ADHD medication, which is, I think, could be familiar to many, many people to hear something like that, and it had.

I don't think that the meth spurred the poaching. I don't think that he poached trees only to get money for for drugs, but I do think it assisted it. And I also think that there's this like very interesting deep history of using amphetamines in the workplace, in industrial workplaces, that at one point was considered a great thing because of the productivity that it enabled and intensified, and became sort of a backyard poor person, you know in quotes drug and became associated with really kind of disgusting stereotypes of the working class. It changed sort of how how people react to hearing that someone is using a drug like that. But it was a part of his was and is a part of his life, you know, and his father's life.

I think I just now come to it with a bit more sympathy and a bit less of a immediate sort of you should, you should stop. You know, I think that's a very simplistic point of view that I had at one point in time and now I think, oh, you know, we've really created a system where it's it would be unfair of me to tell you not to use at this point.

Andy:

So you wrote this book a year ago. I'm assuming you're working on something now. I don't know if you can talk about that at all.

Lyndsie:

Yeah, and it springs or is intertwined with Tree Thieves in a little bit of a way. So at the end of Tree Thieves, I talk a little bit about community forest management, and they sort of I wouldn't even call them alternative now, because there are setup systems for this, but you know the the opportunities for communities to manage tracts of land that at one point would have either been privately owned or owned by a federal agency, and the ability to manage that land with different outcomes in mind that are often less strict.

Part of this that I find quite interesting is that in Scotland there is a 20-year-old law called the Land Reform Act which, if you read the early parts of Tree Thieves, kind of brings together the early parts and the end of the book where I talk about the enclosures, movement, and clearances of land of, you know, moving working class people into cities so that land can be managed for the wealthy and by the few, and so this act empowers rural communities to buy back land from both government agencies and private landowners, which much of the country is owned by very few, very rich people.

They manage that land for the community good, and so there are no sort of private landowners, it often facilitates interesting traditional crafting and farming practices and allows for this sort of deeper cultural connection to the land because it recognizes that some communities were their identity and their culture has been damaged by the sort of land ownership concentration. So, anyway, it's kind of about this Land Reform Act. There are some entire islands, for instance, that have bought themselves back from families that have owned them since the 1700s, or you know, mountains being bought by a community or entire forests, and I think it's quite a radical and sort of inspiring way to look forward to different methods of managing land.

And it includes youth, which I'm really interested in. It's not just to put things away for pretty views. You've got communities that are raising animals and hunting and fishing in rivers that they were not allowed to for the past 300 years and stuff like that. And in fact there's a quote from one fellow when his community sort of successfully took back their island and he had previously been charged with poaching deer and his his sort of first quote at this meeting was well, there are deer again, there are deer now, and that's just amazing to me. So I'm writing about community land in that way. So, if any, listeners are interested in that, you know reach out if they know stories and things like that, please do.

It's a very early stage of exploration right now, so doing lots of interviews and kind of following, following rabbit holes and all that fun stuff, so the fun part the fun part, where the options are limitless and it's easy to find stuff.

Andy:

If people want to follow along, see what's going on with your book when it comes out, where can they find you?

Lyndsie:

I'm on, you know, instagram. It’s my full name is my handle. I still use twitter marginally, uh, and so my handle for that is @LBourgon, but I don't like to encourage people to go on there too much anymore. Um, and yeah, so probably instagram is the best place, and I have a website as well.

Andy:

Awesome and I'll say it in the intro, but I haven't said, we haven't actually said the book's name this entire time. But it's called Tree Thieves and you can get it anywhere. It's a great book. I really enjoyed reading it. Lindsay, thank you for writing a really interesting book and for coming on to talk about it.

Lyndsie:

Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

To hear this interview, tune into episode #224 of the Poor Proles Almanac.