Canada's Forest Fibre Grab

We return this week with journalist Joan Baxter, who dives deeper into her work for the Deforestation Inc. investigative series that showcases reporting from 300 journalists worldwide. Joan shares with us her findings on ecologically destructive practices hidden behind sustainability claims.
We learn about how Joan's investigation into Canada’s logging industry helped uncover a web of corporate consolidation that has been aided by funding from taxpayers. We also discuss her book, The Mill: Fifty Years of Pulp and Protest, the story of taxpayer support for the Northern Pulp Mill in Nova Scotia and its history of “environmental racism” and public protests.

Check out The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' Deforestation Inc. series and read Joan's article in the Halifax Examiner.

Make sure to check out the show notes on the podcast webpage for more links and helpful resources.

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Transcript

Jan Sumner: 0:00

Welcome to the Clear Cut. Hi, I'm Janet Sumner, Executive Director at Wildlands League.

Kaya Adleman: 0:08

And I'm Kaya Adelman, Carbon Manager at Wildlands League.

Jan Sumner: 0:14

Wildlands League is a Canadian conservation organization working on protecting the natural world.

Kaya Adleman: 0:21

The Clear Cut is bringing to you the much needed conversation on Canadian forest management and how we can better protect one of Canada's most important ecosystems, as our forests are reaching a tipping point.

Jan Sumner: 0:40

Okay, this is episode two with Joan Baxter, who hails from Nova Scotia, and she's going to be talking quite a bit about the issues that are rearing their heads in Nova Scotia. She's written a book about this, has done a lot of fact checking about the issues. I will say that we have not fact checked all of Joan's issues. We will post all of the articles and the links to the book and which include a lot of fact checked, information for you to go through, and we recommend that you do so if you're interested in this and research a little bit more. The podcast, the Clear Cut, is here to give voice to people, and we've given voice to, we've given a platform for Joan Baxter to speak about the issues that she's finding in in Nova Scotia, but how these are also playing out at a global scale, when you have companies like Paper Excellence that come in and buy up various licensees and and mills, et cetera, and the allocated fiber that goes along with those mills, and then what happens at the local level or what she has experienced at the local level. This is not to make a grand statement about it, but just as an example, and so I think that you'll enjoy this episode for all the richness of what she has researched and what she can bring to the conversation, so I look forward to this dialogue.

Kaya Adleman: 2:07

Yeah, me too. Definitely very, very interesting conversation and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, and hopefully Jan did as well.

Jan Sumner: 2:16

Yeah.

Kaya Adleman: 2:20

I was wondering if maybe we want to talk about Deforestation Inc.

Joan Baxter: 2:37

Oh, which part did you want to talk about?

Kaya Adleman: 2:38

That's pretty broad or I don't know, maybe like the Northern pulp mill in Nova Scotia. Maybe that's like a narrower lens.

Joan Baxter: 2:45

Okay, well, I mean, that's something very near and dear to my aching heart, that story, Because when I came back from working for CIFOR actually in Kenya in 2016, I wrote a book about a 50-year-old pulp mill in Nova Scotia, in Pictou, nova Scotia, which had been, as I found out, poll of the most egregious cases of environmental racism in Canada, in that the provincial government back in the 1960s basically lied to, tricked in what has been called almost a criminal manner, the chief and councillor from Pictou Landing, first Nation into signing over the use of their precious tidal estuary, which they call ASEG, which means the other room, because it had so many uses for them. They fished there, they collected medicine there, they collected plants and food there. They took their kids there to hide them when the RCMP came to take them away to residential schools. They were convinced that if they signed that over for the use of this pulp mill, which at that time was Scott paper out of Pennsylvania, they'd still be able to do everything except drink the water, which was a total lie. Within days out, the fish were dead, it was completely destroyed and they had to live with that toxic pond in their backyard from 1967 until that mill stopped producing in 2020. And I mean, it was just a horrific story. But that was just the water pollution and of course that was going out into the Northumberland Strait. They eventually dammed up that tidal estuary. They also had to live with the stench of a very old, dirty craft pulp mill that didn't bother keeping their pollution control mechanisms up to date at all. They weren't even working, always exceeded their emissions limits, even when they were self-reporting, and was purchased in 2011 by Paper Excellence.

