A gripping account of the billion-dollar timber black market—and how it intersects with environmentalism, class, and culture. In Tree Thieves, Lyndsie Bourgon takes us deep into the underbelly of the illegal timber market. As she traces three timber poaching cases, she introduces us to tree poachers, law enforcement, forensic wood specialists, the enigmatic residents of former logging communities, environmental activists, international timber cartels, and indigenous communities along the way. Old-growth trees are invaluable and irreplaceable for both humans and wildlife, and are the oldest living things on earth. But the morality of tree poaching is not as simple as we might think: stealing trees is a form of deeply rooted protest...
Publisher: 288 pages Pages: 0316497444 ISBN-10: 0316497444 ISBN-13: 978-0316497442 ASIN: B0998KYMFH
Click on the image to read the book
Lyndsie Bourgon is a writer, oral historian, and 2018 National Geographic Explorer. She writes about the environment and its entanglement with history, culture, and identity, with features in The Atlantic, Smithsonian, the Guardian, the Oxford American, Aeon, The Walrus, Hazlitt, and elsewhere. In 2018, she traveled to Peru with National Geographic to document indigenous experiences of timber theft.