Protesters pour cold water on forest plan
Nina Newington has been taking cold comfort in doing what she says is the right thing.
“Whether or not we can get any responses and so far we’re getting nothing from Natural Resource or the premier, even if you can’t do that, it activates all the other people who actually care and are concerned about this,” said Newington, who has been part of a group encamped on South Mountain in Annapolis County for more than seven weeks to protest forestry practices.
“People are really getting in gear trying to work out and start proposing areas for protection and how is that going to work and how is that going to look for the different watersheds around the province because we better get going.”
Newington, part of the Extinction Rebellion action network, is referring to the Progressive Conservative government’s promise to protect at least 20 per cent of the total land and water mass of Nova Scotia for nature conservation by 2030.
Newington says it should start with a planned WestFor Management cut on 24 hectares of Crown land near her encampment, west of Highway 10 and east of Eel Weir Lake, between two branches of Beals Brook.
That’s where the forest protectors set up camp on Dec. 2 to protest the cut on what they say is the last hope wildlife corridor in an area of extensive wetlands and even more extensive clearcuts.
A spokesman for WestFor could not be reached by deadline but the company, in a mid-December statement, rebuffed activists claims that clearcutting on Crown land is proceeding at a rapid and destructive pace and that all forestry activity should be stopped on Crown land until the Lahey Report is implemented.
“They are trying to create an impression there is widespread, uncontrolled harvesting on Crown land when the opposite is actually the case,” Jamie Lewis, president of WestFor and Lewis Mouldings
Ltd, said in the statement.
"Despite what activists say, harvests on Crown lands have actually declined by over 40 per cent over the last five years. More specifically, in the last two years, harvest levels have remained well below historical levels, proving there is no truth to the claim that a spree is on to cut all that can be cut ahead of Lahey implementation.”
WestFor maintains that Crown land harvests are “carefully planned, reviewed, approved, monitored and audited,” by the Natural Resources Departement.
The WestFor statement said the majority of harvests it conducts on Crown lands leave more than 50 per cent of the trees standing and that only a 30 per cent harvest is planned for the Beals Brook area.
“The issue in this case is not clearcutting, it’s that they shouldn’t be cutting this at all and there needs to be a process,” Newington said.
She said the process has to be connected to that government commitment to protect 20 per cent of all land by 2030.
“When they have everything off the proposed list and fully protected, they are going to be at 14 per cent and to add that six per cent is adding another 330,000 hectares, which is about the equivalent of three Tobiatics. (The Tobeatic Wilderness
Area spans parts of five counties in southwestern Nova Scotia and is the largest protected area in the Maritimes.)
“They’ve made a commitment to really significantly increase the protected areas. Most of that has to come from Crown land. Our point is that you shouldn’t be cutting this, this is a wildlife corridor. If they talked to anybody local about the history of the area, they would realize this has always been an incredibly rich, ecologically important area. Why aren’t you looking at protecting this 24 little hectares instead of coming in and cutting and then saying, 'Oh, now we’re going to protect.'”
'IRRESPONSIBLE'
Even cutting 30 per cent with extraction roads will destroy the wildlife corridor, she said.
“You’re going to come in and wreck this 24 hectares for the sake of trying to take out 30 per cent and most of it is red oak and white pine, neither of which have huge saleable value right now. There are some stands of softwoods in there which is what the moose and the deer need for winter.”
Lewis said in the WestFor statement that the demand that all harvesting should stop “is highly irresponsible and would devastate many businesses and families and it would not move us any closer to implementing ecological forestry.”
WestFor is owned by 12 fibre-using companies throughout rural Nova Scotia, most of them family owned that rely on Crown wood for some of their fibre supply, he said.
“Nova Scotia’s forestry sector is comprised of over 10,000 workers, 36,000 woodlot owners, 80 sawmills, two pulp mills and hundreds of supply and service companies,” Lewis said.
But Newington said the hearty band of protesters will remain in camp “as long as it takes.”
Newington’s motives are straightforward.
The 63-year-old who lives on North Mountain, about 45 minutes across the valley from the encampment, said about three years ago she was observing some barn swallows that nest in her barn.
“I was joyful watching them and then just filled with grief and guilt, really, with what we’re doing to the planet. I thought, I am going to do what I can. It was very simple, but I felt better and since then, I’ve been doing what I can.”
Doing what she can has translated into several encampment protests in an effort to slow or stop logging efforts, including a Digby County protest that resulted in her arrest for trespassing in December 2020.
Now, there are the winter nights huddled in double sleeping bags inside a canvas rollover prospectors tents heated by a woodstove, which she says is surprisingly cozy on frigid nights.
Three or four people stay in the camp overnight and others come and go by day.
“We are getting a heck of a lot of local support.”
Newington said WestFor has not begun any forestry activities on the 24-hectare swath in question despite the protesters having been told that the cut was to begin in mid-December and then again in mid-January.
She said significant parts of the South Mountain have been clearcut.
“Really, we’re going to have to look across the whole province and find the places that haven’t been decimated,” Newington said of the 20 per cent preservation goal.
“It used to be that in order to protect something you had to show that it had this tremendously high conservation value and find all these endangered species. Now, really the areas that should be protected are all the areas that haven’t been cut to heck yet.”