In my various travels, I’ve often noted that if a country has trees, children will climb them. (The only place this appears not to be the case is in cities like New York and London, where the law forbids it, as do neurotic parents. I recently overheard a mother in Rockefeller Park shout at her daughter, who was scaling a tiny Macedonian pine, “You get down out of that tree. You’re going to get all sticky, and I don’t want to hear none of it!”) Despite the inherent dangers, many children regard the branches of a tree as a haven rather than a terror, a realm apart from the terrestrial, adult world. The psychologist J.O. Quantz theorized in 1897 that over the course of “a few thousand generations,” during which humans climbed into trees to escape predators and find sustenance, we evolved to regard trees as “natural protectors.”
Increasingly, the roles are swapped: we are the protectors of the trees (as well as their greatest predators). So it is fitting that, when all other forms of protection fail, climbing a tree remains our last means of saving it from being cut down. The act of “tree-sitting”—camping out high in a treetop as a means of protest—began in New Zealand in 1978. To protect against the logging of the Pureora Forest, home to sacred totara trees and rare kōkako birds, protestors followed the example set by Edward Abbey (whose The Monkey Wrench Gang had appeared just three years earlier) and resorted to disruptive pranks and stunts, but in the gentlest ways they could devise. First they attempted to block the logging road by planting native tree seedlings across it. When that failed, an activist named Stephen King (no relation to the author), who was known as the “barefoot botanist,” free-climbed up into a totora tree and strung up a wooden pallet high in the branches. He and five allies, including his 12-year-old brother, lived in the treetops for about a week. Ingeniously, they revealed their location only to reporters, but remained hidden whenever loggers were nearby, so the loggers never knew which tree they were in, and therefore couldn’t cut down any trees without fear of killing them. A public outcry ensued, and the logging was called off.
