Media Clipping — Saturday June 7th, 2008, The Chronicle Herald

Something new in the woods: calm talk about forestry

By Ralph Surette

The hearings on the future management of most of Nova Scotia as a physical entity – its forests, parks, mines and general ecology – have ignited something. They’re drawing crowds the way travelling hearings usually don’t. I was at the Yarmouth gathering this week, one of 26 across the province, where some 150 people showed up – complaining that if it had been better publicized, a lot more would have come.

The meeting was in the hands of pleasant volunteers with the arm’s-length provincial agency Voluntary Economic Planning (VEP), and everyone on all sides had their say without raised voices. I mention this because it counts as progress, in itself, in a province where even calm talk about forest management has been extremely scarce.

Remember that ecology groups fought a long battle just to get VEP to run these hearings instead of the Department of Natural Resources. The DNR has administered a decades-old policy of industrial forestry that has reduced this province to one long clearcut with only a few accidental stands of old forest still standing, worse economic outcomes than most other provinces, and has largely lost public confidence. Just getting this little bit of the process out of DNR’s clammy hands caused the MacDonald government some headaches.

At the Yarmouth meeting, someone – obviously not up to speed – asked: "Where’s DNR?" The moderator explained that they weren’t here, in order to avoid an "us-versus-them" situation. That is, with DNR there, the reasonable tone in the room would have disappeared. It happened last time there was such an exercise, about a decade ago.

At that time, I attended a meeting in Sackville, where we were jammed into a small room. DNR field people took a barrage of hostile policy questions that only their superiors could have properly answered, and with a long line of angry questioners still standing, shut down the meeting because "we only hired the hall until 8 o’clock."

With the current process, DNR will still have the final say. VEP will write up a report in the fall based on what it heard at these hearings. This will be followed by a round of meetings with stakeholders in 2009. DNR will write the final report in 2010. So, what are the chances of anything changing? Good, actually – despite complaints by environmentalists that industry people have been packing some of the meetings (I didn’t see that at mine). For one thing, after all of this, if there’s just more of the same, there’ll be hell to pay.

A reading of the polls raises another angle: If the NDP comes to power, as this week’s and a total of nearly two years worth of polls suggest, the government-DNR relationship will change, which is the prelude to real change on the ground. Indeed, the natural resources file, on which the public has become increasingly alienated from government policy – both Tory and Liberal over time – is one of the forces that has brought the NDP to prominence.

And there’s something else. The larger context is changing fast, and in many forms. With regard to environmental degradation, economic sustainability, economic growth and what have you, we’re hitting the brick wall that we’ve been approaching for decades. With regard to forestry, the cutting has diminished considerably over the past year or so, as markets shrink and prices drop. What remains of the forest is taking a little breath. It’s time for policy-makers, especially those on a road to nowhere, to take the opportunity and do a rethink.

A few weeks ago, GPI Atlantic, which has become the main voice for progressive forestry in Nova Scotia, put out an update of its big 2001 report that rattled the forestry establishment, and found only the slightest smidgen of progress in the decade preceding 2006: clearcutting down from 97 per cent to 94 per cent of total forest cutting and select logging up from a pathetic 0.9 per cent to 1.5 per cent. On the longer term, the existence of old forest (over 80 years of age) is down 94 per cent in the last half-century, while forest younger than 20 years of age is up a staggering 327 per cent. That’s the broomstick forest you see everywhere.

Meanwhile, Nova Scotia is second-last in Canada in what it gets for its wood – $108 per cubic metre. The Canadian average is $183. Manitoba, which has an NDP government less beholden to large outside interests and which promotes a value-added forestry, gets a staggering $428 per cubic metre, according to GPI. In that update, GPI forestry researcher Linda Pannozzo gives this account of what has to be done: "Immediate protection of all remaining old forests, a sharp reduction in clearcutting and harvest volumes, much stronger incentives to support selection harvesting and uneven-aged management harvesting, and a determined shift to value-added forest products that produce more jobs and economic value per unit of wood and thus require less timber." There’s nothing new in that call. It just has problems getting through. We’ll see if it does this time.

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