Joan Baxter: 5:20

At that time Paper Excellence was very small in Canada, nobody really knew who they were. They realized they were related to Asia pulp and paper, which has a horrendous credit and environmental record in Asia, owned by the Indonesian Wijaya family. And they acquired the Nova Scotia pulp mill in 2011, kept it running and then they started to expand in Canada and they bought Catalyst in British Columbia. They bought two mills in Saskatchewan. That gave them three mills in British Columbia. Then they bought Domtar, which gave them a huge foothold in North America, the States and Canada and all the mills and, of course, all the associated forest leases. Then, most recently last year, they bought Resolute.

Joan Baxter: 6:16

So that gave, and that was my last communication, actually, that I ever had from Forest Products Association of Canada because I was working on this Deforestation Inc investigative series on this company in Canada. I asked how much land, how much forest land that would give paper excellence, ostensibly owned by one single Indonesian billionaire. But we don't know because it's a very complex, opaque corporate structure and ownership and basically it looks as if it's all run by the same family, which is Asia Pulp and Paper Sign, our mass corporation, huge in China, huge in Indonesia. The FPAC made possibly the mistake of actually answering a question honestly and told me it would give them control of 22 million hectares of Canadian forest land, which is an area four times the size of Nova Scotia, and we don't even really know who owns it. And they got through the competition bureau and were able to make these takeovers. They took those companies private. So again we lost any insight we had into how things are being run.

Joan Baxter: 7:35

They also have been fighting to get hold of a massive pulp mill and forest concession or plantation concession in Brazil which is being they're contesting in the courts and this company, paper Excellence, has kind of. They have a very interesting business model. They also operate in France. They have two mills in France and they get grants from the government to stay open for those jobs and to support the forestry sector industrial forestry sector and to clean up their act because they pollute so terribly. In Nova Scotia they've had $28 million from the federal government to clean up their act and they've had $111 million from the government of Nova Scotia also to purchase 475,000 acres of Nova Scotia which they still own. No-transcript.

Joan Baxter: 9:13

And what we were told by many people who had worked for them is that what's going on in Canada is a fiber grab. That's why they just close those mills and every time they want more fiber. For example, in Saskatchewan right now they keep saying they're going to open one of the mills that's been hibernating if they get access to more boreal forests in Saskatchewan. There are people fighting that in Saskatchewan who have been in touch with me. They feel like they're dealing with the same company. So they get government money, they close the mills anyway and then they open it again if they get more forests and that seems to be the way that they operate. And here in Nova Scotia because we had one premier who was a very stubborn guy and didn't like being threatened told them they had to close that effluent facility which was called Boat Harbor and didn't give in to their pressure, and so they had to close the pulp mill in 2020, at which point Northern Pulp, owned by Paper Excellence, owned by the Wijaya family that's worth $10 billion, owned by the Wijaya family that's worth $10 billion declared bankruptcy and went into creditor protection in the British Columbia Supreme Court. Their largest creditor is themselves Paper Excellence, and the second creditor is Nova Scotia government, which is still owed $86 million and they're not repaying that while they're in court. Owed $86 million and they're not repaying that while they're in court. Meanwhile, they continue to harvest on Nova Scotia Crown land, on their own land that they haven't repaid the people of Nova Scotia. They got a loan of $75 million from the people of Nova Scotia to buy 475,000 acres. They harvest on that land, but they're not repaying that loan. 75,000 acres. They harvest on that land, but they're not repaying that loan.

Joan Baxter: 11:12

And when you speak about corporate capture in the forestry industry, I think Nova Scotia could actually could write a whole monologue on it. So the former premier of Nova Scotia, progressive conservative, john Hamm, in 2002, extended the lease with the company, which has changed hands five times. It went through five American owners before it was bought by Paper Excellence Gave those owners until he just extended the lease on that pulp mill effluent facility until 2030, like that. When he left office he became chair of the board, and he was chair of the board of Northern Pulp from 2010 until 2020 when the mill closed. And former ministers whom I interviewed for the book I wrote about this pulp mill told me that this former premier, john Hamm, every time the government or minister changed, he would just walk right through the department introducing everybody to the executives of this company. So it's serious corporate capture plus our Department of Natural Resources and Renewables.

Joan Baxter: 12:18

Basically, all the three people deciding forestry policies in Nova Scotia had come from pulp mills, one from Resolute, one from the Stora Enso pulp mill in Port Hawkesbury, and those were the people who basically have been making forestry policies in Nova Scotia for the last few years.

