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 […]
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 […]
Ships, Conservatives, turbines, gold, and forests
Morning File, Thursday, August 23, 2018
Hello, I’m Joan Baxter, Nova Scotian journalist and author, wondering how on earth Tim does this every morning. News 1. Ships start here, but when? Jennifer Henderson investigates the six-month (and counting) delay in the completion of the first ship in the multi-billion dollar Halifax Shipyard contract in a new article for the Examiner: The […]
The universe doesn’t actually orbit around Danny Chedrawe’s enormous ego: Morning File, Thursday, August 31, 2017
News 1. Forest review redux The province announced yesterday “an independent review of forest practices in Nova Scotia“: University of King’s College president William Lahey will review forest practices and evaluate market access for private forest owners. Prof. Lahey is an associate professor at Dalhousie’s Schulich School of Law and a former deputy minister of […]
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, […]