Fun fact, hammering metal spikes into tree trunks is a federal crime in the US because environmental activists used to do it in the 80s to fuck up chainsaws and logging equipment.
So you should never use this effective strategy for disrupting logging operations because it is illegal.
Here’s a link describing exactly how to do it, so you can make sure not to by accident.
Okay, but a laborer working a shit job for a shit logging company doesn’t deserve a chainsaw chain snapping in their face. Like most agriculture jobs in the US, logging labor is dominated by undocumented immigrants, paid far too little cash under the table, and who most certainly don’t have benefits like medical or workplace injury coverage for when a 2000 rpm chainsaw blade snaps and whips them in the face.
How about we instead find another way to disrupt logging operations that don’t put incredibly vulnerable laborers at risk? By all means, tear down the system, but don’t hurt the very people you’re supposed to be helping.
^^^ this and driving spikes through trees can severely harm the tree and even kill it. Copper spikes will kill trees, and putting holes in trees can open them up to fungi and other things that feed on the cambium and destroy the tree.
Logging is literally the #1 most dangerous industry in North America, with the highest rate of professional fatalities per year. Laborers themselves are already calculated as rather expendable and replacing parts is… not difficult.
Trees can easily heal from branches being pruned, but breaking the bark on the trunk, even just to carve your initials, can seriously injure a tree even without leaving potentially toxic metal in the wood.
Just to make the bit about chainsaws clear:
A chainsaw is basically a chain wrapped around a rotor, spinning at high speed. That means there’s a lot of energy built up in the chain and that chain is designed specifically to chew through wood fiber.
Logging chainsaws do not cut through anything over a certain hardness, so when that chain hits the spike it hits something way harder than it can handle, all of that stored energy is being pumped into the contact point of the chain, and one of two things happens:
The chainsaw rebounds in your hands, heading for your face or torso.
The chainsaw blade breaks and whips loose, heading god only knows where.
By the way, chainsaws tend to react the same way to human bone, which is why you can’t really saw through a human being with one. It’s a pretty common trope from horror films that’s total bullshit, I’m sad to say. Belly and face lacerations can work though, aspiring true crime writers!
Back to the point, I don’t know if anyone has been killed from this, but this is literally one of the ways that chainsaw accidents grievously injure people. This kind of stuff can easily give you serious and potentially life-threatening lacerations, and spiking a tree is like forcing one of these events to happen.
Spiking trees is illegal because it’s essentially negligent assault, just delayed, and it shouldn’t be in anyone’s resistance handbook if you actually give a shit about the people or the trees.
More fun facts for those of you who haven’t spent time in the Pacific Northwest: Spiking trees is not done to cause harm to loggers. Instead, activists who spike trees make it widely known that they’ve spiked some number of trees in a given stand of trees scheduled for logging.
Logging companies don’t want to process those trees not because they want to save the lives of individual workers (besides, a lot of commercial logging these days is done by big equipment, not by flannel-clad men with chainsaws walking right up to a tree). Instead, they don’t want a spiked tree running through their mills. Once those big saws in the mills hit a spike in a tree, it’s like a bomb goes off. Not safe, sure, but also very costly to the mill.
As the thinking goes, it would take up too many man-hours to inspect every harvested tree for spikes, so logging companies avoid that stand. Activists win. Except it’s not that difficult for mill owners to inspect felled trees with metal detectors and avoid potential catastrophe. It’s just an added expense, which milling companies pass on to consumers and use as an excuse for laying off mill workers.