Joan Baxter: 12:36

And I suspect though I have no basis to say this, but I have a hunch if you look in other provinces you'll probably find very similar patterns I feel like the forestry sector has had even less scrutiny than the oil and gas sector in Canada.

Joan Baxter: 12:56

Of all the extractive industries, I think even the mining sector sometimes gets more scrutiny than the forestry sector does. So that's kind of the Northern Pulp saga in a nutshell, I should just add, if you want to talk about tactics and bullying, after my book came out, they refused to allow me, they didn't give me any interviews, paper excellence and their communications person, unbeknownst to me, a month or so before the book was even published, sent a letter out to all former employees and employees of the Northern Pult Mill and it was a form letter with a form for them to send off to Chapters Indigo in Toronto and to the local bookstores, saying that if I were allowed to promote my book in their stores or do any signings, they would orchestrate a nationwide boycott of those bookstores. So my book signing was cancelled because the bookstore owner was threatened. And she was told by some of the paper excellence employees that they would come in and tear it up in the mall and destroy everything. So that's how they operate If they don't get what they want, they bully. Which is why I say I feel like the forestry sector has an undeserved mythological good reputation in Canada and as a non-forestry expert, I am also a member, because I'm a woodlot owner. I'm a member of a forestry cooperative here in Nova Scotia and I spend a lot of time talking to the professionals who work there, who do the ecological forestry and who are very much geared towards trying to reestablish the Wabanaki Indigenous Forest, and they agree with me. Actually, I'm learning from them. A lot of this stuff doesn't come from me. It comes from these people who have worked inside the industrial forestry sector and pretty are extremely disillusioned by it. I've been I'm not exaggerating to say that I've been.

Jan Sumner: 15:17

we now have qualified to be able to run commercials on our podcast. This may not seem like a good thing for some people, but for us at the clear cut, it's a very good thing. It means that you are public, are now downloading over a thousand copies of each episode a month, which is fantastic, and it puts us into a new bracket where people want to actually advertise on the podcast. We are going to do our very best to make sure that the ads that run on the podcast are something that may be of relevance or of interest to you, and hope that you can listen to these ads and see them as a marker of success and your faith in the podcast. So thank you so much for listening to the Clear Cut. I know that, kaya, and I appreciate it, so very, very much, thank you. I want to provide a little bit of contrast, because I think that there are companies out there that Joan's talked about, but I also know some companies where we've had progressive companies who want to do some of the right things, and we've seen some of them. I know one company in Quebec where their chief forester went to work for the crown or work for the province, and she's fantastic. I think she's great, she knows what she's doing. So we've seen, uh, really good foresters move back and forth between governments and industry and so just um, just to put that into context a little bit, and then I would. to speak to the lack of choices for small mafia., that between a rock and a hard place when industries are. Maybe it's a one-industry town, maybe it's a two-industry town, but I mean the fact that companies can ask for these letters to be signed or for people. We've had experiences in Ontario where people get bused from one location to another to go and protest against the environmental groups coming into town. I've personally had people, you know, yelling and screaming at me, et cetera, even when you're in there to try and actually do a collaborative approach and work with the company on a forest management plan, and so there is on a forest management plan, and so there is this challenge to livelihoods and to people's existence that I think, also keeps them enthralled to what industry wants or can make their demands very threatening to their own lives. So yeah, I just wanted to comment on that.

Joan Baxter: 18:06

Oh, I mean absolutely. I have so much s ympathy for the small operators and, as I say, even 40 years ago every small town had a small mill that was supplied by local contractors and when this big pulp mill came in, they actually had their own hired contractors. So they took the load, they took the responsibility and they went out and they did their operations themselves. Over the years they've outsourced it and, as we know, if you're a forestry contractor and you want to operate in the modern industrial sector, you've got to invest a million dollars in machinery or two million, which means you're totally beholden to the bank and if you're not going to have your house and your machine seized, you have to run the thing 24/7. And they are.

Joan Baxter: 18:54

They're really caught in a very difficult position because that's what they've been relegated to, because the industrial forestry sector, very much like agriculture, has forced them to go into so much debt to compete and they actually did decimate the jobs. They've reduced the number of jobs in the forestry sector in Nova Scotia, absolutely incredibly, by a factor of 10 or 100. I can't remember the actual figure, but there used to be so many more people who could actually make a living working in the forest. Who can't? Now? Because you can't unless you have one of those giant machines.

