Tree sitting

Based on Wikipedia: Tree sitting

On December 10, 1997, a young woman named Julia Butterfly Hill climbed 180 feet up into the branches of a 600-year-old Coast Redwood in Humboldt County, California. She would not touch the ground again for 738 days.

Think about that for a moment. Two years and eight days. Living on a tiny platform in the canopy of an ancient tree, through winter storms and summer heat, through illness and loneliness, while logging companies and their lawyers tried every tactic imaginable to bring her down. She named the tree Luna, and by the time she descended on December 18, 1999, she had become one of the most famous environmental activists in American history.

But Julia Butterfly Hill was neither the first nor the last to turn arboreal occupation into political protest. Tree sitting—the practice of climbing into a tree and refusing to come down until your demands are met—has become one of the most dramatic and enduring tactics in the environmental movement's arsenal.

The Logic of Living in the Sky

The basic premise of tree sitting is elegant in its simplicity. Logging companies will not cut down a tree with a person in it. Full stop.

This isn't just corporate caution—it's a hard line that most jurisdictions refuse to cross. Deliberately felling an occupied tree would be attempted murder, and no timber company wants that liability. So when activists climb into condemned trees and refuse to leave, they create what game theorists might call a "credible commitment." Their own bodies become shields.

But tree sitting accomplishes more than just preventing individual trees from being cut. It works on multiple levels simultaneously.

First, there's the publicity. A person living in a tree is inherently newsworthy. Reporters show up. Cameras roll. Suddenly, a logging operation that might have proceeded in obscurity becomes a national story. The spectacle of police deploying specialized extraction teams—often involving helicopters, professional climbers, and elaborate safety equipment—only amplifies the drama.

Second, there's the legal dimension. Tree sits buy time. While activists occupy the canopy, lawyers work the courtrooms below, seeking injunctions, challenging permits, and finding procedural leverage to protect the forest. Many successful tree sits have been essentially holding actions, keeping chainsaws at bay until judicial victories could be secured.

Third, there's the raw economics. Removing a tree sitter is expensive. Companies must hire specialized extraction teams, coordinate with law enforcement, and halt operations for days or weeks. Every day a tree sit continues, the cost calculus shifts further in the protesters' favor.

From Children's Contest to Civil Disobedience

Here's a delightful historical footnote: tree sitting started as a children's game.

In the early 1930s, during the height of America's endurance contest craze—when people competed to see who could dance the longest, sit on flagpoles the longest, or eat the most in a single sitting—children got their own version. Kids would climb into their backyard trees and compete to see who could stay up the longest. Siblings brought food. Local businesses sponsored prizes. It was wholesome Depression-era entertainment.

The transformation from children's pastime to protest tactic happened gradually, but the modern era of political tree sitting is generally traced to New Zealand in 1978. In what appears to be the first documented case of tree sitting as environmental activism, protesters climbed into trees in the Pureora Forest following a 100-person anti-logging demonstration. Three days after the initial occupation, more sitters arrived. Logging was suspended for safety reasons. A week later, an indefinite hold was announced. Three years after that, the forest became Pureora Forest Park, permanently protected.

The strategy spread quickly. By the mid-1980s, tree sitting had become a recognized tactic across the English-speaking world, from the ancient forests of Tasmania to the old-growth stands of the Pacific Northwest.

Life in the Canopy

What is it actually like to live in a tree?

The physical setup varies, but most tree sits involve a small wooden platform—typically just large enough to lie down on—secured high in the canopy. Sitters use harnesses and ropes for safety. Food and supplies come up via buckets and pulleys, delivered by ground support teams who often camp nearby.

The experience is simultaneously transcendent and grueling. Tree sitters report profound connections with their host trees and the forest ecosystem around them. They watch storms roll in from impossible vantage points. They share their platforms with birds and insects. Some describe something approaching a spiritual awakening.

But they also endure crushing loneliness, physical discomfort, and genuine danger. Platforms sway in high winds. Rain soaks everything. The cold can be unbearable. And always, there's the psychological pressure of knowing that your presence is actively resented by people who want you gone and who have the legal authority to remove you.

Some sits last days. Some last weeks. A few have lasted years.

The Arms Race of Extraction

As tree sitting became more common and more effective, the forces arrayed against sitters became more sophisticated.

In the early days, extraction was relatively simple. Officials would wait. Or they would try to negotiate. Sometimes they would cut off supplies and hope the sitter would eventually give up from hunger or cold or simple exhaustion.

In Northern California's timber wars of the 1990s and 2000s, more aggressive tactics emerged. Pacific Lumber Company—which became something of a nemesis for the tree sitting movement—began hiring professional extraction teams. These weren't law enforcement officers but private climbers, arborists skilled in ascending trees using specialized equipment. By 2003, Pacific Lumber was deploying whole teams of these extractors, particularly in the Freshwater area east of Eureka.

The extractions were conducted by Eric Schatz of Schatz Tree Service, a professional arborist. The work requires genuine expertise—climbing 100 or more feet into a tree, approaching an unwilling occupant, and somehow getting them safely to the ground without anyone falling to their death. It's dangerous, technically demanding work.

