This story was co-produced with the Halifax Examiner.

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."

But some who know the forests best say industrial forestry — and the landscape changes that go along with it — are a big part of what got Nova Scotia into this situation in the first place.

Drought

The decree prompted a wave of complaints from Nova Scotians confused about where they could, or couldn't, go. Canada's far-right lambasted the decision, with conservative outlet Rebel News calling it a "climate lockdown," even though the province’s Progressive Conservative government never mentioned climate change in relation to the decision.

At the same time, cyclists who depend on established commuting trails to get to work and people who walk and hike on these established trails expressed their frustration that the ban was too broad, targeting citizens and activities that pose little direct wildfire risk.

The unprecedented ban comes as the province deals with heat, a moderate-to-severe drought and no rain in the forecast — conditions exacerbated by climate change. While natural wildfires are common and part of a natural cycle in the boreal forest that stretches in a vast arc across Canada’s central and northern regions, massive destructive wildfires were practically unheard of in Nova Scotia — until recently.

In 2023, however, three unprecedented wildfires burned through more than 25,000 hectares in the province. A fire in Upper Tantallon burned 151 homes while forcing 16,400 people to evacuate the Halifax suburb; a wildfire in southern Nova Scotia’s Shelburne County became the largest wildfire in the province’s recorded history.

Those fires loom large in the government’s current response, with the department of natural resources warning "nobody wants a repeat of 2023." Before the ban, there had already been 100 small wildfires in Nova Scotia, and officials said conditions are drier than they were in 2023.

"Conditions continue to be extremely dry. Until we get a significant amount of rain, we're at an elevated risk of wildfires," said Houston in announcing the ban. "Most wildfires are caused by human activity, so to reduce the risk, we're keeping people out of the woods until conditions improve." The province’s messaging does not mention climate change, saying only that “hot, dry conditions have greatly increased the risk of wildfires.”

But experts warn that blaming drought alone is misleading: the province's industrial logging regime, which Houston has said can continue to operate with special permits the government has issued to forestry operators, is making the problem worse.

A ‘main accelerant'

Historically, Nova Scotia's forests were a fire-resistant mix of large deciduous and coniferous trees of different ages, known as a Wabanaki-Acadian forest.

Industrial forestry practices over the past seven decades  — cycles of clearcutting, establishing softwood plantations, herbicide spraying — have transformed that ecosystem into one of predominantly even-aged, coniferous plantations that contain fewer species all living and dying around the same time, more crop than forest.

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

Burgess pushed back on the claim the province's forests have been homogenized by logging.

"We have plenty of diversity," he said. "We've got a huge variety of tree species and ecosystems and plant species and wildlife diversity here."  

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.

As destructive wildfires have become more common Canada-wide, the country's industrial forestry industry sector has started to pitch itself as a solution to the problem. Last year, Derek Nighbor, the president and CEO of Forest Products Association of Canada, the country's largest forestry lobby, told the Maritime Lumber Bureau his organization was running a huge PR campaign to make Canadians think of forestry as a solution to the climate crisis — and wildfires.

The argument that some kinds of forestry management could help reduce wildfire risk has some support — in western Canada and the boreal forest in particular, it can help reduce fuel loads — but in Nova Scotia, the best way to reduce wildfire risk is to restore as much of the forest to its natural state as possible, said Lancaster.

In the meantime, he's taken the "unpopular opinion" of supporting the ban. His organization manages a heavily-used trail where he sees first-hand the widespread "disregard" among Nova Scotians about the risk of wildfire. But those restrictions should also apply to other high-risk activities, including logging, he says.

Wildfire isn't on people's minds in Nova Scotia in the way it is in western Canada, nor does the province have the firefighters, helicopters and wildfire fighting infrastructure to deal with the challenge.

"It's unfortunate, and I think just kind of an example of humans' inability to kind of really fully address risks they haven't already encountered," he said.