Joan Baxter: 19:31

Now, as I say the forestry co-op with whom I work they don't get to tell landowners what they're going to do. They offer them the options and then it's up to the private landowners to decide how they're going to manage the work done on their land. And the operators of those machines I mean the family that actually did the work on our property. They're like ballet dancers with those machines. What they can do if they want to and if they're allowed to is amazing. But very often they're not allowed to because it's not the most profitable way to work in the forest. And they agonize over it as well. I don't want to. Demon's small contractors are beholden to their debts, while the big companies seemingly aren't. That's interesting, and they're not the members of FPAC who are driving this stuff.

Jan Sumner: 21:21

I mean, FPAC has a lot of members, Just to be clear. There's quite a few members across Canada. But I have a recent experience with a company that we worked with last year in Ontario that had Indigenous-owned contractors who ran their machines and again they had to mortgage everything to get those machines and it requires them to be run at a fairly high rate and then if one of them breaks down, that's the livelihood, that's all of their assets. It's very, very difficult.

Joan Baxter: 22:05

Yeah, it's tough. I mean this particular campaign. I also wanted to mention to you that I also lurk on Twitter X and this article was tweeted out and I had a response from somebody who is head of media and campaigns for energy cities in Brussels in Europe, and he wrote we have similar campaigns here in Europe. The name of this one is alarmingly close the one that they have there to the one you wrote about in Canada. So this isn't even something limited to Canada. I think this is a worldwide phenomenon.

Kaya Adleman: 22:57

And I think there's a fiber shortage and so there's a fiber grab going on. Yeah, that's the information that you'll see on your social media pages. Is forestry for the future or whatever other uh industry-backed campaign, but not journalist written pieces like deforestation inc and your work in the halifax examiner

Joan Baxter: 23:16

Well, that's the frustrating irony, isn't it that I dissected this campaign, but my article can't be shared on facebook.

Joan Baxter: 23:23

But I still had to keep looking at their posts, which can be.

Jan Sumner: 23:28

Yeah, and the one that you were talking about, the broad campaign, but I guess investigation, was it Deconstruction or Deforestation Inc.

Joan Baxter: 23:39

Deforestation Inc and it was as I say, it was last year. It involved 350 media outlets around the world, from Myanmar to Brazil to Spain, everywhere spearheaded by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and it was kind of two-pronged. They were looking at certification schemes, schemes so Forest Stewardship Council, sfi and really critical of FSC actually, which is the gold standard for certification schemes but been very seriously weakened over the years, and they found a lot of gaps where they weren't monitoring. Even FSC was not monitoring things. So that's they and that was worldwide, and it was called Deforestation Inc. There were literally thousands of articles that emerged from it. But the articles that we, the Canadians and people in France published actually led to and we were focused much more on paper excellence and the fiber grab in Canada and the origins of paper excellence and the financing behind it, which had been from China.

Joan Baxter: 24:54

Back in the 2000s. Our articles led NDP MP Charlie Angus to ask for an investigation into paper excellence in the Natural Resources Standing Committee, which happened actually, and they invited the ostensible owner of paper excellence, jackson Wijaya, who doesn't live in Canada, he has houses in Indonesia and London and all sorts of places, multi-multi-millionaire, part of this gazillionaire family. They invited him to come and appear before the committee and twice he declined, twice In front of Canada's elected parliamentarians. The next step would have been to pass a resolution that would have issued a summons, which is quite rare. And if that happened which didn't happen because the Conservative Party started filibustering that committee on on Oil and Gas and Transition Act acts bills then if Jackson Wijaya set foot in Canada he could have been officially escorted into Canada's House of Commons.

Joan Baxter: 26:17

But that didn't go that far because, as I say, the committee got distracted and filibustered by the Conservatives on other issues, got distracted and filibustered by the Conservatives on other issues, but it was still quite a snub by a company that is now the biggest, has the biggest market share in Canada it is 21,. 22% of Canada's forestry sector is in the hands of this one man. Supposedly that he snubbed Canada's elected officials and wouldn't even appear in front of them to answer questions about who owns what and what their real intentions are in Canada. That didn't get much media again, but it got some, and if those media could be shared on Facebook and Instagram it would have even more publicity and maybe other media would have picked it up.

