Click on image to go to Interview. It begins at approx. 41 mins in.
CBC: Your long weekend just got better, because Now or Never’s latest podcast just dropped and we’re taking you on adventures across the country. We start in Winnipeg…
In a Nova Scotia forest, Nina Newington and Lisa Proulx are putting up tents, turning on camp stoves, and settling in for a summer of trying to protect the forest from logging. Their tools are tiny —endangered lichens almost imperceptible to the naked eye — but their love for the forest is big, and determination is growing by the day.
Lichen Camp 2025 — Day 25
Nina Newington, May 7, 2025 “A busy day at Lichen Camp yesterday. Deb Kuzyk painted a lovely new sign. Then CBC’s Moira Donovan came to tape a segment on lichen hunting to save forests for “Now or Never”. That should air on CBC radio on May 15th…” From 2025 Lichen Camp
[ 41:56 ] CBC: …Deep in a Nova Scotia forest a group of campers are settling in for a different kind of ritual.
NN: This was actually the first place I kept eyes on a logging road, right here,we managed to stop it then but now we’ve had to come back.
CBC: In a canvas tent by the side of a logging Rd., Nina Newington and other members of Lichen Camp are preparing to spend months in this stretch of Nova Scotia forest.
NN: I think that’ decrepit looking probably Red Maple in ther, I would say that’s where I should look. We should go waiting in, and actually I’m going to tuck my socks into my pants.
CBC: Nina & Lisa Proulx are citizen scientists scanning the woods for signs of life. They are inspecting trees for tiny at-risk lichens that are almost too small for the naked eye but they are significant enough to stop the harvesting activity happening around them.
LP: now this is interesting, OK, to do a little climbing here… we have these little handy dandy magnifiers… it’s just amazing, once you start looking closely at things, you know you see things that you walk by before…Here is a stubble Lichen, c’mon over
NN: just about to get in the car and then you hear Lisa go oh oh look, Stubble Lichens on the alder… I just like OK but she has this just incredible fabulous boundless enthusiasm I mean it’s just it’s like the soundtrack of our hunts in the woods to me as Lisa goes woohoo, or hey, look! it’s wonderful like just shared joy. [44:07]
CBC: It is that shared joy and their determination to protect this forest that has kept Nina and Lisa coming back here for years.
NN: Some of it was actually a local person paddling on the lakes and she’d seen this peninsula and gone wow this is really a cool place, and then and then she started looking around and kind of said, actually you should really look at the whole Goldsmith lake area. And that was some years ago. And then couple of us came in and after a while you realize how whole those forests feel, and it’s a really different feel than being in a piece of sort of managed forest that’s been kind of limited, it just feels really good to try and help preserve that wholeness and bring it back. [45:03]
It’s not that the whole, it’s a big area we’re trying to protect, it’s like 3900 hectares, a good chunk of it has been cut, there’s nowhere in Nova Scotia that, you know, has continuous virgin forests.
But there are a lot of places where you start walking down trail and you go wow. All of a sudden, they put in harvest plans to log 460 hectares, which was just huge and we just went oh wait.
I had heard about people doing this in BC who was looking for lichens – although they don’t actually have an Endangered Species Act and we do – so that was really like putting out the word and then somebody coming and finding 1 and when the snow melted, Lisa finding two more’.
And we kind of went Huh!
LP: My first thought was that this one tree, it can’t be and it was really quite a rush to think that this one tree will be protected by a 100m buffer, and that we really gave us the incentive to keep looking, and then we would find more and some days we would go all day and not find anything; and it’s funny ’cause looking back at that first one that I found, it first one actually that was found at Goldsmith Lake. [46:12]
CBC: Because of this groups lichen looking, they have managed to reduce the amount of proposed logging to half of what was originally planned. But in April, Lisa made a discovery at their old campsites in another area of the forest
LP: we happen to drive by the area where we camped last year and there was one of those big feller buncher machines there, and our hearts just sank.
NN: We set up the camp on the 13th of Sunday and nobody came on Monday and nobody touched the fellow bunch of it you could see we began to realize like oh it had already cut into a bit of that forest but they weren’t any of the warning signs that are supposed to be around or anything.
Tuesday, truck pulled up and they basically said you have to leave this is an industrial work area.
And we had already sort of discussed this and realized that we probably were not going to be trying to block them from cutting it.
The first they were cutting, the particular area iwas clear cut in 1972, it was sprayed it was managed, but you know we had spent a lot of time in it and what you see is that it’s beginning to heal.
So we made the decision, and we moved the camp on the Friday because I know that where we camped now the forest on this peninsula is really extraordinarily ecologically valuable; and if we had to choose, that I would have chosen to protect this one.
[48;50} So, it was brutal, it’s how it is here, we make the games that we can make on behalf of nature and sometimes they are enough and sometimes they’re not.
LP: It gets very frustrating to get tired after awhile, ’cause we do a lot of times, we go every week sometimes two or three times a week and it seems or it seemed at least for the longest time that nobody was listening to us; and yet we were finding, you know, these lichens that were legally protected and they just weren’t paying any attention to us.
And then they started cutting and we’re thinking well why bother anymore
NN: especially in the early hours of the morning sometimes you go you know what are we going to have to do?
And I confess that this spring I was watching spring come in my garden, I have a big garden, I was really enjoying watching and I was like, maybe we won’t have to camp this year.
And I was actually pretty good with that. And then it was like hell, you know you spotted that, equipment and we went OK.
And really we had that camp up and running in 24 hours from when I realized what your message said. I don’t know I just accept that it’s my jobl do you know what I mean like something in me has just said I’m going to do what I can and if I weren’t doing that I don’t think I’d feel very good about my life, you know.
Sometimes you just say OK now you have to put on your frosted glass risk as blinders
LP: it’s very hard to stop looking when you see something like that so I’m always the one that lags behind sticking my head and tree holes.
NN: for a long time they just pretended that I proposal didn’t really exist. and it wasn’t relevant but we actually just found out that the area has been put into formal assessment for protection.
Which is great and it’s a process that takes about a year. But they’re going to keep logging. So you know we’re going to go on doing what we’re doing which is sort of documenting the value of the area and also finding the species at risk that will keep nibbling away and saying for goodness sake isn’t it time to stop?
LP: every time we come here we find something that’s a little more special that you might not see somewhere else , and that that’s the thing that has really kept us going. I always used to think that what can I do I’m just one person. Well if I’m with Nina, we are two people and you know we just keep adding up and we’re spreading all across the province.
NN: I do think about the moment when this area gets protected and I think I’m going to cry, you know, I mean just kind of cry with relief.
Do I think that’s the end of the work? No I hope to like give myself a little bit of a breather but you know it’s, the work is going to go on, because it’s not just this area.
CBC: We reached out to Nova scotia’s Department of Environment and climate change and the department of natural resources and they say that they are focused on the goal of protecting 15% of land and water by 2026 and are continuing to implement forestry policy on crown land in the meantime .
They also say that there’s no decision yet about Goldsmith Lake, but the areas identified as having old growth and species at risk have been removed from the logging plan
And the harvest is free to continue. [51:27]