Published Writing
What is really happening in our forests
https://capebretonspectator.com/category/contributors/samuel-ainsworth/?print=print-search
I come before you today not as an expert or as someone with higher authority. I come before you as a citizen of this land who has grave concerns about the management of our provincial natural resources. Before I begin I would like to acknowledge the people who lived here for over 10 000 years. I am aware that the small bit of knowledge I have learned about the forests, animals and waterways from living intimately with them for the past few years is nothing compared to the deep wisdom and understanding the Mik’maq have of this beautiful land.
The wealth of a sovereign nation used to be measured by the reserves of tall, strong long-lived trees. The forests and the trees in them are a precious valuable resource that is critical to the prosperity of this province. Nova Scotia’s trees at one time towered over the rivers and lakes and if we could go back in time would inspire awe in their majesty.
This resource that Nova Scotia once had allowed us to become a world leader in shipbuilding. Nova Scotia’s ships were world renowned for their strength, speed and beauty. The people had great pride in their ability to take the strong timbers of the forest and craft them into things of beauty, and from them command the world’s oceans. Because of this, the reputation of Nova Scotians was one of intelligence, toughness and resourcefulness.
In the 1950s they began bottom dragging on Grand Banks. All the inshore fishermen fought against this, as they knew it was going to destroy the fishing. The government told them everything was fine and not to worry. In less than 5o years the greatest fishery in the world was destroyed and in 1992 the cod fishery was closed putting more than 40 000 people out of work. Industry greed and government incompetence ruined the greatest resource we had on the Atlantic seaboard. I say all this to point out that the forests of this province can produce big healthy trees that can support our people, but this resource can only bring us prosperity if it managed properly as the great tragedy of the cod fishery so clearly demonstrates.
Today in Nova Scotia we have less than 1% of forests that are older than 100 years (DNR’s # from 2008). The World Wildlife Fund has declared our Acadian Forests endangered. The woodland caribou is extinct in our province as is the eastern wolf. The mainland moose is barely holding on and the list of endangered species of plants and animals and fish is over 60.
Imagine this: You have an orchard of beautiful productive apple trees your grandmother planted. You hire a manager to help you manage your orchard. On his resume, his mission statement is: “To work with Nova Scotians to build a better future through sustainable natural resource management.” You feel good about all the great things on paper and hire this manager. You decide to go for a holiday and leave your orchard in your manager’s hands. Coming back, what you see horrifies you. All that is left is a devastation of stumps, ruts and mud. Your orchard and family legacy has been destroyed. Seething with anger you go to see your manager. He looks at you straight in the face and tells you everything is fine and not to worry as everything is sustainable. Imagine how you would feel in this situation.
In 2012, Ronald W. Stern’s company, The Stern Partners Inc. in Vancouver struck gold when they bought the Stora Mill in Port Hawkesbury for 33 million. In this deal, they got the rights to over 1 million acres of Crown Land. The taxpayers were also fleeced of a whopping 156 million dollars without their consent. Here is what we paid:
- 20 million to buy this company 50 000 more acres of land.
- 19 million for the forestry sector, and to build roads for Mr. Stern
- 24 million to make the Mill more productive
- 38 million for sustainable harvesting and forest management
- 12 million to keep the mill in hot idle.
We shelled out 156 million. He shelled out 33 million. Also just a side note: Mr. Stern’s total revenue last year from all his companies was a staggering 1.75 billion dollars.
We work hard in this province and have some of the highest taxes in Canada yet we are always being told there is no money. Our roads are crumbling, our water infrastructure is leaky, and our doctors, nurses, and teachers have to fight tooth and nail for fair wages. One in three children in Cape Breton is below the poverty line. Yet we have 156 million for Mr. Stern. Does this make any sense to you?
Let’s compare two business models: One from the pulp mill in Port Hawkesbury and one from Larchwood in Margaree. The pulp mill harvests about 240 000 cords of wood a year and they directly employ 300 people. That works out to 800 cords per job. Larchwood uses about 200 cords per year and has 14 direct jobs. This works out to 14 cords per job. It takes 57 times more wood to create one job in Port Hawkesbury. Is this good value?
