Sticky Fingers

If you own a bike in a city, you know you’re tempting fate when you leave it unattended for a minute without locking it securely. So when you consider the value of all that wood standing unguarded in the wild, it’s no surprise that clandestine loggers are preying on it throughout the United States and Canada. What’s more, these North American tree thieves are a tiny group compared with those in the developing world, where the poverty of displaced populations makes taking unharvested timber an even greater temptation.

With Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America’s Woods, Lyndsie Bourgon, whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Smithsonian, and National Geographic, places lumber poaching into context, including the deindustrialization of the working class and long-standing urban-rural divides. She does much of that by focusing on the redwood forests of northern California and the small community of Orick.

Once home to...