Turned down Annapolis County determined to find better way to manage forests
When the municipal council wanted to temporarily halt clear cutting on Crown land in Annapolis County the province said no. Twice.
Now council has four of its members doing research, has a workshop planned, and hopes to come up with a proposal that will appeal to the province and replace any existing thoughts of large-scale clear cutting.
“We’d received a lot of contact from our constituents expressing real and deep concern about the clear cutting that was already taking place in Annapolis County – a lot of it on private land – but also the upcoming signing of the contract with Westfor (Management Inc.) which was really going to give them unprecedented authority over all the clear cuts in the area,” said Warden Timothy Habinski.
Fourteen per cent of Annapolis County is Crown forest and council didn’t know how much was going to be cut and how rapidly it was going to be cut.
“But we were concerned, so council voted to send a letter,” Habinski said. “We asked for a one-year moratorium on clear cuts within Annapolis County. What we asked for specifically was to be excluded from the terms of the Westfor contract for a period of a year to give us an opportunity to see the contract as well – to get our heads around it and see what it meant, what its implications were likely to be.”
The March 3 letter was sent to former Minister of Natural Resources Lloyd Hines and copied to Premier Stephen Mcneil.
Request Denied
Not only were they told ‘no’ to the exemption, they couldn’t get a copy of the Westfor contract, Habinski said. It was still being developed. But council wasn’t going to let it rest and reiterated its initial concerns - and again the request was denied. This time after the May 30 election and by a deputy minister.
He believes council must make an active proposal for the province about an alternate path the county would like to see employed for the development and the use of forest resources in the area.
“Simply waving a flag and asking them to stop while we collected ourselves just wasn’t effective and I understand why it wouldn’t be,” Habinski said. “The province wants to move. It wants to have things done. And it’s much easier to substitute Plan B for Plan A than it is to just say ‘halt Plan A.’”
“So what we’re doing right now is we’re engaged in a prodigious amount of research. We have four councillors specifically tasked with learning everything they can about the history and legislation of forestry in the province. We’re organizing a workshop for early in the fall to which we’ll be inviting a lot of people to come in and present to council and help us formulate a strategy and a way forward to present to the province.”
Concerns
While the esthetic impact of clear cutting is people’s first reaction, Habinski said that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Extensive clear cutting and regenerations makes for progressively lower quality forests, has a profound impact on water tables, and causes significant soil erosion.
“In addition to that, in a time when, of course, we’re concerned about climate change, forests serve as carbon sinks. That’s one of their prodigious capacities is that they can scrub carbon,” he said. “When you remove a forest it’s going to be 30 or 40 years before you have an appreciable impact as a carbon sink once again as that forest regenerates itself. So right at a time when the environment is very sensitive and vulnerable we’re doing one of the things that is potentially worse for it. We’ didn’t know how much was planned to be cut. The sense that we had was the cut was going to be extensive. If it’s extensive it’s concerning.”
He said the county has seen, along with a provincial contract, a great push by various commercial operations to encourage private landowners to clear-cut their properties at the same time.
“I think that probably has a fair bit to do with the fact that these forestry companies are aware that the cap and trade system is going to be introduced at some point in the next, hopefully, two years,” Habinski said. “And if it’s well thought out and intelligent there’ll suddenly be a financial argument made to woodlot owners to keep their forests standing because you’ll be able to sell those credits and realize revenue for a forest that isn’t cut. So if you know that’s in the pipeline, if you know that’s coming, you try to get all that lumber off as fast as you can because your benefit as a corporation disappears if it’s not cut.”
Habinski said residents concerned about the clear cutting issue cay play an active part in the
False Dichotomy
He said there’s often a false dichotomy presented to people over the clear cutting issue that leaves the province in a pinch because industry says it needs to preserve jobs and concerned citizens are talking about the environment.
“And the province thinks that those two are mutually exclusive – that you either must sacrifice jobs to protect the environment or sacrifice the environment for the sake of economic activity,” said Habinski. “That’s not the case.”
He pointed to Scandinavian countries with virtually the same forestry resources as Canada do very little clear cutting.
“And they realize many times the financial profit from their forestry industry than we do,” Habinski said. “All their valueadded industries are kept within their nations. They do selective cutting, spot cutting, corridor cutting. Their model milks every last dollar out of a resource that is then very carefully preserved in all of its biodiversity. To me, any complicated problem like this, you don’t have to invent a solution out of whole cloth. Someone in the world has thought of a solution and they’re doing it. We need to figure out what they’ve done and how it can be applied here.”
The county is looking at those different ways of managing forests before it’s too late. And council still doesn’t know how much will be cut and how quickly.
“Altogether, the picture looks like extensive clear cutting,” Habinski said. “And I think that it has the potential to do real and lasting harm to Annapolis County. And that’s why we wanted to have a say in it.”