The massive corporations that are leveling our crown lands are not here to give us jobs. They are here for one reason—to make money. They are here because they have very cheap access to our resources, without which they can’t make money. The source of the revenue being generated is our land, not these big companies.
We have a huge restoration project ahead of us and instead of subsidizing the clear-cutting of our lands and planting fiber farms we should be helping mother nature do what she wants to do which is grow big healthy trees. We gave 156 million dollars to pillage our lands, just imagine how many people we could put on the ground doing the right silvicultural work with this kind of money.
A democracy is a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them or their elected agents, We elect our Premier and then he or she appoints the ministers, which form the cabinet. The minister of Natural Resources, charged with managing our natural resources, is supposed to be there to represent our will and execute the wishes of the people.
In 2008 over 2000 Nova Scotians were asked how they wanted our lands to be managed. The values agreed upon were sustainability, diversity, collaboration, transparency and informed decision-making. The goal of this work was to reshape how our natural resources were being used. The forestry panel was made up of Bob Bancroft, biologist and former conservation officer, and Donna Crossland, who has a Masters of Science in Forestry; and Jonathan Porter, an ex-Bowater employee and clear-cutting fundamentalist. Mr. Porter would not work with Bob and Donna and produced his own report.
The vocabulary in the report published by Bob and Donna represented the voice of what Nova Scotians want. Some of the words used in the report were: high quality trees, ecology based. multi-aged forest, watershed protection, wildlife biodiversity and stewardship.
The vocabulary used in Mr. Porter’s report was: clear-cutting, herbicide application, reducing red tape and biomass.
The report by Bob and Donna was a great report and it represented the values of Nova Scotians. It was seen as a ray of hope in a history of exploitation and destruction but was extinguished by Mr. Porter, and yet again the voices of the people were ignored. Four year later, DNR hired Mr. Porter as the Executive Director of the Department’s Renewable Resource branch.
Corruption is defined as misuse of entrusted power for private gain. It includes patronage, fraud, theft, political party financing, collusion and conflict of interest. The story of what is happening to our forests is directly linked to the connections between the regulators and the industries doing the damage. This revolving door is here for everyone to see.
The Auditor General released a report last year. It stated:
- DNR does not have the necessary procedures in place to ensure timber harvest reporting is complete and accurate and does not perform regular monitoring of harvest limits. This could result in underpayment of stumpage fees.
- We found no evidence of an approved plan in 10 of the 13 silvicultural sites’ files we examined.
- DNR does not verify that silvicultural work has been completed to Department standards before it reimburses operators. This may result in forest harvest activities becoming unsustainable and reducing economic benefits to the province.
Moses Coady, the founder of the cooperative movement in Canada said: “Environmental problems stem from an ignorance of science, concentration of land ownership in the hands of a few and the exploitation of the lands for profit.” Sound familiar? When our Minister of Natural Resources says, “In some areas, clear-cutting will not have an impact on the total health of the forest, it may even improve it” we can start to understand the ignorance Moses Coady was talking about. How can you be talking about the health of a forest if you just cut it down? This is plain nonsense.
Our forests are our most important allies for our survival into the future. Here is a list of the critical functions they provide:
- 1 acre of healthy forest provides enough oxygen in 1 year for the survival of 18 people.
- Sequester carbon out of the atmosphere
- Provide habitat for our precious wildlife
- Control flooding and preservation of our watersheds
- Filter out air pollution.
If we continue on the “don’t worry everything is fine” path we are currently on, we are going to be left with a ravaged eroded bushland with silted rivers and vanquished wildlife. My plea to you all is to go to where the cutting is being done; observe it for yourselves; educate yourselves and others about what is happening to our forests.
I want to thank you all for your attention and time and am going to end with a quote from a true leader, Franklin Roosevelt: “Here is your country. Cherish the natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage for your children and your children’s children. Do not let selfish or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance.”
Choppers and Good Cheer
The last leaves have fallen to the forest floor and as I look out across my little forested valley I would like to take this time to respond to the Margaree Salmon Association’s request for suggestions on how to move forward into the future. Before I do that, I believe it is important to point out some serious problems with the MSA’s new friendship with Port Hawkesbury Paper and the new study on the Margaree river created with Matrix Solutions Inc. There is something definitely ‘at large’ in this new study and the claim that the river is in “fantastic heath” is, I believe, to be a serious disservice to the salmon, the river and the intelligence of the people of Margaree and their ancestors who have lived alongside this beautiful river for over 200 years.
