Stories Maps Tell

Forest around Goldsmith Lake November, 2022. Drone photo credit Malachi Warr
Click on images for larger versions

Part I:  Just not true?

By Nina Newington

One frigid November day in 2022, CBC came out to film citizen scientists on the South Mountain in Annapolis County. The group had identified 7 species at risk occurrences in areas the Department of Natural Resources and Renewables (NRR) had approved for logging around Goldsmith Lake.

Breck Stuart,  General Manager of WestFor penned an op-ed in the Chronicle Herald in response. It began:

The area around Goldsmith Lake in Annapolis County has caught the eye of anti-forestry perspectives here in Nova Scotia. These 10,000 acres have been painted in the media as old, untouched pieces of forest that should be protected because of these qualities. We thought it would be important for the public to know this is just not true.

The area was previously owned by the Bowater Mersey forestry company and used extensively for forestry. This area was clearcut in 1975-76 and sprayed with herbicide and had several silviculture treatments applied in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Source: www.pressreader.com Dec 2, 2022

WestFor’s Community Engagement Officer sent DNR a copy of the Op-Ed on November 29, 2022, noting “I just wanted to keep you in the loop and let you know that we are doing our best to show the forestry side of this.”*
*This information comes from a Freedom of Information request I filed regarding the 462 ha of harvest plans proposed in the area surrounding Goldsmith Lake.

In an email sent earlier that day DNR’s Resource Manager for the Western Region ended, “Of note most of this area was cut in the 1970’s by Bowater, then pct’d, etc. Managed forest.”

By December 2023 this had morphed into two bullet points for ministerial briefing notes and media:

  • Goldsmith Lake was purchased from Bowater Mersey in 2012
  • Historical forest management records came with the purchase and go back to 1970 showing extensive silviculture activities that included harvest, commercial and pre-commercial thinning, tree planting and herbicide application (attached map)

NRR’s statement isn’t quite as blanket as WestFor’s claim that “the area was clearcut in 1975-1976” but it paints the same picture: this 10,000 acre area is not worth protecting.

According to the MLA for Annapolis at the time, Carman Kerr, whenever he asked the Minister of Natural Resources, Tory Rushton, about the Goldsmith Lake Wilderness Area – an area his constituents had proposed for protection in November 2022 – he was met with the same response: ‘My staff inform me Goldsmith Lake is managed forest and that’s not changing.’

Ministers are busy people. They rely on information from staff. But was the information given to the minister by the Forestry Division staff of DNR accurate? The ‘attached map’ referred to in the briefing note is included in the Freedom of Information Request. As Bowater’s visual representation of how they managed the area between 1970 and 2012, it is worth taking a close look at.

The map in question

Map 1: Bowater’s visual representation of how they managed the Goldsmith Lake area forests between 1970 and 2012.  The map was provided in NS Gov’s  Freedom of Information response

The wishbone shaped dark body of water in the centre is Goldsmith Lake. To the east are Corbett Lake then Dalhousie Lake. The dark grey areas are private land, the rest is Crown. The plain pale grey areas were not cut or ‘treated’ during Bowater’s tenure.

DNR has added to the original map the outlines of the harvest plans they approved in 2022, using darker lines to the east of Goldsmith Lake and paler ones to the west.

For anyone accustomed to how much Crown Land in this province has been cut and how much it has been fragmented, the first thing that stands out on this map are the large untouched areas to either side of Goldsmith Lake and between Corbett and Dalhousie Lakes.

Then you start to notice all the smaller patches between the cross hatched and spotted areas. According to Bowater, these weren’t cut or treated between 1970 and 2012 either. This is definitely a glass half-full/glass half-empty moment.

There is a LOT of forest that was not touched during Bowater’s tenure. Of the areas that were cut during that time, most were cut between 1970 and 1994 so they are now 30-55 years old.

It is interesting that DNR added to this historic map the boundaries of the harvest plans they approved for the area in 2022. Did they think this would show that they were only approving harvesting of already ‘managed’ areas? What the map actually shows is that, particularly on the west side of Goldsmith Lake, they approved the logging of areas that had not been touched by Bowater.

Map 2:  Boundaries of the harvest plans approved in 2022 include both managed forest and forest untouched by Bowater.

Missing from the map
There is something important that the Bowater map does not show: two large patches of recognized Old Growth Forest on the west side of the lake. These patches were expanded by DNR in 2022 in the course of their Integrated Resource Management review process.

Map 3: Two large patches of recognized Old Growth Forest on the west side of Goldsmith Lake (red) were expanded by DNR in 2022 (larger purple +red areas). A new logging road west of Goldsmith Lake was constructed in the summer of 2022.

Expanding the area of recognized Old-Growth shrank the proposed harvest plans by 26 ha.The 2022 harvest plan boundaries drawn onto the Bowater map by DNR reflect the revised boundaries of the Old-Growth Forest area but they do not show the existence of the old growth forest itself.

Why not? DNR sent this map to the minister as evidence that the Goldsmith area is managed forest. Surely the presence of two large patches of old growth forest in such an area is noteworthy.

Map 4: Detail from Bowater Map: Old-Growth Forest Policy areas as expanded by DNR in April 2022 are my addition.

This might be the first time recognised areas of Old-Growth Forest around Goldsmith Lake were left off the map by DNR but it certainly isn’t the last. The presence of old-growth forest does not fit well with the “it’s all managed forest” narrative the Minister has been fed.

It turns out that the DNR amended Bowater map isn’t the only map where recognised old-growth stands are curiously absent…

More  to follow – NN