Nina Newington was at her logging protest camp deep in the tinder-dry woods of Nova Scotia's Annapolis County early Tuesday afternoon when she learned the woods were being closed. She would need to get out of the bush within the next three hours or risk a $25,000 fine.
Tim Houston, the province's premier, had just banned anyone from entering the province's woodlands until Oct. 15 or until substantial rain reduces wildfire risk. Private landowners can still move about on their own property, but are forbidden from hosting others “to use wooded areas of their properties.”
Newington, who heads a group of citizen scientists called Save Our Old Forests, had spent the previous four months camped out on Crown land in a cluster of cutblocks slated for clear cutting, combing them for species at risk and nooks of old-growth forest. The ban cut Newington's efforts short, leaving her stranded at home, wondering if all their work to protect the forests was about to be undone.
The same is not true for forestry operators, who have been granted special exemptions from the wildfire restrictions. They are free to continue cutting trees, hauling them, doing silviculture (except planting) and road work on private land, which comprises about 70 percent of the province. On Crown land they're restricted to logging at night.
Several of these activities are deemed high risk under British Columbia’s wildfire act. Despite the extreme wildfire risks in Nova Scotia, however, the provincial government has issued blanket permits to forestry operators to continue logging on Crown land.
Todd Burgess, executive director of Forest Nova Scotia, said his group is "very supportive" of the ban, because the risk is so high. Nighttime logging is an exception, because it's a "measured risk that's worthwhile right now."
Industrial logging is "one of the main accelerants of the problem," said Mike Lancaster, executive director of the St. Margaret's Bay Stewardship Association. It has left more fire-prone trees and deadwood than would have once existed, transforming the landscape into a tinderbox.
"The pre-European forests that typically covered Nova Scotia, PEI and New Brunswick were these dark, closed canopy, very old forests for the most part," said Donna Crossland, a forest ecologist and vice-president of Nature Nova Scotia.
Because of the trees' size, shrubbery or small limbs couldn't grow and the ground was a lot more moist, making it nearly impossible for a fire to spread. Major wildfires only started after Europeans arrived, and they were almost exclusively triggered by human- or machine-caused fires getting out of hand, she explained.
The late 1700s and 1800s saw "wave after wave of fire" as settlers logged, cleared the land and covered the Maritimes with railways and sparking trains.
The ecological changes continued into the present as the pulp-and-paper and timber industries planted more fire-prone conifers and sprayed herbicides to kill off more fire-resistant deciduous trees.
Normally, Nova Scotia Environment and Climate Change (NSECC) issues herbicide spray permits for forestry operators in August, and makes those public. So far this year, there has been no official word about spray permits, but signs are appearing in woodlands notifying people that spraying has been approved.
The glyphosate spray kills broad-leaf plants and deciduous trees that compete with the conifers, and in doing so, produces large amounts of highly flammable dead material in the landscape. Inquiries to NSECC and to Natural Resources, the department in charge of enforcing the wildfire restrictions, on whether spraying can go ahead with such extreme wildfire risk in the woodlands went unanswered
Between 2001 and 2024 Nova Scotia lost about 17 percent of the tree cover the province had in 2000. The vast majority of this loss came from forestry, according to data collected by Global Forest Watch. Researchers have also pinned the shift on logging patterns.