BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 146: Lyndsie Bourgon, Author of Tree Thieves

Lyndsie Bourgon is a writer, oral historian, National Geographic Fellow and author of Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America’s Woods. Join Hal and Lyndsie as they explore the many paths that led to her book on the booming trade in stolen timber and other forest products from America’s public and private lands. You will never look at a beautiful violin or guitar quite the same (“music wood’ is among the most poached and the most valuable), and you will be left pondering a very unsettling question: What is outlawry, really? From Robin Hood and Little John poaching the king’s deer in Sherwood Forest to a lone man illegally cutting shakes in shadowy Northern California redwood groves, through roadside burl merchants in dying towns surrounded by mountains laid bare by clearcutting for an insatiable global market, how exactly does one define a natural resources crime? Tree Thieves is not a simple true crime book with simple villains. It’s an exploration of humankind’s relationship to the natural world that sustains us.