Sitting in trees: an oddly effective method of protest.

 In December, 1997, Julia Butterfly Hill climbed atop the 1,500-year-old redwood tree named Luna, and stayed there for 738 days, only coming down in December 1999 when a deal was struck with the Pacific Lumber Company that not only protected Luna, but also all the trees in a 200 foot radius. When I first read that, I thought “wow, that's impressive. It sparked so much news coverage, and support, that the real environmental impact must have been in the publicity. Surely sitting in a tree for 2 years is not the most effective means of stopping deforestation.”

Then I did the math. 

The population of the earth is around 8 billion. 64.8% of that is within the working age ( ages 15 to 64), giving us a total of 5.18 billion. Arbitrarily subtract an additional 15% for people who for reasons unrelated to age can not sit in a tree  as for some reason, “how many people are medically unable to sit in a tree” is not something people want to spend money on researching. That gives us 4.41 billion people for the purposes of tree sitting. Calculating if the increasing number of people creates new tree sitters faster than aging demographics can reduce them is outside the scope of a blog post, and as such I will be treating these numbers as static for the rest of these calculations. Realistically, the arbitrary 15% reduction will cover any discrepancies with changing demographics, as the 15% number was purposefully chosen as higher than my best estimates to catch this and any other statistics I will need to ignore in order to make this reasonably sized.

Assuming Luna itself is a dot of negligible size or that the 200 ft buffer was calculated from the tree's center and not its outer bark, a 200 foot radius buffer zone is 125,663.7 square feet, or  1.17 hectares. 448 million hectares of forests are lost, but most of that is not permanent forest loss. 155 million is from forestry, which replants the trees it cuts down so it doesn’t run out of wood. We can debate if this should be saved, but personally I no longer consider these areas real forests. These are farms, and if we want to make them real forests again they would not be significantly better off than regular farm land. 113 million hectares are lost to shifting agriculture, a process that does not exist in large quantities in the northern hemisphere, but is very popular in tropical climates, even making up 95% of Africa's tree cover loss. Shifting agriculture is when a farmer cuts down a section of forests, farms it for a time, and then the land is left to become forest again for a time before the cycle begins anew. This lets the land regain nutrients for farming without needing to use excessive fertilizer. While this is land intensive, this is sustainable and has many environmental benefits, and as such is probably not worth sitting in a tree to stop. Another 113 million hectares are lost to wildfires, which are not only natural and often beneficial, but also something that no amount of tree sitting will ever stop, because fire does not know how protesting works. After all that, we are left with 105 million hectares of permanent forest loss, with most of it being for agricultural purposes in tropical countries. 

The one problem with these calculations is we don’t know for how long Julia Butterfly Hill’s actions are actually going to protect Luna. It has been 25 years, but if the area will only avoid the axe for another 10 years or 10,000 we don’t know. Due to the fact that if this was widespread lumberjacks would stop caring nearly as much, I will assume that the moment a person leaves the tree, the tree will be cut down. Multiply every number below by 12.5 (25 years Luna has stood after the protest/ the 2 years the protest happened in) if you disagree with this assumption. 

With 105 million hectares to save and each tree sitter saving 1.17 hectares, that means that we will need 89.74 million tree sitters at any one time to prevent all permanent deforestation. Divided amongst 4.41 billion tree sitters, that gives us an almost even 50 tree sitters per tree that needs to be sat in. This means that in order to save every single bit of deforestation, each person will only need to spend a little over 1 week and 6 hours every year in a tree, a surprisingly reasonable amount of time. I’m an eagle scout, I could easily spend a week in a tree. The hardest part is setting up a tent and stuff, but the great thing is that if I can get that set up, the next person can just use mine. Have some of the other 49 non active tree sitters supply food, batteries, and other supplies, and this process that I originally calculated to prove how the physical act of sitting in a tree was not the most effective method, turned out to be oddly effective. I am struggling to find any more effective method of preventing deforestation that a normal person can carry out. 

Am I saying that we should conscript every able bodied person on earth to sit in a tree for a week? No. beyond the obvious logistical problems of doing that, there are too many people who want to cut these trees down, or simply don’t care for this to be usable on a wide scale, and if we did convince these people then our problem is already solved without any tree sitting. What I am saying is that this is an underexplored method of small scale activism. You only need 300 people at a time to save an area the size of central park, or only about 1000 to save an area the size of Manhattan. And unlike my calculations, protests like these could likely save the area for a period of time, instead of needing to be done continually. Tree sitting could just be a very useful tool for forestry conservation, one that we need to look a lot more into.