Policy analyst and writer Peter Puxley, speaking at a #WaterNotGold panel in Halifax last Saturday, pushes back on the idea that all rural Nova Scotia can hope for are short term jobs in extractive industries that come at huge environmental costs.
Last week the province issued permits for the spraying of glyphosate on some 938 hectares (2300 acres) in rural Nova Scotia. Affected woodlots are in Hants, Cumberland, Guysborough, Inverness and Colchester Counties.
“Cut … cut … cut,” Carmen Williams says quietly as we drive slowly along a side road in Nova Scotia, indicating the area of almost 400 acres of public land outside of Lockeport, Nova Scotia currently slated for clearcut. Sierra Club Gretchen Fizgerald reflects on a recent birding trip in Southwestern Nova Scotia and the effects of clearcutting on tiny migratory birds and their fledglings.
Media release: A survey of birds in a forest on public land in Southwest Nova Scotia, slated to be clearcut found 31 species, 25 of which are migratory species protected under the Migratory Bird Convention Act. Birds identified included warblers, vireos, thrushes and finches.
Op-ed by Community Forests Shelburne County: “We need to see more than just words, since the biggest threat to Nova Scotia’s crown land forests stems from your continued unabated licensing of their wholesale destruction by clearcutting.”
News release: Westfor have announced on CBC that they are planning to cut the Corbett-Dalhousie Lake forest any day now. Through non-violent direct action, Extinction Rebellion Forest Protectors intend to protect this forest, an ecologically intact mixed hardwood forest in the midst of a sea of clear-cuts.
Wherever he looks Ray Bates sees corporations exploiting Nova Scotia’s natural resources as if there is no tomorrow. This must stop, he writes.
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…”
The province is proposing that lands near Coolen Lake, straddling Lunenburg County and HRM, be clearcut. The targeted lands contain one of the oldest remaining forests in the Maritimes, let alone Nova Scotia, a post on the Healthy Forest Coalition Facebook page states .
“Nova Scotians must project into the future and realize the consequences resulting from the industrial actions of the multinational corporations who appear to be salivating over what Nova Scotia’s governments might be willing to offer,” writes Guysborough resident Ray Bates.