This article is Part 4 in Linda Pannozzo’s series: Biomass, Freedom of Information and the Silence of the DNR Company Men. The proceeding articles are: Part 1: Reporter Linda Pannozzo discovers just how hard provincial bureaucrats worked to ignore her questions. Part 2: An Open Letter to the FOIPOP Review Officer Part 3: What Happened When This […]
Fishers being squeezed
“Changing the "owner-operator policy" could amount to a corporate raid on Nova Scotia’s inshore fishery”
Since 1979 there has been a policy in place on Canada’s east coast to protect inshore fishermen: the “fleet separation and owner-operator” policy essentially prevents the corporate sector from owning inshore licenses. Today, the corporate sector already owns three-quarters of the fishery (mainly in the mid-shore and off-shore) and inshore fishermen are worried about the […]
Muzzling the Forest Keepers
A Field Guide to Boreal Felt Lichen and DNR Message Control
Endangered boreal felt lichen. Photo courtesy Brad Toms. A redacted email exchange recently obtained through a Freedom of Information request revealed that on November 7, 2014, Allan Eddy, the associate deputy minister of the Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources, was not happy with something he had just seen. Eddy was attending the annual science conference […]
Glyphosate and the Politics of Safety
You could call it a convergence of interests. About a month ago a meeting was held in Truro, Nova Scotia to inform an already jittery public about forest company spraying of VisionMax, a glyphosate-based herbicide on its clearcuts. At the time the Department of Environment had issued 11 permits, including four to Northern Pulp, one to […]
Biomass, Freedom of Information and the Silence of the DNR Company Men
Part 3: What Happened When This Reporter Got Called Down to the Office
I’ll admit I was pretty intrigued this July when I was invited to a meeting at the Department of Natural Resources office in the heart of downtown Halifax. “I recognize that there have been challenges in providing you with the information you have requested, and that you have a number of questions for us that […]
Forest Tragedy
How the forest industry and compliant bureaucrats hijacked the public will
They were heady days. It was spring of 2008 and citizens started gathering in droves in community halls to talk about why the natural world mattered to them. A few months earlier Conservative Natural Resources Minister David Morse announced that Voluntary Planning would lead a year of independent public consultations on the province’s minerals, forests, […]
Biomass, Freedom of Information, and the DNR Company Men, Part 2: An Open Letter to the FOIPOP Review Officer
Editor’s note: In March, the Halifax Examiner published Linda Pannozzo’s investigation into biomass harvesting, “Feeding the Fire.” Pannozzo followed that up in April with “Biomass, Freedom of Information, and the Silence of the DNR Company Men,” which looked at how information is controlled and managed in the Department of Natural Resources, and how her investigation […]
Biomass, Freedom of Information, and the Silence of the DNR Company Men
Reporter Linda Pannozzo discovers just how hard provincial bureaucrats worked to ignore her questions.
In the opening scenes of Franny Armstrong’s 2009 film The Age of Stupid: Why We didn’t Save Ourselves When We Had the Chance, everything lies in ruin: abandoned rides sit idle in a flooded theme park, forests are ablaze, and amid the smoldering detritus of decades of climate chaos the planet appears to have also […]
Feeding the Fire
Biomass and Nova Scotia’s Race for the Bottom
Editor’s note: This story has been taken from behind the Examiner’s paywall. The Examiner does not accept advertising, and so relies on a subscription-based revenue model; this allows us to pay writers like Linda Pannozzo, the author of this piece. If you find this kind of journalism worthwhile, please consider subscribing. To do so, click […]
Carbon Laundering, De-growth, and Re-thinking the Economy
What our politicians won’t be discussing at COP 21 in Paris
Linda Pannozzo is an award-winning author and freelance journalist. This is an excerpt from her forthcoming book “About Canada: The Environment” (Fernwood Publishing). The U.S. federal inquiry that investigated the financial crisis of 2008-2009 — the most serious crisis affecting the global economy since the Great Depression — concluded in 2011 that it was an […]