Nova Scotia (53 page)

Tar Ponds, Pipelines and Green
Power

If it’s any consolation to Cape
Breton, some environment watchers in Canada say that the lingering
mess known as the Sydney Tar Ponds is not the worst contaminated
site in Canada, that in fact such honour goes to Hamilton Harbour
in Ontario. Nonetheless, as of 2007, the Tar Ponds remain an
environmental nightmare comprising thirty-one hectares of a coastal
estuary containing 700,000 metric tonnes of sludge laced with heavy
metals, dioxin, other coal-based contaminants and at least 3.8
tonnes of PCBs.

   
There is a long legacy of failed federal and provincial
attempts to solve the problem. 1995 saw the abandonment of an
incinerator project and in 1996 the Nova Scotia government
brain-stormed a scheme to bury the place under tonnes of slag, a
proposal which did not go over well with the citizens of Sydney. In
1999, the newly formed Joint Action Group began work to come up
with a community-supported solution to the problem, but it wasn’t
until 2007 that a $400 million program was announced to incinerate
the PCBs, solidify the rest of the gunk with a massive quantity of
Portland cement and then tidy things up with a  plastic cover
and then soil and grass. It’s safe to say that controversy still
surrounds the clean-up, which has been at least twenty-two years in
the works and has generated 620 technical reports and 950 public
meetings.

   
While Sydney is still hoping to recover from the persistent
pollution of hundred-year-old coal and oil technology, the province
continues to encourage oil and gas exploration off our shores,
providing incentives for new exploration and strategies to tap some
of that wealth in the form of oil royalties for provincial needs –
even as Ottawa attempts to siphon off more than its fair share of
the wealth.

    
A flurry of activity in 1999 included natural gas
companies committing $60 million to explore nineteen offshore
locations. North America’s largest natural gas plant was opened in
Goldboro on the Eastern Shore and, by December of that year,
natural gas was flowing out of the province to distant markets
through the Maritimes and Northeast Pipeline. Eventually, some of
that gas would find its way to the Nova Scotia Power plant in
Dartmouth, providing a significantly cleaner means of producing
electricity. While the provincial government once had a fairly
direct involvement in developing offshore oil and gas, in 2001, it
got out of the business by selling Nova Scotia Resources Limited, a
final gesture towards privatization in that
arena. 

   
Although we are “blessed” with some abundance of offshore
hydrocarbons, retrieving those resources is both expensive,
dangerous, and the resulting fuels will do little to slow the
increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Sadly, relatively
little has been accomplished here to further develop tidal power by
tapping the monumental potential of the Bay of Fundy. On the other
hand, wind energy in Nova Scotia has come of age. While early wind
pioneers like Neal Livingston in Cape Breton seem to be routinely
snubbed by Nova Scotia Power, other community-based wind companies
like the Colchester-Cumberland Wind Field Inc. are developing
environmentally-friendly wind generation stations to sell clean,
green wind power to the utility and feed electricity directly into
the provincial power grid. There is agreement from all concerned
that the  potential for coastal wind energy in Nova Scotia is
enormous.

Two Juans and the Losers

Near midnight on September 29,
2003, Hurricane Juan hit the shores of Nova Scotia near Halifax and
travelled northward, leaving devastation in its path. It was the
most massive storm to come ashore near Halifax since August of 1893
when an “August gale” blasted the province with winds over 180
kilometres an hour. Juan was a Category 2 hurricane with sustained
winds of at least 158 kilometres an hour and gusts up to 176. Wave
height in some places was recorded at 19.9 metres and storm surges
of 1.5 metres led to considerable shoreline damage. The Hurricane
Centre in Dartmouth had to be evacuated due to fears the windows
would blow in from the power of the wind.

   
The morning after Juan, I surveyed the damage at the
Fisherman’s Reserve nearby at Three Fathom Harbour, where buildings
had been lifted from their foundations and relocated to
neighbouring properties. Boats and a few buildings had been swept
away, and for those fisherman who had stayed near their wharves
through the night, it was a living hell.

