In recent days you might have received an email from the Department of Lands and Forestry (DLF) inviting you to answer a survey about its State of the Forest report (SOF), first published in 2008, and updated in 2016. Using data collected by the DLF, the document purportedly describes the changing condition of the forest,...
Backroad Deal
Part 2: Nova Scotia’s policies to conserve the province’s endangered forests might be doing more harm than good
(This is the second of a 2-part series. See Part 1 here.) It was an unseasonably warm day in February when I met up with Mike Lancaster to walk part of the new Ingram Access Road — a clearcut 100 metres wide in places — which he and other conservationists say cut out part of […]
“Nature won”
Supreme Court ruling orders province to meet the obligations of the Endangered Species Act.
“Nature won.” That’s how retired wildlife biologist Bob Bancroft reacted to a judge’s decision on Friday which essentially orders the Department of Lands and Forestry to obey provincial law when it comes to protecting endangered, threatened, and vulnerable species. There are 60 plants and animals identified under Nova Scotia’s Endangered Species Act. But the judicial...
Auditor General finds Lands & Forestry and Health Departments slow to enact changes
All governments are doing a wonderful job at everything, according to all governments. For a more objective assessment of performance, citizens depend on the work of the Auditor General. The “exit” report of an Auditor General — one who’s spent six years researching promises kept and promises broken by government — is of special interest....
Port Wallace Gamble: the real estate boom meets Nova Scotia’s toxic mine legacy
Part 1: The making of a toxic mess and the uncalculated costs of previous gold rushes.
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 […]