Lyndsie Bourgon

a good overview of the complexity of conservation issues related to people and trees. I am familiar with snow leopard projects where native herders can get insurance if leopards take any of their livestock and where the conservancy buys wool products to help boost the economy. This book deals with people who live near the national parks, many of whom were loggers or from logging families. They lost their livelihoods and even the benefit of collecting firewood as the park's borders expanded and logging was curtailed.
I do believe the author could have been a little fairer to the conservation movement. she sympathized with the poachers, many caught in cycle of poverty and addiction, but gave the impression that conservations were either fascists or hippies and incapable of considering humans as just one more animal whose needs have to be considered in the equation… (plus d'informations)

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.

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.… (plus d'informations)

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 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.… (plus d'informations)