Pete Gamlen Draws a Standoff from Above

You’re above everyone. Below, tactical officers mill about in helmets and camouflage vests. Gamlen positions us forty feet up in a tree and from there the entire operation shrinks to the scale of a board game.

Robert Moor’s feature, published in the March 9, 2026 print edition under The New Yorker’s “The Control of Nature” department, follows his time as a tree-sitter blocking the Trans Mountain Expansion pipeline in Burnaby, British Columbia. Over the summer and fall of 2021, he occupied a makeshift tree house on a rotating schedule with a small band of activists. The article is written entirely from above. Moor spent a month on that platform, watching officers and machinery move below him.

To capture this scenario, illustrator Pete Gamlen builds a composite narrative scene rather than freezing a single moment. Every significant detail from the 8,000-word article appears in the image. The tarp roof, the climbing harness, the N95 mask. And tucked into the upper right corner, almost easy to miss, a hummingbird, the tiny creature whose nesting season temporarily halted the entire pipeline. By placing the viewer at the tree-sitter’s elevation, Gamlen turns the image into a first-person experience. The officers become game pieces. The lone protester on his plywood platform commands the frame.

Gamlen works in clean, consistent-weight outlines with flat, unmodulated color. His figures are slightly compressed, giving the scene a toylike quality that creates tonal distance without undercutting the subject matter. The palette is tight the way a data visualization uses color to distinguish categories. The composition sits somewhere between Chris Ware’s diagrammatic precision and a Bruegel village panorama. Many small figures, each occupied with their own business within a shared landscape. The deadpan register mirrors something Moor describes explicitly in the text. The police neutralized the protest not through brutality but through patient, almost imperceptible suppression. Gamlen’s even-tempered line work captures that eerie calm.

Pete Gamlen is a British-born illustrator and designer based in Brooklyn. His editorial clients include The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, ProPublica, Vox, Texas Monthly, The Guardian, New York Magazine, Google and Warby Parker.