The most dramatic escalation came in May 2021, when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police extracted tree sitters on Vancouver Island using helicopters. They flew dangerously low above the canopy, dropping officers on long lines or directly into the treetops. There was no communication with the sitters beforehand, no safety assessment of the platforms, no coordination that might have prevented disaster. It marked a significant departure from established extraction protocols, which had previously relied on more gradual approaches like shooting lines into trees or simply waiting sitters out.

A Global Movement Takes Root

The geography of tree sitting tells a story about where industrial civilization clashes most violently with remaining wild places.

Australia became a major theater for tree sitting battles. The continent's ancient eucalyptus forests—some trees reaching staggering heights—have been contested for decades. In 1983, activists climbed trees to block construction of the controversial Cape Tribulation to Bloomfield Road in Queensland, using hammocks that allowed them to remain aloft for up to a week at a time. The Tasmanian Wilderness Society pioneered the use of wooden platforms in the 1980s, creating more durable infrastructure for extended occupations.

In 2004, activists from Greenpeace and the Wilderness Society claimed the world record for highest tree sit: 65 meters (about 213 feet) up a giant eucalyptus nicknamed Gandalf's Staff in Tasmania's Styx Valley. Peter Firth spent 51 days at that altitude.

Perhaps the most remarkable Australian tree sit belonged to Miranda Gibson, who climbed a 60-meter eucalyptus in Tasmania's southern rainforest on December 14, 2011, and vowed to stay until the forest was protected. She lasted 15 months before being forced down—not by extraction teams but by a bushfire that threatened her tree. The forest she sought to protect was supposed to be covered by an intergovernmental agreement, but was scheduled for logging anyway.

Germany has produced some of the most sustained tree occupations in Europe. Starting in 2012, activists have occupied various sections of Hambach Forest to prevent its destruction for the Hambach surface mine, a massive lignite (brown coal) operation. The occupation has become a major focal point for German climate activism.

In October 2019, activists squatted the Dannenröder Forest to oppose logging for highway construction. What made this occupation distinctive was its scale and organization. Roughly 100 activists built more than 100 treehouses across multiple "barrios" (villages) throughout the forest. They organized democratically, without hierarchical leadership. Their goal was protecting a water protection area that supplies 500,000 people in Frankfurt. They held out for more than a year before being evicted in October 2020.

The United Kingdom developed its own tree sitting tradition during the anti-roads protests of the 1990s. The 1994-1995 campaign against the M65 motorway saw the construction of the UK's first "tree village," with more than 40 treehouses built in the upper canopy of Stanworth Valley. Some British tree houses have been occupied for a year or longer.

The Titnore Wood campaign in West Sussex demonstrated how tree sitting could achieve lasting victory through sheer persistence. Protesters began occupying trees in May 2006 to oppose an urban development. They built treehouses and a network of tunnels. They held on for nearly four years. In March 2010, the local council unanimously rejected the development application. The trees—and the sitters—had won.

The American Timber Wars

Nowhere has tree sitting been more contentious than in the ancient forests of the American Pacific Northwest.

The modern American tree sitting movement traces to Mikal Jakubal, who on May 20, 1985, climbed a Douglas fir in the Middle Santiam region of Oregon's Willamette National Forest while clearcut logging proceeded around him. His sit was short-lived, but it inspired a group action by Earth First! activists that lasted nearly a month, ending only when sheriff's deputies wrestled protester Ron Huber from his tree after a daylong standoff.

The stakes could be mortal. In 1986, a tree sitter at Four Notch, Texas, suffered a leg injury when loggers simply cut down his tree with him in it. In 1988, a sitter in British Columbia's Sulphur Passage was shot with pellets by loggers who then cut down his tree; he narrowly avoided major injury. In 2002, two American environmental activists involved in tree sitting protests died in separate accidents.

By 1989, tree sitting had become coordinated enough that activists organized a National Tree Sit Week, with 12 simultaneous sits across 7 states.

The most famous American tree sit—Julia Butterfly Hill's nearly two-year occupation of Luna—ended in triumph. Hill and other activists raised $50,000 to spare her tree and establish a 200-foot buffer around it. Her book The Legacy of Luna and the documentary Butterfly brought the practice to mainstream attention.

But perhaps equally remarkable was Nate Madsen's sit in a thousand-year-old tree he named "Mariah." After two years in the canopy, Madsen descended in 2000 with agreements from both Pacific Lumber and the California Department of Forestry to protect his tree.

The Berkeley tree sit of 2006-2008 broke records for urban occupations. Protesters sat in coast live oak trees for more than 21 months to prevent construction of a new sports facility by the University of California. They lost—the university won in court and began logging the grove on September 5, 2008. Four days later, the final four sitters surrendered. But 21 months of occupation had made their point.

Beyond the Forests: Mountaintop Removal

Tree sitting has found applications beyond forest protection.

In Appalachia, activists have used the tactic to oppose mountaintop removal coal mining—the practice of blasting apart mountain peaks to access coal seams beneath. These sits are particularly dangerous because they occur within active blasting zones.

