Tree hugger power

At the Nova
Scotia Environment Network’s annual gathering last week, in a
discussion on working with the new government, some expressed hope, but
most were disappointed. Longtime NDP MLA and environmentalist Howard
Epstein was passed over for a cabinet post, and there has been no
progress on key NDP issues, like a permanent uranium mining ban and
improved renewable energy policies.

The attending environmentalists were, however, thrilled about the
$70 million increase in the provincial land acquisition budget, and
that 14,700 hectares of Eastern Shore land has been protected as the
Ship Harbour-Long Lake Wilderness Area.

According to Kermit deGooyer, the Ecology Action Centre’s wilderness
and public land conservation planner, the finalization of the new
wilderness area is “a significant first step for this government in
protecting land and keeping the commitment of the previous
government.”

That last government committed to protect 12 percent of Nova
Scotia’s land from development. Minister of Natural Resources John
MacDonnell tells me he hopes the $70 million will bring the province
“as close to 12 percent as we can get. We’re considering five land
offerings from the private sector.”

Until then, the largest new protected land in over a decade is
reason to celebrate, and it brings the province’s percentage of
protected land to 8.7 percent. Ship Harbour-Long Lake was brought
together through work of churches, 200 local businesses, the Chamber of
Commerce, schools, the local Musquodoboit community, large
corporations, activists and politicians from each end of the
spectrum.

“Scientists tell us that biodiversity thrives in the absence of
human disturbance,” Degooyer explains of the area’s importance. “Large
continuous areas where wildlife can be undisturbed by people are
rare.”

The area also hosts a population of mainland moose. There are only
about a thousand of them left, making them as unusual as the large
road-free woods they need to live. To illustrate how rare roadlessness
is in this province, deGooyer calculated that all our roads end to end
could circumvent the equator more than twice.

For more than 40 years the Ship Harbour-Long Lake land was leased to
forestry companies, first to Scott Paper, which sold its rights to
Kimberly Clarke, which transferred them to Neenah Paper. And yet the
area somehow stayed virtually free of logging roads. “It was just a
matter of time before it was logged,” deGooyer says. “In ’01 Kimberly
Clarke submitted a harvesting plan to the province that involved
clear-cutting and logging roads.”

But while citizens and activists were ignored by a Conservative
government hostile to new protected areas, the logging companies
listened. “They knew to log it with so much opposition would be a
headache,” deGooyer says. After years of conversations, Neenah backed
out of its licence. Finally the province relented and agreed to a
protected area, pending a year-long extensive public consultation.

The public was overwhelmingly in favour of protecting the land,
which connects two other Wilderness Areas (White Lake and Tangier Grand
Lake) to create 35,000 hectares of nearly continuous protected land.
That’s essentially a wilderness corridor nearly as big as Keji, with
three times as many lakes, that connects to the ocean. There is nothing
else like it in Nova Scotia.

An interesting footnote to this textbook example of environmental
success is that, back in the ’70s, the federal government wanted to
make the same area a national park. “It was felt that the park was
being imposed on the community,” deGooyer explains. “The government
backed away from it in the early ’70s.”

Now, that area has been protected only because the community
demanded it.

“It was bottom-up,” deGooyer says. “It started when the locals got
worried about logging.”

People are fickle that way. We don’t like to be told what to do,
even if it’s good for us. We’d rather figure it out for ourselves.
Government’s job is to shut up and listen.

Let’s hope the new government learns something for this tale.
They’ve done well to seal the deal on this protected area, and even
sweetened the pot with another $70 million for land acquisitions.
Minister MacDonnell tells me he’s heard nothing but positive feedback
on the new investment in public lands. “Nobody’s saying we wish you had
done that other thing,” he says.

But my experience at the NSEN gathering tells me environmentalists
are losing patience on a number of other issues they also expected the
NDP to act swiftly on. Many of these folks are lifelong party faithful.
The lesson is this: now that you’re in power, your job is to do what
the voters tell you.

This article appears in Oct 15-21, 2009.