Trees Are Our Friends: A Zine on Building Tree Houses

sent to Earth First! Newswire

[Editors note: This zine looks rad, but none of us at the Newswire are familiar enough with treehouses to have properly proofread it.]

We’ve cut and pasted the intro below; to download the full zine, click on the following link: 8171a7cd-ea9b-47d4-b46a-047a37405125

hey,

This zine was written in winter 2021/22 as an attempt to gather and share knowledge of our movement about living and building up in trees. We’re neither studied engineers nor arborists. We gained our knowledge by living in occupations, trying out things and making mistakes. If you think some information in this zine is wrong it is very possible so don’t trust this zine more than needed. We are all still learning and making mistakes.

We don’t explain here how to climb, make knots or other basic things you should know before building a tree house. It would be shit to learn climbing from a book anyway. If you don’t know about these skills yet visit an existing occupation or get in touch with an action climbing group nearby. The purpose of this text is not to explain everything from the very basics but to help people who already have some idea about tree climbing to build nice and safe treehouses. We have experiences with treehouses staying just for a few months or years. After that either the cops came with their machines and destroyed everything or the struggle is won and the houses get deconstructed (usually the first option). If you wanna build a treehouse elsewhere than in an occupation and it is meant to stay for a long time you might need to do some things differently than how we describe them here. We gathered our experiences mostly in occupations in Germany and nearby countries. At the
time of writing this zine there are about 10 forest occupations existing only around there and more in other countries. Therefore the idea came to write down experiences about building in trees so that more people in our movement can build up in trees by themselves without being dependent on a few experienced people from previous  occupations.

After a struggle around Hambach forest and Dannenrod forest occupations and their big evictions we can watch now a movement of forest and land occupations coming up in our region. But if we really want to be a movement which can protect forests and confront state and capital we need to work on it. We have many occupations and now it is the time to work on communication structures, safe bases, development of new tactics, strategical thinking and ability to get new people involved and share skills. This zine is an attempt to take part in this process. Please share this zine as much as you like.

 

Posted in Analysis, Anarchist Movement, Direct Action, Treesits.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.