On August 25, 2009, Laura Steepleton and Nick Stocks of Climate Ground Zero climbed 80 feet into two trees within 30 feet of Massey Energy's Edwight mine, inside the 300-foot blasting zone. Their presence halted blasting for six days. They faced harassment from miners including threats of rape. Trees were felled dangerously close to them. Chainsaws partially cut the trees they occupied. They held on.

In 2011, Catherine-Ann MacDougal and Becks Kolins climbed trees on Alpha Natural Resources' Bee Tree mine on Coal River Mountain. Kolins stayed on their platform for 14 days. MacDougal remained for 30 days, making it the longest tree sit east of the Mississippi River.

Perhaps the most sustained American tree sit of recent years was the Yellow Finch blockade, erected in September 2018 to oppose the Mountain Valley Pipeline in Appalachia. The sitters held out for 932 days—more than two and a half years—until March 2021, making it one of the longest-running aerial blockades in American history.

The Violence of Extraction

Tree sitting exists in a legal and ethical gray zone. The sitters are trespassing—usually on private or publicly leased land. But they're doing so nonviolently, and their removal poses genuine risks to everyone involved.

Most extractions have been handled with professional caution. But not all.

In New Zealand in 1997, during Native Forest Action's campaign to save West Coast native forests, the logging company Timberlands West Coast Limited deliberately swung a tree from a helicopter into an occupied protest site without ensuring it was clear of people. The Civil Aviation Authority of New Zealand cleared the helicopter pilot of wrongdoing in what leaked internal documents suggested was a compromised investigation.

The January 2023 raid on the Stop Cop City encampment near Atlanta, Georgia, represented a darker chapter. Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, known as Tortuguita, was shot 13 times and killed by a Georgia State Patrol trooper. Tortuguita was a forest defender, part of a movement opposing construction of a police training facility in what activists called the Atlanta Forest. It was the first known killing of an environmental protester by American law enforcement in the modern era.

Why It Works

Tree sitting persists because it works—imperfectly, inconsistently, but often enough to matter.

The tactic succeeds by changing the cost-benefit analysis of destruction. Cutting down an ancient tree or bulldozing a forest is easy when no one is watching and no one is in the way. Add a human body to the equation—someone willing to risk arrest, injury, even death—and suddenly the calculation changes.

Tree sitters force confrontation. They make the abstract concrete. It's one thing to approve a timber harvest plan in a distant office. It's quite another to send armed officers into the canopy to physically remove people who are protecting something they love.

The tactic also generates what media scholars call "earned media"—news coverage you don't have to pay for. A person living in a tree is inherently interesting. The drama of extraction attempts is inherently compelling. For underfunded environmental groups competing against wealthy extractive industries, this free publicity is invaluable.

And sometimes, tree sitting simply runs out the clock. Logging permits expire. Political circumstances change. Courts rule in activists' favor. Every day a tree stands is a day it might be saved by forces beyond the forest.

The Trees Themselves

At the heart of tree sitting is a relationship—between human and tree—that defies easy categorization.

Tree sitters often name their trees. Luna. Mariah. Gandalf's Staff. This isn't mere sentimentality. After spending weeks or months or years in intimate contact with a single living thing, watching its branches move in the wind, feeling its bark against your skin, sharing its space with birds and insects and rain, something shifts.

Many tree sitters describe emerging from their experiences changed. Julia Butterfly Hill has spoken of her time in Luna as a kind of spiritual transformation. She went up as a young woman looking for purpose; she came down as someone who had found it.

The trees they protect are often genuinely ancient. Luna was 600 years old—already mature when Columbus sailed. Mariah was a thousand. Some of the cedars defended on Vancouver Island in 2021 had been growing for 1,200 years, since before the Norman Conquest of England.

To sit in such a tree is to occupy a kind of temporal bridge. The organism supporting you was old when your great-great-grandparents were born. If protected, it might still be standing when your descendants' descendants walk the Earth. Tree sitters stake their bodies on the proposition that such continuity matters—that some things are worth inconvenience, discomfort, and risk to preserve.

The Future of Tree Sitting

Tree sitting continues today, though the battlegrounds have shifted. The old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest are mostly gone, protected, or permanently contested. New conflicts have emerged around pipeline routes, mining operations, and urban development.

The tactics have evolved too. Modern tree sits often incorporate elaborate infrastructure—not just single platforms but interconnected tree villages with walkways, communal spaces, and sophisticated supply systems. The Dannenröder Forest occupation, with its hundred-plus treehouses organized into democratic barrios, represented a new model of extended occupation.

Extraction methods have become more aggressive. The helicopter removals on Vancouver Island in 2021 crossed lines that had previously been respected. The killing of Tortuguita in 2023 raised the stakes higher still.

Yet the basic logic remains unchanged. When someone climbs into a tree and refuses to come down, they create a problem that money and power cannot easily solve. They assert, with their bodies, that this tree matters. This forest matters. This place matters.

And sometimes—often enough to make the whole enterprise worthwhile—they win.