The company hired to help create the study, Matrix Solutions Inc., based out of Calgary, states on its own website: ”Our services and roots reach deep into a variety of industries from oil and gas, mining, pipelines, infrastructure and more”. Matrix Inc. has worked for such projects as the Bakken crude oil pipeline, Bankers Petroleum Albania Ltd, fracking in Alberta and the Irvings. Closer to home Matrix Inc. was hired by Alton gas to help approve a project that will pump 10 million litres of salt brine each day into the Shubenacadie river system.
In light of all this information I have three questions: 1) Who recommended this company to the MSA? 2) How much money did Matrix Inc charge for this study? 3) Has Matrix Inc ever done any work for PHP or it owner mega industrialist Ron Stern.
The report created in partnership with Matrix Inc talks about excessive downgrading and deep cuts into the channel bed. Parts of the river are eroding the banks and fields at a rate of up to 12 feet per year (this fact alone is a HUGE red flag) with the average around 5 feet per year. The conclusion reached is that “we have a river of significant instability” and “this is what rivers do.” These statement normalize an very abnormal situation.
Doing some elementary math with these numbers we can get a broader historical context: James Ross and his family came to northeast Margaree in 1800 and started farming the same year he arrived. By 1804 his three brothers Edmund, David and William followed him and were all farming in the valley. Irad Hart, his wife and six children were the first settlers to start farming on the western side of the river in 1809. People have been farming in the valley bottom for over 200 years. Taking Matrix Inc’s study with the average erosion rates of 5 feet per year over 200 years we would have erosion over 1000 feet across the valley, and 2400 feet of lost land in the worst spots (12 feet per year). If this was the natural rate of erosion over 200 years, almost all the farmland and houses along West Big Intervale Rd. and half the farms along the entire length of the Margaree would have disappeared into the river decades ago.
This did not happen because for 150 of those years there was no massive industrial clear-cutting of the head waters. Talk to anyone who grew up fishing on the river and the story is the same: Nowadays, the river floods faster and is much more destructive than in the past. Salmon pools (Forks, Brook and Cemetery pools) that have been fished for hundreds of years are now gone or are drastically altered. This new study, conducted over just a few months, with no baseline information, and not taking into account the hundreds of years of history is very misleading. Without looking into what caused this dramatic change and accelerated erosion into the banks and farm lands is like analysing the fatty tissue of someone who eats 10 lbs of bacon and washes it down with 4 liters of pop every day and never analysing their diet. Everyone knew before Matrix came in that the river had changed in a big way and the most important question What is causing this change? is being asked by no one.
In the Oran article outlining the study, PHP claims they are cutting only 3662 hectares of the watershed in the next four years–as if this is something great for the river and the salmon. It is important to put these numbers in context. First of all, everyone I know in the valley operates in acres; so 3662 ha. is 9048.99 acres of water-drinking, water-storing trees gone in just 4 years.Remember this example is not taking into account the the hundreds of thousands of acres cut in the last 50 years.
A conservative estimate of how many cords are harvested per acre is 10 cords. A cord of green pulpwood weighs about 2 tons (4000 lbs) and half of that weight is water (2000lbs). Hence our equation is as follows 2000(lbs) x 10(cords) x 9000(acres) = 180 000 000 lbs or 81 million liters of water that are no longer held by the trees that have will be cut in just 4 years. Is it any wonder that the lower river is being torn apart at such an alarming rate?
In short, this means you no longer have these trees to soak up the rain and store it . This is the main reason why all the peer-reviewed science in the world agrees that clearcuts are so destructive to rivers. Every time you see a pulp truck heading down to the mill understand that half of that load is water and those trees are no longer there to absorb the spring snow melts and heavy rains.
The next major problem with this study is that it was undertaken in the dry summer over a very short period. The changes that are happening to the river are not happening when the river is low; they are happening when the river is flooding. A study that would truly give a scientific understanding would focus on measuring and collecting data during a heavy rain event. That is when all the damage is done to the salmon pools and peoples’ land. If you want to get accurate data on the changes in the watershed, you must test your samples directly below a clear cut and roadway during a heavy rain event, and you must also measure total suspended solids. This data must be compared to a sample from a brook on which there has been no logging.
