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January 20, 2008, NYTimes

Timber Thieves Strike at the Heart of Lands Held Dear

By SUSAN
[url]http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/susan_saulny/i
ndex.html?inline=nyt-per[/url]

ROYALTON, Vt. - The trees around George and Agnes Spaulding's 170-year-old
farmhouse here are as good as money in the bank, many being old-growth
maples that are valuable not only for the quality of their wood but also for
the sweet sap that the couple boils into syrup each spring.

Having been born on the farm, Mr. Spaulding, 78, loves the trees the way
only someone who grew up with them could. But beyond that, he counts on the
syrup sales to supplement the family income, which comes mainly from the
twice-a-day milking of three dozen cows.

So when a neighboring farmer crossed onto the Spauldings' land and chopped
down 30 or so of their best trees, the couple was devastated.

"There were a lot of nights spent worrying, and when I'd get up, I'd just
see bare stumps," said Mr. Spaulding, who was awarded about $30,000 for the
tree loss in a civil lawsuit against his neighbor last month. "The wood was
sold for lumber. And he didn't leave much very good."

Across the country, trees are disappearing in cases that are often small in
scale but largely unsettling, probably prompted by the rise in timber value
and the increase in worldwide demand for American hardwood - particularly
from builders in Europe and China. The total value of the American log
export market has more than doubled since 2000, industry experts said, and
it continues to grow.

In the United States, forests are not being illegally logged on a systemic
scale, as is the case in countries like Indonesia, Malawi and Brazil, where
unauthorized harvesting has led to serious deforestation and attendant
environmental problems. Here, the issue is often scattered and intimate, and
often affects homeowners, parks and public forests.

In Flint, Mich., for instance, thieves last month stole black walnut trees
from the grassy landscaped edge of a main city street. Earlier last year,
people were snatching saplings from a city park there as soon as they were
planted.

"It's a different scale and victim," said Paul Harwood, who owns a forest
management and wildlife consulting business in central Vermont, contrasting
the domestic problem to the larger international issue. "But it's still a
loss that goes well beyond the value of the trees."

In Arkansas, predators want pine; tree rustlers hit a small section of a
state forest sometime in the last few weeks, an investigator said, leaving
only stumps. In Kentucky, thieves hunt with muffled chain saws for oak,
chestnut and cherry trees. And as the Spauldings learned, maple trees are
tall targets of the Northeast.

"It's getting so much worse that I'd say in every county in Kentucky we have
timber theft issues," said Dea Riley, executive director of the Appalachian
Roundtable, which provides resources and legal help to victims of tree
rustlers. "So many more people are showing up to say, 'Hey, my timber got
stolen.' The phone just hasn't stopped ringing. We have a waiting list of
victims that we won't get to in a year."

Ms. Riley continued, "Most of these people don't have the money to fight for
themselves when they are victimized. And many of these cases are huge losses
to the landowner."

Data on timber theft is hard to come by because, experts say, much of it
goes unreported, and many states lump it with other crimes under general
property theft handled at the local level. Advocates in some states, like
Ms. Riley and others in Kentucky, are trying to stiffen penalities.

"Our cause is really a socioeconomic one," Ms. Riley said. "People are being
abused."

Alberto Goetzl, a forest economist who is studying the extent of domestic
illegal logging for a coming report, said that without data, it was hard to
prove that tree thieves were more active now than in the past. He said the
issue was probably cyclical, depending on pricing, and more of a local
nuisance than anything.

"Some people say it's worse out in the Pacific Northwest, others say
Appalachia," Mr. Goetzl said. "We have not been able to determine whether
it's any worse in one place or another. What we have learned is that the
concern about timber theft is greater than I thought before I went into
this."

The price paid to loggers for timber varies from mill to mill, region to
region, and is largely dependent on the quality and size of individual
trees, and the global and domestic markets. Demand for softwoods of the
Pacific Northwest like the Douglas fir, largely used in construction to
frame houses, is in a slump right now because of the downturn in domestic
housing starts. But the hardwoods - used for things like high-end finishes
and furniture - are more coveted now than in recent years, particularly
abroad. One top-quality black walnut tree in the Midwest, for instance,
could be worth over $5,000.

Black walnut trees so often disappear from their owners that Keith Argow,
the president of the National Woodland Owners Association, said, "Walnut has
feet," because the trees seem to "just walk away."

Mr. Argow continued, "We have found more and more landowners are patrolling
their properties more carefully as a trend nationwide."

Timber thieves tend to pick the easiest trees to steal, and they most often
belong to vulnerable owners, like older people or the poor - or people who
are on vacation or away from their land. Mr. Spaulding had been in the
hospital for heart surgery when his trees were chopped.

"A lot of people grow timber for a specific purpose; it's retirement, or a
college education," said Dennis Mason, an investigator for the Arkansas
Forestry Commission. "Thirty or 40 good trees can be worth many thousands of
dollars. But it's so easy to steal, and most people get away with it. I'd
venture to say we only get 20 percent, at the most."

Still, since 2002, investigators in Arkansas have recovered more than $1.4
million for landowners in about 340 timber theft cases, Mr. Mason said.

In Conneaut, Ohio, in the far northeastern corner of the state, Frederick T.
Bennett, 60, is missing several black walnut and butternut trees that, he
said, were about as old as he is and were planted by his father.

Mr. Bennett recalled watering them as a child, using three-gallon pails
because he was too small to lift five-gallon containers. Before his father
died, Mr. Bennett said, he made him promise not to cut those trees down.

But last June, someone else did, bulldozing the trees and claiming they were
outside of Mr. Bennett's property.

"I was sickened," Mr. Bennett said, choking up at the thought of his father
seeing the stumps.

The authorities would not prosecute because they could not prove intent to
steal the trees, he said, and now the case is in civil court. The timber was
valued at $10,000, Mr. Bennett said, but the trees were irreplaceable to his
family.

"There have been four generations of Bennetts that picnicked under those
trees and partied," he said, "and now they're gone."

prettydancer · Joined: 17 Oct 2007 Posts: 29 Location: new york

Ten thousand dollars and they kill ancient trees. For $500,000 they would probably kill their kids.