KJIPUKTUK (Halifax) – This weekend we feature an interview with Ralph Wheadon, who became a Provincial Forest Ranger for the area above St. Margaret’s Bay in the early fifties. He talks about fighting forest fires, log drives down the Ingram River, and the changes (not for the better) he has witnessed over his long career.
“If we don’t have logs, if we don’t have timber, I worry about our watersheds. And I am really concerned, as a lot of people are, about cutting that biomass stuff down, young trees, 3 to 4 inches, that we need to grow to protect the land, and they’re not letting then grow, they’re burning it at Port Hawkesbury, it’s unreal. If we don’t have the forests, where is the game going to live?”
The interview was produced by Kent Martin, whose wonderful work we have featured before (and no doubt will feature again).
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Wonderful film. Ralph knows the Chebucto Peninsula like the back of his hand. In 2009 he told myself and Nick Hill how to find some “overmature” oak stand deep in the Five Bridge Lakes Wilderness area.(he had told Beth McGee about it, she told us). He hadn’t been there for 25 years, drew us a rough map. We got close to it and it was falling light, we needed some advice on whether we were off-track so called Ralph, fortunately the cphone connection worked. Ralph: “you just came across a little stream about 100 yards back?..Yes… and he told us exactly where we were and how much further we had to proceed and what we would encounter along the way. It was a great find: http://versicolor.ca/forest/index.html and helped in the efforts to protect the FLWA. Kent is a very community and nature oriented filmmaker. A great combination. Thanks NS Advocate
Very nice video! Thanks for sharing! Protect the woods so that grandkids can become old folk too!