   
Juan caused the death of eight people and left a swath of
massive forest damage. From the air, it looked like some giant lawn
mower had cut a path through the coastal and interior forests. The
damage would take decades to repair and, in some rural areas, it
was used as an excuse to increase the devastation of clear-cutting
that continues in Nova Scotia.

   
Many Nova Scotians faced costly home repairs (overall
property damage was more than $100 million) and hundreds of
thousands of Maritimers were without power, some for up to two
weeks. While many believed that Juan’s wrath was just the luck of
the draw, when it comes to tropical storms, others are concerned
that this may be part of a new storm pattern emerging as the result
of global climate change.

   
As if to add insult to injury, Mother Nature conjured up
another clobbering storm that winter dubbed “White Juan,” which
arrived on February 19, 2004, as the result of an offshore low
pressure system. White Juan dumped a mass of snow on the entire
region, measured at 95 centimetres at Shearwater Air Base. Nova
Scotia was declared to be in a state of emergency and everything
closed down. High winds up to 120 kilometres an hour created zero
visibility in many places as everyone hunkered down (some without
power) and prepared to shovel out the next day.

Yet Another Kettle of
Fish

In April of 2005, Fisheries and
Oceans Canada issued a release that stated, “The ocean industries
sector has roughly doubled its contribution to the Nova Scotia
economy since 1996.” The federal minister, Geoff Regan, offered the
observation that “Nova Scotians attach immense historic and
cultural value to the surrounding ocean.” A little further along in
the release, one would quickly realize that he wasn’t just talking
about fish. The $2.62 billion contribution to the Nova Scotia
economy included both fish and oil as well as a smattering of
shipbuilding and tourism. But oil was the winner here and fishing
came in second. Oil and fish have proven to be a dangerous mix
throughout the world for environmental reasons and it looks like
the economic scale has already tipped in favour of oil, which may
not bode well for the future of the fishery.

   
My fishermen neighbours down the road from me in Three Fathom
Harbour still go out to haul lobster traps in season and fish for
herring after that but during most of the year their boats remain
tied to the dock. They say the quotas for the small inshore
fisherman are set too low to make it worthwhile to go to sea for
hake or haddock or some of the other remaining fish that swim off
our shores. It’s still a sad state of affairs for most independent
fishermen who would like to preserve the traditional means of
making a living from the sea.

   
So where is all that fish revenue coming from? Primarily the
big companies. And while the inshore fishermen remain the losers in
the game of fish, the rest of us continue to ponder if the industry
in general is being allowed to fish too much or too little. From an
economic standpoint the answer is too little, but from a
sustainable environmental point of view, it’s probably still way
too much.

   
In 1996, Nova Scotian companies harvested 279,331 metric
tonnes of fish. In 2004 it had risen to 332,255 but by 2005 it had
shrunk back to 268,000. In 2004, that included about 16,000 tonnes
of haddock, nearly the same amount of hake, but a whopping 75,000
tonnes of the much smaller herring. Lobster rivalled herring with
about the same numbers. But what do those numbers really add up
to?

   
Sometimes a visual image tells more than statistics and I
have two contrasting images in my head. The lobster fisherman
catches lobster much the same way he did fifty or more years ago
except that he is aided by a mechanical winch. The trap goes over
the side with bait and some time the next day that trap is hauled
aboard, the lobster removed, the trap is rebaited and dropped to
the sea floor again. It’s a labour-intensive task but it seems to
me to be an honest encounter of man and
shellfish.