Jan Sumner: 27:11

But yeah, well, it sounds pretty daunting even for a province to take on some of that, because that's the other thing is, much of this is disaggregated across the country and, as you're saying, hal, you know, in Nova Scotia there was a premier who said you know what, I'm not going to accept this and decided to push back, yet still it ends up in a court in british columbia that's being fought and they still don't have the money. And what was it? 173 million or something they still owe.

Joan Baxter: 27:36

They owe 86, but I forgot to mention that actually they're suing the province for 450 million for premature, premature closing of the pulp mill.

Joan Baxter: 27:44

Gotcha Because they said they were allowed to use that pulp effluent treatment center until 2030 because a former premier had signed off on that. So, in addition to the fact that they're not repaying the debt, this gazillionaire company, they're also suing the province of Nova Scotia for an amount that could exceed $450 million. And all of that is behind closed doors mediation in the Supreme Court of British Columbia, which, as Nova Scotians like to point out, is very odd, since Northern Pulp is in Nova Scotia.

Joan Baxter: 28:21

Yeah, very odd, but again it speaks to how much power and money these corporations have

Jan Sumner: 28:32

And also how frustrating it must be. I mean, those are taxpayer dollars that are going to fight that lawsuit and every day in court is going to cost you a lot of money. So it's not just what's owed, but it's also what you're being sued for, and then all of the amount of time that you have to spend doing that and it loses complete sight of sustainability. And if we have good jobs, in the forest

Joan Baxter: 29:01

I mean another angle of this PR thing ( and I'm not sure, I see it a lot in the sort of small local publications that still exist, media publications that still exist, m any of them are kind of a one-person or one-family operation, but the way many of the large forestry corporations operate and many of the large corporations operate is, you know, they suck up public money to the tune of tens, to the hundreds of millions.

Joan Baxter: 29:27

They sue when they don't get what they want. I operation) paper excellence, has had nova scotia in court I can't remember how many times I think six since about 2014 because they wanted them to use less water, they wanted them to reduce their emissions, and every time, every step of the way, they go to court and fight it. And at the same time, one of these Paper Excellence is a master of this they'll hand out $25,000 to a local firefighter group or they'll hand out $50,000 to one First Nation, and that gets more headlines than their pollution. And it works, unfortunately, because they hand out a press release. It gets printed in a local newspaper and then it gets picked up by the echo chamber and those things can show up on Facebook and Meta. So that's another angle to these campaigns that works really, really well and makes people think that these are benevolent just benevolent corporations

Jan Sumner: 30:31

Or even say there's two sides to the equation. They did this, but they also did this right, so it it sends a mixed message into the uh to the sphere

Joan Baxter: 30:41

And I mean these amounts of money they give out is just it's not even pocket change for them. So it's the stuff that would fall out of their pockets if they were walking down the street.

Jan Sumner: 31:01

But it's pretty incredible that you had 300 journalists, investigative journalists, come together. I mean while we've seen t Traditional media and the new, newly coming to the fore media that is still fact-checked and produces journalism in a good way. We're still seeing all of that, uh, now amalgamating, sometimes in these ways that are really powerful, because that was. I read a lot of the articles on that deforestation, deforestation inc and it you. It really gives you a different worldview and it's almost like unchained right, because you're not even you're allowed to report on these things and get to others. But 300 coming together is an immense opportunity.

Joan Baxter: 31:37

Those were very interesting Zoom meetings. I bet, I bet, I bet

Joan Baxter: 31:58

The european media, I mean, um, germany still has very good publicly funded media, um, and people pay more taxes to get that in in europe than they do here. So so the European media have not been as badly decimated in recent years as have North American media, and I mean Canada is in a particularly dire situation. When I was in journalism school back decades ago, I can remember the studies then, the Thompson's report, you know, saying that every town had to have two different media outlets or newspapers, and they were concerned then about the concentration of ownership. And now you look across the country and there's almost nothing left except, you know, the hedge fund owned right wing National Post, the globe and mail, which has always had a certain line, and, in a very, very pro-business uh, the toronto star, which was also sold off, and then the closure of all of these small media outlets. I know that this isn't specific to our forestry discussion, but it's specific to every issue, really, because people aren't informed anymore. It used to be that the people even when I was researching for the pulp mill book and that was in 2016-17, I would go into the archives and find a little tiny New Glasgow thing, evening news, and it was as thick as a telephone directory. Every single tiny community had somebody reporting from there. So people knew what was going on in their own community and in their own local government, their own provincial government and federal government and that's gone. And I find it really, really worrisome. So even if you, no matter what issue you're fighting and I'll take the example again of our poor friends who are down there camping out that was in the winter, by the way, during that big dump of snow we got, they were still there they don't get the media coverage they would have got before because there's so little left and I think, but there they they are, they're still out there. I mean, I really have great faith in canadian