The National Research Council (2003) reported that “after dams, roads are the most significant impediment to the Atlantic Salmon Recovery”. PHP has scores of logging roads that cross the Margaree tributaries and almost none of them have any erosion control to keep the roadways from washing into the waterways. These brooks and streams are choked with siltation and sediment that came from the logging roads (see my youtube video Beethoven and Bullsh**). If anyone wants to see the washout going from the roads and ditches straight into the brooks, just stop at any culverts on the way to Cape Clear, accessed by Fielding Rd. in NE Margaree–also a great drive to see the magnitude of the clear cutting being done in the highlands. If PHP claims to care so much about the environment and the Margaree why wouldn’t they help mitigate these washouts by taking the most basic measures? These would not be happening if it weren’t for the logging roads used to access our trees for their profit.
Come on PHP! Out of 156 million of our money, you can’t even put a few hay bales to at least give the impression you care. Hay is a lot cheaper than $5000 chopper flights but I guess if it’s not your money anyway, who cares?
My suggestions to the MSA are as follows:
- Instead of giving thousands of dollars away to a company like Matrix, why not reach out to one of our universities like St FX and create a partnership? The Margaree watershed has great potential for thesis topics and could benefit from having young scientists invested in research in the valley. These studies cannot shy away from clearcutting in the headwaters if they are going to have serious credibility. Core data need to be collected at key points every year, particularly during high water and this must include total suspended solids.
- The cause(s) of the accelerated erosion rates must be seriously investigated. Normalising this dramatic change is very misleading to the public and landowners.
3.Study the effects of erosion and sedimentation of road crossings, particularly in the sensitive highlands. The MSA must put pressure on the pulp mill to start protecting these tributaries from the washouts and erosion from the logging roads. This would be easily accessible work and is the number one impediment to atlantic salmon recovery after dams and should become a major priority of the MSA.
- Stop taking free chopper rides from the pulp mill as this affects your credibility in the public’s eye and is a very dangerous road to go down. In addition, partnering with a pulp mill undermines your mandate to protect the salmon and its habitat because PHP is destroying this very same habitat.This situation is exactly the reason why laws were created around conflict of interest.
In closing I know there are many good people in the valley and the MSA who care deeply about the river, salmon and the land. I believe that parts of this new study do a disservice to all three. If the river is to become resilient again and the pools to deepen, it is our responsibility as conscious humans to use the bright flames of science, logic and reason to solve the problems we have created. The salmon need us to hold the torch high and not have it darkened by corporate interests and profit. Can we not have one river in this province allowed to heal and to be spared the relentless ravages of industry? The Margaree could be a beacon of light in a very dark history for salmon in this province but the clearcutting must be drastically reduced.
Looking up from my pen and paper I look out the window across the valley and the tumbling brook below and remember the words of Moses Coady who said in 1939 that ”environmental problems stemmed from an ignorance of science,concentration of rural land ownership in the hands of a few and exploitation of the lands primarily for profit”.
For more information and photos about this topic go to Save the Margaree Watershed on Facebook.
Deep into the Woods
https://invernesscounty.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/The-Participaper-Vol-35-No3.pdf
The year was 2009 the month was May. I stood alone in the forest next to a big pile of tools and equipment. I heard the sound of the truck that had dropped me off fade into the distance. Very quiet and still the trees around me reached up into the sky striving for the sun that had yet to unfurl the leaves on their branches. I made a trail into my land and spent the next 4 days hauling all the tools for my survival into the spot I had chosen for my cabin. As I hauled the tools for my life into the woods, the woods began to breathe their life into me. And so began my adventure into the Acadian forests of Cape Breton.
