The Prisoner's Dilemma Under Giant Trees: When Poachers, Undocumented Workers, and Forest Rangers Are All Trapped in a Hopeless Infinite Game

I recently read The Reporter's investigative piece "Crimes Beneath the Ancient Trees" from their events desk. Like so much of what The Reporter publishes, it reads like a catalog of Taiwan's wounds.

The most demoralizing thing about this whole situation is that the government hasn't been idle. Laws have been passed to restrict the viewing and purchase of Taiwan's red cypress and flat cypress. Forest rangers have been deployed to patrol the mountains. But the reality is that Taiwan has been cultivating a timber-harvesting culture since the Japanese colonial era — originally as a means of putting food on the table, and for many Indigenous people it was both a traditional practice and a vital economic livelihood.

Government messaging against illegal logging might make a small dent. But the moment economic pressure builds, or the profits grow large enough, human nature completely loses its grip.

In the end, everyone is just trying to feed their family.

The book offers a deeply ironic example: many Indigenous people believe that a "burl" — the knotted, abnormal growth on a tree — is a sign of sickness. Cutting it off, in their view, actually helps the tree recover. And of course the market is full of collectors who go crazy for these strange, contorted shapes. The result: loggers pocket enormous sums while reassuring themselves with the thought that they're performing a kind of arboreal medicine — "I'm helping the tree heal!"

On the government's side, the ranger corps operates in a state of permanent understaffing. The salaries simply cannot compete with the open market; what keeps people in the job is sheer love of the mountains. But that love runs headfirst into reality whenever rangers actually encounter illegal loggers in the field.

The Reporter describes an unspoken rule that has emerged: both rangers and poachers generally try to avoid direct confrontation. Everyone is out here trying to feed a family. No one wants to turn a few planks of wood into a tragedy in the middle of nowhere.

And now there's another layer: undocumented migrant workers. Some migrants who come to Taiwan find that legal wages under local regulations are quite low. So some of them drift toward timber work, because the profits are so high — it becomes "spread the good news," one person pulling in another, forming a remarkably complete ecosystem deep in the mountains.

If you drew out a prisoner's dilemma matrix for this situation, you'd see that the Nash equilibrium almost inevitably points in one direction: poachers keep cutting aggressively, and rangers, to stay safe, can only search passively.

The underground economy: policy above, workarounds below

You might ask — isn't the government doing anything? Plenty of measures have been tried, but every one of them hits a dead end.

For instance, the government attempted to cut into the buyer's market by legalizing certain cypress sales. But according to The Reporter, many vendors simply use "legal to cover illegal." They acquire a legitimate timber sales certificate and then use that certificate to sell black-market wood underneath it. One interviewed businessman openly admitted that the process for obtaining legally-sourced government timber takes six months to a year — so why bother? Illegal channels are faster and cheaper.

The result: a thriving underground economy, where illegal timber even has established "market prices" in the black market.

What about ramping up enforcement, bringing in technology? The government has presumably been trying. But the book notes that illegal loggers evolve right along with it — they see solar-powered surveillance cameras and simply pull them out of the ground and toss them in a ravine. Meanwhile, Taiwan's forests have never competed well for attention against national defense, social welfare, or education. Without political priority, you can't get adequate funding — and what funding you have often gets squeezed away by competing policy priorities.

The dilemma of globalization and inequality

What struck me deepest was how this problem maps onto Taiwan's current macroeconomic tension.

Taiwan's stock market has been dazzling lately, but riding alongside the tech boom is a widening wealth gap. For the government, this is a giant tug-of-war. A wider wealth gap also means higher total tax revenue, so the treasury is actually better-funded than before. The main policy debate has centered on taxing the wealthy more heavily, redistributing to everyone, or providing subsidies to struggling industries.

But in a globalized world, finding a method that genuinely lifts incomes for all middle-to-low earners is not so simple. If such a method existed — one with no barriers to entry and a reliable upward effect — every other country would be fighting tooth and nail over it.

When the opportunity cost of survival at the bottom is compressed to nothing, and the profit from hauling a burl out of the mountains is astronomical — how do you possibly stop undocumented workers, and people who desperately need money, from climbing those hills?

The small, feeble thing we can still do

This is the most disheartening part of reading this investigation. It is not a story with heroes and villains. Every person in it made the choice most rational for themselves, within the limits of the system and their place in it — and together they are collectively destroying something irreplaceable.

If the structural problems can't be solved in the short term, what can we actually do?

I keep coming back to fur coats.

Wood is genuinely beautiful. But it is even more beautiful left standing in the mountains. For a long time, having a large wooden sculpture or carving in the home was considered a mark of status and refinement — but at its core, it carries the same cost as wearing a fur coat. It is bought with something's life.

We can still support legally-sourced domestic timber — buy a notebook, a small stationery item. But for those strange, contorted burl carvings, we should start with ourselves: lower the demand.

No demand. No market.

I know we can't ask all of humanity to follow suit. But this seems to be the smallest, most modest thing that ordinary people like us can actually do — right now.