Joan Baxter: 34:13

citizens

Jan Sumner: 34:15

yeah, and we turn increasingly to the social media channels because we aren't getting the media from, uh you know, sources that can be relied

Jan Sumner: 34:24

on and that gets skewed, as you said

Jan Sumner: 34:25

, by these uh big, uh pr campaigns and a lot of sorry.

Joan Baxter: 34:31

Did you make yourself read any of the comments? Because the comments are in the thousands and actually I found some of the comments quite encouraging

Jan Sumner: 34:39

yeah, no, the comments are quite good. um, I, I do find it, uh it encouraging that we're starting to see this. Journalists tackle this, and it is context setting. Well, it's not all about forestry. It does set the context, for how does forestry get reported? How do we hold forestry companies accountable? How can governments be even helped in holding forestry companies accountable? Because corporate capture happens a lot in the absence of the public being able to see this, and so if you have the resources, if you have the ability to go in and talk to governments multiple times and that transparency is not out there in the public, then obviously the politicians are going to be listening to you because they hear you the most. So it's all context setting all context setting

Joan Baxter: 35:32

Absolutely, and I don't know what's going on at the level of all the different provinces. I've kept close track. I suspect that it's probably something that's a very similar message with all the provincial forest associations in nova scotia. They they don't call themselves the nova scotia forest products association anymore. They now call themselves forest nova scotia, which is delightfully benign, um, but they also. The first thing you see on their, their website is that forestry combats climate change.

Joan Baxter: 36:06

So there's certainly um people working on fantastic rebrand messaging therefore, their first blog is, you know, forestry, a proactive approach to wildlife prevention. So it's it. You know, you can see that. You can see they're working with professional message massagers to get the same message out everywhere, and it's very powerful again, because that's what people are hearing and seeing. Oh, and they're starting their own podcast too, by the way Forest. Massage. Oh fun Coming soon.

Jan Sumner: 37:22

Well, I think it's tough because people want you know. You look out at the forest and you want it to be true. You want it to be true that forestry is going to help you with climate change. I do believe forests will help us with climate change if we don't manage them to death, and so forestry is a very different kettle of fish.

Joan Baxter: 37:51

When the Northern Pulp Mill was fighting for its life against the premier and they were really trying to mount a campaign to convince the premier to extend their use of that effluent facility so that they could keep running forest, nova scotia came up with a campaign called nova scotia needs forestry and the ecology action center made a little sticker with an s on it so that people were going around and removing the ry at the end of it and putting an S on it.

Jan Sumner: 38:26

That's the thing is it gets translated in your head. Is for us, Right? And that's the that's, that's the difficulty. So we're, we're almost out of time, Joan. I just wanted to ask are there any things that so? Why do you get up in the morning and write Cause, cause? Do you have hope? Do you? Are you just sheer determination and anger and stick-to-itiveness? Is it just? You know good, is it like? What is it that motivates joan baxter? Is it? Is it? Uh, yeah, do you have hope?

Kaya Adleman: 38:57

yeah, and where can we? Where can we read your work? Um, not on meta platforms.

Joan Baxter: 39:06

Well, first of all, right now I mean, as I say, I've been writing for the Halifax Examiner primarily, and I've also been writing for the Energy Mix, so on climate change issues and on green hydrogen and associated issues, which also then they all start overlapping because the green hydrogen would be producers here in Nova Scotia want to basically cover the entire province with giant wind turbines, which will really impact the remaining forests. So do I have hope? I wouldn't do all this stuff if I didn't have hope. I would just stay in bed with the pillow over my head. But you have't have hope. I would just stay in bed with the pillow over my head, but you have to have hope.