I spent the first spring, summer, and fall clearing a small piece of land, building my cabin and chopping wood. In my own little valley next to a cold clear brook the work was hot and heavy but not tedious. The heat of the work was tempered by many quick refreshing dips into the cold brook. I got the roof of my cabin on in the late fall and moved from my tent into my cabin. The elation of lighting my first fire in the cabin on Jan 2, 2010 is still warmly etched into my memory. What a moment, with the cold wind driving the snow sideways outside, to hear the crackle of the fire and feel the heat slowly warm my bones and fill up the cabin. The fire in my stove was more than just heat, it was my companion, it was hot water, it was survival. It warmed my soul to come back from the mountaintop and see the smoke rising up from the chimney knowing that I would soon be warm and dry.
Now that the survival phase was over I had time to explore and get to know the forest better. With great excitement I would discover new majestic sugar maples and regal tough old yellow birch. I discovered one ancient king who dominated the wood, a very strong and beautiful yellow birch, I named him Old Chief. I would often make a special pilgrimage to see the Old Chief and think about the centuries that had passed since he was a young sapling. He would have been living when the first white settlers dropped their black anchors into the clear waters off this coast to row ashore with their tools and dreams, just as I had done.
Talking with the older local people in the community I learned that my land hadn’t been cut until 1964. It was patch cut, the straight hardwood were taken and what was unsuitable for lumber was left standing. The old trees that were left reseeded the cut areas with yellow birch and sugar maple. Now 60 years later these young trees were about 40 feet tall growing in dense groves between the areas of older trees. A forestry friend of mine came up to see me and walk through the woodland with me, as I had little knowledge about the best way to manage the forest. He suggested that I had a great site to do silviculture to help the young hardwoods grow stronger and faster. Silviculture is the art and science of managing the growth, composition, health and quality of woodland to meet the diverse needs of the land owners and society on a sustainable basis. I spent the next 4 winters on snow shoes working with my chainsaw removing the crooked, weak and small trees from the stands and leaving the tall, strong, straight trees. With great satisfaction I would often take my tea break sitting on a log looking at these groves after I had spaced these trees and felt as good as the chickadees that were playing above me.
As I worked in my forest and worked with wood for my buildings I started thinking about all the things we make from wood, the list was massive. The forests provide us with hundreds or uses for their timbers and also the wood to keep our homes warm in the winter. Also the forest provide us with many other non-timber products such as maple syrup, fiddle heads, mushrooms and many medicinal plant and flowers. As well, think of the paper that is in all of our books, newspapers, paper towel and toilet paper. All of these products come from the forest and we use them every single day. Trying to imagine the world without wood was a pretty dismal experiment.
There is also tremendous spiritual strength that humans have always drawn from the forest and from trees. The first temples of the ancient Greeks and Romans were trees and their first cathedrals were groves of ancient trees. The Mi’ Kmaq always gave thanks to the spirit of the trees when they were cut and had great respect for the forest as the giver of life. Henry David Thoreau drew deep inspiration from the forest and wrote “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential fact of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover I had not lived. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” Thoreau was a big influence Tolstoy, Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. A friend of mine in the Margaree told me a story about a man who worked in the woods his whole life. This man was unable to get to the woods anymore and my friend took him some Mayflowers after a long winter, as the man smelled these flowers he was reminded of the woods and it moved him to tears. This is how powerful the effect of the forest can have on our spirits.
In March of 2013 I purchased a beautiful Belgian draft horse named Duke. He was five years old and had a very kind eye. With the help and encouragement of Leo LeBlanc and his son Ben we spent a month hitching Duke to every sleigh, cart and horse Leo had on his farm. Usually it is said that a green horse and a green driver leave both black and blue. However, under the watchful eye of the horse boss, Duke and I got along great. It was a great month, with me Leo and Ben often heading up to the woods with Duke, Foster and Diamond and coming home with a good jag of firewood. We hitched Duke up 27 times in the first 30 days and after that intensive training I was comfortable heading to the woods with Duke by myself.
A well broke horse can teach you
Good legs, stout heart and gentle
Go slow, work smart, be steady
The rest is simple.
