WOLFVILLE, N.S. — “There was no warning. I woke up and heard them offloading the clearcutting machine at the bottom of the driveway. By the time I got down there it was on its way up the wood road.”
Susan Haley said to the forester: "What's happening here?"
"Just doing a little selective cutting up there," he replied.
"Selective cutting! With that thing?"
They poured 60 loads of gravel to upgrade the wood road, which is also my wood road. The actual cut took three months of the summer, with wood trucks going in and out daily, every one of them turning in my driveway. Ironically, the Abitibi-Bowater plant in Liverpool shut down that summer, so I don't know where the wood was going. Probably Northern Pulp in New Glasgow - it's the only one left.
It's now seven years after the cut was made and the little trees are barely creeping back. I go out and stare at the massive scar created for the staging area. Since I'm walking through woods belonging to me on the way, I know what forest undisturbed for 50 years after a much less complete cutting - with power saws - by farmers with horses and small tractors looks like.
What does it look like? Still pretty wretched.
No one now growing up in Nova Scotia knows what a real forest is or should look like, the forest we once had.”
Haley, an accomplished writer, lives on a dead-end road in Black River. She knows firsthand. When I went out to the Methal’s powerhouse in 2013 I witnessed a similar massive scarring of the landscape. Such grim deserts are all wrong.
Now atop the same South Mountain, there’s some extensive clearcutting happening on private property not far from where Pete Luckett has his popular winery on the Grand Pre Road. Folks who live in the vicinity have being trying to register their concern with the authorities. I passed a fully loaded logging truck on my way up there.
Sure, the land is zoned for forestry, but how is it that the habitat for bald eagles, barred owls and eastern wood pewees (which are an endangered species in N.S.) nesting on those trees don’t matter. In addition, Curry Brook at the base of the steep hill has trout in it.
The clearcutting began last year, ceased for a time, then started up again in August. Hearsay on the mountain indicates it will continue in 2020. For Celes and Sue Davar, who built five years ago, the obliteration is shocking. The trees are simply considered a cash crop.
Celes, who is a biologist, has written to ask who is going to be monitoring for soil erosion and habitat protected. MLA Keith Irving has promised to help. Their neighbours join in their worry.
As Sue Davar points out, “we can’t keep doing this. How can we sanction the loss of this CO2 carbon sequestration.”
With industrial forestry equipment it’s not like the ravaging of the forest is providing many jobs. We may moan about the burning of the Amazon forests, but in this small province shouldn’t clearcutting be better controlled?
Over 20 years ago Sharon Doyle of Wolfville tried to raise concern about a massive clearcutting near Yarmouth. She delivered a petition signed by 17,000 people to the provincial authorities of the day.
“It sank into a black hole,” she recalled sadly. Doyle is a former monk with the Nova Nada Carmelite Hermitage near Yarmouth. It was disbanded after a three-year struggle against timber giant J.D. Irving and its 24-hour noise and light.
The monks took off their earplugs and asked for a two-mile complete buffer, but Irving wouldn’t cooperate. “Unwillingly and unhappily we shut down after two years of stress. There were no more retreatants and there was no more silence.”
A quarter of a century ago now, Doyle stated, if we clearcut in this region that can change climate levels to such an extent that someday it will change the level of the ocean. She still believes we are all connected, and every decision we make has to be viewed in terms of others, not just profit and greed.
Doyle adds that government regulation creates inferior, monoculture forests. The whole process is giving her and many others, myself included, an acute sense of climate change anxiety.
Ironically, just this past summer the E.C. Smith Herbarium at Acadia University employed an honours student to seek out old growth forests in the Annapolis Valley. Mapping these magnificent ecosystems was her task.
While all too rare in this province, herbarium staff believe old growth forests hold extraordinary genetic diversity and act as essential carbon sinks. The oldest tree the student located was an approximately 265-year-old eastern hemlock.
Knowing where they are is one step and protecting them should be the very next one. No more grim deserts please. Write Minister of Natural Resources Iain Rankin - [email protected]
Former Advertiser and Register reporter Wendy Elliott lives in Wolfville.
