Media Clipping — Tuesday, February 5, 2002 The Daily News, Halifax

Protesters want forest protected, regardless of rules

By Brian Flinn

Bowater Mersey wants the province to review the way it’s been cutting trees in a disputed area near Chester, but environmentalists say it would be meaningless.

The pulp and paper company has stopped clear cutting trees in the Kaiser Meadow-Timber Lake area until June. In the meantime, it wants government bureaucrats to determine if it’s meeting logging regulations.

"We believe such a review is necessary to provide a factual basis for all future discussions on Bowater’s forest management practices," Bowater general manager Jonathan Porter said in a statement.

But activists, who have been trying to stop logging on 170 hectares of Bowater land to be cut this year, say they have no doubt the company is conforming to Nova Scotia’s logging rules.

"That doesn’t mean anything. Our problem is with the regulations," said Chester resident Brad Armstrong, who led a blockade of the logging road leading to the site two weeks ago.

Bowater says it’s leaving buffer zones around streams as well as clumps of trees required in regulations enacted last month.

Armstrong said yesterday the regulations allow clear cutting and don’t require the company to protect old-growth trees on the property, 15 kilometres north of Chester. He showed reporters a video of the property that shows stumps of trees that were more than 100 years old.

"I ask Bowater to work with us to find an alternative to clear-cutting," he said.

Bowater says it has preserved a similar patch of woods, and denies there are trees worth saving on the site.

Sierra Club executive director Elizabeth May said an independent scientific panel should settle the dispute. A similar panel was formed to look at logging on Vancouver Island’s Clayoquot Sound in the 1990s and called for an end to its clear-cutting.

A Bowater spokesperson said the end to logging in the area last week had nothing to do with protesters. The company planned all along to move its equipment and will keep hauling logs off the site until the spring thaw.

Copyright © 2002, The Daily News