Yesterday, Stephen McNeil made four campaign promises that he said are aimed at “preserving and enhancing the environment.” Critics say they are aimed at preserving the status quo. A re-elected Liberal government would continue the ban on onshore fracking. It would introduce a Coastal Protection Act after public consultation on issues concerning the fishery and offshore drilling....
Life After Pulp
Energy Miracles, Jobs, and other Nova Scotia Government Delusions
No one would have called it “greenwashing” at the time, but from the very beginning the pulp and paper industry in Nova Scotia was engaged in it. In 1929, when industrialist Izaak Walton Killam founded the province’s first pulp and paper mill in Brooklyn on the banks of the Mersey River estuary, the forests of […]
Losing the forests for the trees: New figures show increase in clearcutting
Despite what the Nova Scotia government has said in response to concerns raised over clearcutting, the most recent figures released from the National Forestry Database (NFD) indicate that in 2015, both the overall harvest and the proportion of trees removed by clearcutting continued to increase. And ironically, the national body used data supplied by the […]
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, […]