Until very recently, the horse was the most powerful tool for humans in managing the forest. A horse cannot compete with a big harvester that costs half a million dollars, but there are many advantages of a horse over a machine on small woodlots, you don’t need to build massive roads into your woods ,you don’t compact or rip up the forest soil which is critical for growing good timber. Also there is beauty and value in working with a living animal rather than a big, expensive, noisy, smelly machine. With a horse you can handpick trees, get them out and leave a healthy forest behind. Given careful management it is possible to harvest firewood, poles, and saw logs from woodlands without reducing the capacity of the forest to continue its full range of ecological functions and to provide the yields to future generations. Thinning of regrowth forest allows the remaining trees to grow faster and to a larger size. If the most desirable trees are always removed the value of a forest is degraded over time. Always go in and take the worst leave the best until your woodlot is healthy then you can start harvesting some of your big high value trees. With a properly managed woodlot Your capital(standing forest) is increasing as well as your dividends(periodic harvesting of wood).When we restore and heal the forest we also restore and heal ourselves.
Recently, I have been doing work on my girlfriend’s woodlot. I call it forestscaping. Find the most beautiful aspects of a woodland, be it a brook, a view of the ocean or a special tree and enhance the special aspects of these areas. I enjoy designing these spaces and clearing out dead trees and brush and building benches small shelters and a firepit so these spots become a comfortable place to spend time. There are so many beautiful spots in this county that could be realised with a good approach and some positive impact forestscaping. A lot of these spots are sensitive and special and would be ruined if a big road was put in there. Small trails to secret spots are something that can be cherished by future generations. There are also many different values that people are trending towards other than straight timber extraction, such as small eco- cabins, recreational trails for hiking and skiing, wildlife biodiversity and spiritual retreats. Most of these kind of projects can be best realised with a good plan, a chainsaw and a good horse, without changing the integrity of the forest. This kind of work combined with some silvicultural work can really get people back into their woods and can create a very strong bond between them and their trees. It’s kind of like designing a giant garden with giant plants you tend and can walk under.
I believe there is tremendous potential in the forests of Cape Breton. We need to develop a more sensitive approach to management and develop more small value added buisnesses rather than trucking out huge quantities of low-grade trees for a single product. A great example of multiplying the value of a log incredibly is Otis a Tomas. Otis has been making fiddles, cellos and other musical instruments for years from a single big sugar maple tree. He sells these instrument for thousands of dollars apiece and it is a functional work of art that people cherish and pass on to their children. Other good examples are Finewood flooring and Larchwood. The forest are providing the material for these small buisnesses that employ people year round. We need more of this. I also believe we should have community forests where people who don’t own forests can go and work and learn about proper management of our woodlands and help educate our children about the value of the forests. This could also be a good place to get fire wood for older people who can’t get their own firewood so they have some energy security. We gave a million acres to the mill owned by an American corporation for nothing, why not have a few thousand acres for the use of local people and local buisnesses? There is some will on the part of the province as they see it working well in provinces such as Ontario and British Columbia.
Our forest here in cape Breton are some of the richest and diverse temperate deciduous forests in the world. They have taken a beating, yes, but these trees are strong and are trying to get back to the balance it once had, it is in our interest to help mother nature in this process. They are the home of our moose, deer, rabbits and grouse. They filter the water for our wells and provide needed shade for the salmon and trout. They provide the most beautiful color to our festivals and the symbol for our nation. Our forests are the key to our long term survival and our best allies in the uncertain future that is unfolding. We don’t need more parks, we need to work with our forests and to learn from them. We need to help them do what they do best which is to reach for the sun and grow big and strong. Go to your woods, visit your strong and deep-rooted neighbors. Don’t ask what can your woods do for you, ask what can you do for your woods? And if you listen, observe carefully and do the right work you will leave a living legacy that can provide for you and future generations.
Trees of Life
We are the walls of your home
The chairs for your weary
The table for your food
The timbers for your barn
The posts for your fences
The poles for your power
We are the trees in your forest.
We are the wharves for your boats
The shade for your salmon
The trap for your lobster
The apples for your pies
The syrup for your pancakes
The barrels for your whiskey
We are the trees in your forest.
We are the fiddles for your music
The floors for your dancing
The colours for your festival
The wood for your stoves
The fuel for your beach fires
The paper in your books
We are the trees in your forest.
We are the steeples for your churches
The alter for your prayers
The pews for the faithful
The coffins for your passed
The cradles for your babies
The leaf for your flag
We are the trees in your forest.
We are the oldest living beings
The temples of your ancestors
The givers of the air you breathe
Yes, we are the Trees, the life giving Trees.