In December 2020, Mike Lancaster was invited to attend an online meeting of the Western Region Stakeholder Interaction Committee, which he describes as a venue for those holding forestry licences on Crown land and “other key stakeholders to engage with the Department of Lands and Forestry on forestry and planning issues for the western region […]
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 […]
Environmentalists say logging companies are rushing clearcuts near Lake Deception before new forest regulations come into effect
Environmental groups are pushing back against three proposed cuts in a rural area near Lake Deception north of Shelburne. The cuts are on Crown land allocated to 13 companies in the WestFor group, which includes Northern Pulp, Louisiana Pacific, Ledwidge Lumber, and Harry Freeman & Sons. These “variable retention” cuts (a forest industry euphemism for...
Truth Be Told: Nova Scotia’s forest department hires a PR firm with forest industry ties to help it with transparency
Cover photo: recent drone shot of a clearcut located between Kejimkujik National Park and Lake Rossignol. Photo courtesy Jeff Purdy. The Nova Scotia Department of Lands and Forestry (DLF) recently hired DG Communications, a public relations firm, to assess the department’s progress in meeting the recommendations of William Lahey’s Independent Review of Forest Practices, specifically […]
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 […]