This is Part 1 of a three-part story about the toxic legacy from historic gold mines in Nova Scotia, which its citizens will be paying many millions of dollars to try to clean up, and how the contamination at just one of these sites — Montague Mines in HRM — is still affecting lives today,...
Province issues bids for baby biomass plants
The province has issued a tender to build and operate a half-dozen small-scale biomass plants that will heat government buildings around the province by November of this year. The plants will run on wood chips supplied by private woodlot owners and are being advertised by the Department of Lands and Forestry as both a response...
Bad math at Lands & Forestry
An "arithmetic error" increased the cut for the WestFor timber companies by a whopping 28% — until the Halifax Examiner discovered the mistake.
In what can only be described as a peculiar series of events, the Department of Lands and Forestry is cancelling the third year of an interim lease signed with WestFor Management Inc. WestFor represents 13 forestry companies which are allocated wood from Crown land in southwestern Nova Scotia previously managed by Bowater Mersey. Back in […]
The Archaeology of Loss
How industrial logging in the Mi’kmaq heartland is destroying a lot more than trees
“We were in wonderful moose country now.” At least this is how Albert Bigelow Paine described the Nova Scotia landscape he and three others journeyed through in his 1908 book The Tent Dwellers. The book tells the true story of a June trout fishing trip led by two guides, Charlie Charlton and Del Thomas, who […]
Forest Confidential
An investigation into Nova Scotia’s biomass harvest data and how the numbers aren’t adding up
A few months ago I reviewed a film that has been circulating the province about the growing use of forest biomass as a form of so-called renewable energy. The film — Burned: Are Trees the New Coal? — reported on how the biomass industry sells itself as green by making two bogus claims: it uses […]
Pulp Culture
How Nova Scotia’s Faustian bargain with the pulp industry may leave the sawmills in ruins
I wonder if Billy Freeman, a sixth generation saw-miller with 15 years experience, saw this juncture coming. A few weeks ago, Freeman, the process improvement manager at Harry Freeman and Son Ltd. in Greenfield, Nova Scotia wrote an illuminating op-ed in the Chronicle Herald supporting Northern Pulp in its request for an extension of the […]
By Any Other Name: Nova Scotia’s Department of Lands and Forestry just made “Clearcuts” disappear
Nova Scotians who signed up to receive proposed harvest plans on Crown land might have noticed some disturbing changes recently. As of a few days ago the maps no longer specify whether a proposed cut is a “clearcut” or not. The word was removed from the legend and the list of harvest prescription types. This […]
Department of Lands and Forestry employees are lobbying the government to delay cleanup of Boat Harbour
Morning File, Friday, January 25, 2019
News 1. Scott Brison Writes Jennifer Henderson: “Being the President of the Treasury Board is a bit like peeing in a dark suit,” chuckles Scott Brison.“It gives you a warm feeling, but nobody notices.” Brison, the Liberal Member of Parliament for Kings-Hants, resigned his Cabinet post a couple of weeks ago and, after 22 years […]
Turning protesters into pets
How Nova Scotia's forestry regulators are already undermining the Lahey Report, and what we can do about it.
Cover photo: a clearcut adjacent to the Old Annapolis Nature Reserve. The forest to the right of the clearcut is now being proposed as a second clearcut, which would create a total clearcut area of roughly 150 acres. Photo courtesy Mike Lancaster. In her eloquent and thought-provoking 2014 book, Capitalism: A Ghost Story, Arundhati Roy […]