Walking around this woodland on Sunday, Seeing the path of destruction left behind by the chainsaws of UK coal was depressing and frustrating.But We will not sit by and do nothing while these fuckers take the piss in this so called democracy, where as we know big business calls the shots. We hope to try and defend the site but we desperately need help. The West Midlands Climate camp and other interested people need to have a meeting soon and make plans. It's time to fight back.

Very upsetting stuff and it looks just like Newbury bypass mass vandalism all over again.

I strongly suggest you buy a load of long masonry pins from hardware stores (not local) and hammer them diagonally and deep into the trees at about the height above ground level where they seem to be cutting others to. Use lots per tree spread over quite a broad band so they stand every chance of sawing into at least one. Angling them at 45 degrees makes it much more likely for the saw to hit them. Also buy a good nail punch and use this to hammer the heads well below the surface into the wood itself so they can not be seen or pulled out so that they can not avoid them easily. Masonry pins unlike normal nails are made from very hard steel that will quickly blunt chainsaws hopefully causing contractors to abandon the felling as not worth the hassle.

Despite ill informed nonsense you may hear to the contrary, this is NOT dangerous to the chainsaw operators. Cutting into a hard object with a chainsaw quickly blunts the chain, it does not cause the dangerous kickback hazard that you hear bandied about a lot. Kickback is invariably caused by amateurish use of a chainsaw where the operator tries to cut timber using the "danger quadrant" of the cutter bar causing the saw to suddenly rear up backwards toward the operator.

Also note that this pinning will not signifcantly "hurt" the trees, nothing like cutting them down would! I notice from the pictures that all the felled trees are oak which is very immune to fungal attack that a nail through the bark could conceivably introduce into something less resistant like a beech or birch tree. To be economical with the pins that cost a lot more than normal nails, you need to concentrate the pinning only on the large trees. The small ones that you can easily get both arms around they will simply push over with a dozer. As well as this you need to be building tree houses. I can not attempt to describe how to do that here as that is a bit more complicated.

spiking them - seems a bit late, at least for the ones they've already felled. Maybe there's other big ones still, but maybe they've cut them all down to prevent a protest camp - not the first time that's been done!

Anyway, if you are spiking, pin notices on boundary or trees, and send the company a message that they've been spiked - that prevents cutting and prevents any accusations of endangering people (unless they just deny you warned them - keep proof if you like, though beware of security implications!)

good luck

If you're leaving warnings on trees, take the usual precautions of avoiding identifiable handwriting, fingerprints (especially on plastic waterproof envelopes), blood from small cuts etc. Any accident caused as a result of spiking (or pretended to be as a result of spiking), is likely to be pinned on the warner.
Significant and on-going damage to machinery is effective.

Here in 2010, when everyone is fully aware of climate change and all that it means and the government is actually encouraging corporations to fell trees and dig up fossil fuels from under them. Just what the fuck will future generations think of us? That we were all stark staring mad or just completely eaten away with greed. I feel so utterly ashamed to be living in a country where this happens.

Sawmill workers have been injured by tree spikes:
 http://www.iww.org/unions/dept100/iu120/local-1/EF/CPWatson1.shtml

A better strategy is to build a community campaign including public meetings and worker engagement as well as tree houses, tunnels and sabotage.
 http://coalactionscotland.noflag.org.uk/