To be continued
Please don’t ask me how I intend to respond. I am an old man now.
Ask the next generation, our children, our grandchildren.
Ask the Mi’kmaq peoples who stewarded our lands over 1000s of years before us, the settlers, and through all of our colonization, have retained their sense of the land that once nourished us all.
I don’t know if Minister Rankin sees the contradictions in his own statements, as reported in a recent CBC post by Michael Gorman – Lands and Forestry minister says province committed to Lahey Report recommendations, CBC Aug 19.
On the one hand we hear that
As changes are made, Rankin said his expectation remains that biodiversity value and nature will come first.
Then,
“We’re talking about leveraging higher volumes of that low-value pulp wood, both private and Crown land,” he said. “When those things are in place, then you’ll see more opportunity for partial harvesting on both private and Crown [land].”
So no, biodiversity value and nature are not coming first, rather we can expect to see “more opportunity for partial harvesting” [which the Minister is apparently equating with Ecological Forestry] only after the government is able to leverage “higher volumes of that low-value pulp wood”.
People for Ecological Forestry in Southwest Nova Scotia have laid out the contradiction between what the Minister says and his department’s actions in more detail, even providing a list of all Crown land harvest approvals granted in 2019 while we waited for L&F to flesh out their response to the Lahey Recommendations. Such approvals and the logging continue of course while we continue to wait for L&F to actually implement the Lahey Recommendations. View Post on People for Ecological Forestry in Southwest Nova Scotia (Public Facebook group) Aug 19, 2020; it is also reproduced here for those not on Facebook.
For more on the Minister’s priorities, as expressed by the Minister himself, view Protecting supply of “wood” but not necessarily big trees from Nova Scotia’s Crown lands remains the priority at L&F 15Mar2020 (NSFN Post, Mar 15, 2020).
Like many others, I had some optimism that the Lahey Report of Aug 21, 2018 could lead to real change on the ground. It wasn’t because I agreed with everything he recommended or didn’t recommend; I did not. It was because he offered a clear compromise between what the Forest Industry or at least Big Forestry wanted, and what The Rest of Us wanted.
The clear compromise lay in the Triad. Both sides would have to take less than they wanted for the sake of both sides getting a good portion of what they wanted, and for the sake of peace on the forestry front in NS. Perhaps, just perhaps, if both sides were sincere and with Lahey’s guidance, it would work.
There is more to protecting biodiversity than simply reducing clearcutting
However, there has essentially been no compromise on the-ground while the details of translating the Lahey Recommendations into action continue to be worked out, except for a few more trees left standing in clearcuts (view comments of Raymond Plourde); and the Minister by his own words on Dec 3 of 2018 and again a few days ago has it made it clear that L&F/Big Forestry will not accept any, even transient, reduction in wood supply (as predicted would be the case by Lahey & Co.).
…And while Lahey predicted less clear cutting would lead to a reduction of Crown land wood supply of 10 to 20 per cent, Rankin disagreed. “We believe that we can sustainably grow this industry.” – CBC Dec 3, 2018
“We’re talking about leveraging higher volumes of that low-value pulp wood, both private and Crown land,” he said. “When those things are in place, then you’ll see more opportunity for partial harvesting on both private and Crown [land].” CBC, Aug 19, 2020
In essence Minister Rankin/L&F are working the numbers to ensure the wood supply from Crown land is maintained (or even grown) without regard for The Rest of Us, and without regard for Lahey’s fundamental directive
“In other words, I have concluded that protecting ecosystems and biodiversity should not be balanced against other objectives and values as if they were of equal weight or importance to those other objectives or values. Instead, protecting and enhancing ecosystems should be the objective (the outcome) of how we balance environmental, social, and economic objectives and values in practising forestry in Nova Scotia.” – William Lahey, Aug 2018
So I, like many others, have lost any optimism I had about the possible success of the Lahey recommendations in finally effecting fundamental change in the way forestry is conducted in NS in order to begin to regain some of the many Ecological and Social Services our forests once provided. Deja Vu.
In 2020, are these 200+ year old trees better left standing or harvested? Fortunately, they are on private land – if they were on Crown land, they could be assigned to High Production Forestry, beginning with a clearcut, of course.
Please don’t ask me how I intend to respond. I am an old man now.
Ask the next generation, our children, our grandchildren.
Ask the Mi’kmaq peoples who stewarded our lands over 1000s of years before us, the settlers, and through all of our colonization, have retained their sense of the land that once nourished us all.
My biggest hope is that “we all continue to gather at the edge of the woods where the generations before us and after us re-merge”.
View Two journeys in Nova Scotia forests
Post on NSFN November 25, 2017