The Opioid Crisis Is Killing Trees Too

Minutes after Luke Clarke turned his white patrol truck off the highway and onto the Forest Service road, we came upon a spot that, to most people, would be unremarkable: The blur of greens and browns along the roadside looked like any other patch of forest detritus on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island.

But Clarke looked closer.

Green fir boughs, bright under the morning sky, were strewn across the highway. Sawdust had been crushed into the ridges of a roadside snowbank, leaving an ocher stain. Clarke, a provincial natural-resources officer, stopped his truck, got out, and tromped up and over the snowbank into the forest, followed by his supervisor, Denise Blid.

Hidden behind a row of trees lay the scene Clarke and Blid had expected: a small clearing punctuated by a single large stump. The stump, nearly three feet across, had, until very recently, been the foundation of an old-growth coastal Douglas fir, a tree that Clarke calculated had stood more than 120 feet tall. Sometime during the previous few days, the tree had been illegally felled, and the wide end of its trunk abandoned. This was unusual—poachers usually take the “butt end” of a tree first, since it has the most wood—and Clarke speculated that the culprits would soon be back to pick it up. He photographed the trunk like a crime scene, measuring its dimensions and using an iPad to enter them into a database. He then followed a deep groove in the snow to the spot where the narrow end of the trunk had likely been cut into pieces for easier transport. The only remaining clue was a set of vertical cuts in the snow, left by the poachers’ chain saws.

“Literally, this is what we’re finding every day,” said Blid.

“I’m sure it’s the same people I caught the other night too,” said Clarke. Trees