Nova Scotia’s Forest History: ‘We love the beauty around us, and invite you to destroy it with us.’

For many years a gold and white sign at the entrance to Mahone Bay told visitors that ‘we love the beauty around us, and invite you to enjoy it with us’. For many, many years Nova Scotia governments have extolled the ‘pristine beauty’ of our forests while encouraging local and international enterprises to conduct forest harvests so destructive that we have lost much of our native Acadian forest. To understand how this has come about – and how we can address the problems it has created - we must probe our history of forest exploitation. To do that we need a chronology of forest use and the government policies that support it. We are building that chronology. At the moment it focuses on the period from 1990 to 2013. We are currently working on the years since 2013. If you find it useful but would like to suggest additions, please contact us.

Forest Policy Chronology