   
Herring is something altogether different. It’s far more
technological. The herring schools, with thousands of small fish,
are tracked with electronic gear. A line of nets capture them in
great numbers and, back at the dock, the catch is vacuumed by huge
sucking machines into waiting trucks that trundle off towards a
distant fish plant. As one local fisherman reports, “Sometimes you
can vacuum out 20,000 pounds in twenty minutes.”  Maybe it’s
the vacuuming part that seems the most offensive. It’s more
efficient for sure – takes very little time at all. But, for me, it
underscores how industrial fishing can be. It’s as if fishing has
taken on the guise of manufacturing.

   
My own view is that unless we reverse the trend of industrial
fishing, we continue down the path of harvest-and-destroy.
Alternatives, old or new, need to be found. Scallop harvesting, for
example, usually involves dragging the ocean floor with steel claws
that damage everything and anything in their path. In the
Northumberland Strait, however, some scallop fishermen dive for the
scallops instead in areas closed to draggers – areas that have
already been severely damaged by the dragging. Sometimes video
cameras are used to locate the scallops and then divers go below
for a much cleaner harvest and can thus market their catch as
“diver scallops” to buyers who share concerns for the preservation
of sea life. Clearly, it’s not just the technology that is
destructive; it’s how we use the technology that makes a
difference.

Long Overdue Solutions – Urban and
Rural

In 2007, metropolitan Halifax was
still pumping 180 million litres of raw sewage into the harbour
from sixty-five outfall pipes at nineteen locations. How bad is
that? Very bad.

   
For one thing, the harbour stinks. Tourists and residents are
offended by the smell of raw sewage. Who would have guessed? Also,
one summer in the 1990s, the pollution was so bad that several
hundred lobsters came ashore in Bedford Basin because the water was
lacking oxygen, according to oceanographer David Scott. One of his
colleagues discovered that the polluted waters had destroyed many
species of seaweed and produced mutant asexual snails. Not
good.

   
But it’s not all bad. Over $300 million has been earmarked
for the Harbour Solutions project and construction is well
underway, but not without its critics. Some say it’s too little too
late . . . but it’s still better than nothing. Activists have
argued that millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money has been
diverted over the years from bringing about a proper solution much
earlier. Northend residents are also up in arms that the city has
decided to locate the main peninsula treatment plant in the
backyard of an economially disadvantaged and racially mixed part of
town. Councillor Dawn Sloane calls this “environmental racism” and
local activist Shazza Laframboise states that the Harbour Solutions
people have “deliberately misinformed the
community.”

   
But the end result will be one good leg up on a lengthy
history of chronic water pollution. Once the “solution” is in
place, the planners say the water in the Northwest Arm and at Point
Peasant Park will be clean enough to swim in. The water along
downtown will still be considered somewhat unhealthy. Several
centuries of unbridled dumping in this area means that there will
remain a thick residue of ornery sludge down there, but most agree
that the city is on a necessary path to recovery that may take the
rest of this century. 

   
Since 1998, an organization called Coastal Communities
Network has been looking at the state of rural harbours, wharves
and the communities themselves along the shores of Nova Scotia.
They stated that “A thriving and diverse coastline is critical to
our social, environmental and cultural future.” That is as true
today as it was 200 years ago. What we need are communities, jobs
and resources that are sustainable. It’s an overused word, I know.
But those pushing the sustainable envelope are growing in
number.

   
The CCN folks have a vision of Nova Scotia as a place of
vibrant small coastal communities. And I share that vision. But,
for starters, we need to recognize that only four percent of our
coast is publicly owned. It would be a travesty to see Nova Scotian
shorelines with severely limited public access due to private
ownership, as we see today in Florida or California. The shores and
waters beyond are meant to be shared by all and protected for the
public and planetary good.

   
At the same time, we’ll need to recognize the coasts will be
continuously changing as the climate continues to transform. Global
climate change, meteorologist Richard Zurawski points out, may mean
that Nova Scotia will get cooler, stormier and damper as the
interior parts of the continent heat up. And as the ice cap melts,
the seas will rise. If you are planning to build a house near these
shores, best to consider where that shoreline might be in ten or
twenty years.