Joan Baxter: 39:47

I think that's what makes human beings human beings, I mean, from the beginning of time you always have hope, doing this again and again and again and being beaten down. But then I look around me and I am surrounded by and in touch with all of the people who care about the environment in Nova Scotia do reach out to the journalists and it's the amount of caring that really keeps me going. And there's, you know, there's a forest school not far from where I live and I went and spent a day there with these kids and I'm getting goosebumps talking about it right now I could probably start to cry. That gave me hope. If you take a kid into the woods, they will never come out, and they haven't said.

Joan Baxter: 40:41

I said well, you know, aren't you bored here? They said, no, we're bored when we're at home. There's nothing boring in here. So those are the things that do give me hope. And right across the country I've been, you know, as I say, I'm contacted by people in Saskatchewan and British Columbia all facing the same thing, and I see more and more of the groups across the country trying to link up with each other, which I find really encouraging. So, yeah, I have hope. There are definitely moments, I'm sure we all have them, but yeah.

Jan Sumner: 41:15

I have hope.

Kaya Adleman: 41:18

And what's the title of your book?

Joan Baxter: 41:20

It's just called the Mill. 50 Years of Pulp, pulp and protest, and it's time for a sequel. I thought I was finished with the story, but it goes on. It's a story that never ends, oh goodness so where?

Jan Sumner: 41:37

where can we get your book?

Joan Baxter: 41:39

that is a really good question. I know that you can order it online and it's available as an e-book as well, and I know that Nimbus here in Nova Scotia was distributing the hard copies. But I suspect if you do some searching online you'll find it's available, hopefully. I should probably find out if it's gone out of print, but it hadn't last time I checked. It's gone out of print, but it hadn't last time I checked

Jan Sumner: 42:05

Well, I certainly signed up for the Halifax Examiner. As soon as I read your article I was like, oh, I have to get more of Joan. Yeah, I absolutely have to get more of Joan

Joan Baxter: 42:13

Well, I'm really pleased that you did. I'm really grateful too, yeah, and I'm really grateful for all the work that you do and for your podcast which I've also signed up for.

Jan Sumner: 42:32

Okay, one of the things I learned was Joan's also a woodlot owner which. I hadn't known when we started down this trail with Joan and she speaks about her work that she did as part of Deforestation Inc. And 300 journalists, and I thought it was funny when she said those Zoom calls were something else. I mean, you've got all those different time zones.

Jan Sumner: 42:53

I remember just last week we were trying to put together some work with a time zone difference with Central Europe and Western Canada and me sitting here in Toronto and that was a nightmare. I can't imagine trying to do 300 journalists around the world and having a conversation about forestry. It must have been an organizational nightmare. But kudos and if you haven't seen the website, go check it out there's lots of stories on there. Again, it's heavily researched and it included the CBC and others that participated in this, along with Joan who was writing for the Halifax Examiner, and many others around the globe. So I think you'll find the information there really quite enlightening.

Jan Sumner: 43:39

And you know, I was really blown away by all the research that Joan has done the book that she's put out. It was disheartening to hear about some of the work that was being done to block the book being promoted or out there. Yeah, it's unfortunate when companies have to resort to that. If they're feeling that they're a great company and they're doing good work, they should be proud to take on the criticism and answer the questions. So I'm surprised at that. It's unfortunate.

Kaya Adleman: 44:20

Yeah, I think what stands out to me I don't think we've talked about this in such great detail, but it's this idea that I guess in our current system and the way that the forest industry and a lot of industries are structured, is that, as a smallholder especially, it's only profitable in its ecologically destructive state, and the idea that if you want to be a participant in this forestry marketplace, you have to go into up to millions of dollars of debt and in order to not default on those debts, you have to operate the machinery you took out loans for at that max capacity. That idea really stood out to me as a market inefficiency and something that definitely I think needs to be addressed, especially if we're going to move forward and truly make forestry more sustainable and, you know, be on track to meet our climate and biodiversity commitments.

Jan Sumner: 45:13

It's definitely something that needs to be yeah, it gets to be a self-fulfilling problem, right? So, for example, if you've to be able to qualify to harvest in that area, you need to be able to harvest at a certain level. So you need certain equipment that can harvest at that rate of harvesting, and that means you need a feller, buncher and you need the specialized equipment. And these pieces of machinery are enormous right Standing next to them. They are much larger than an individual and they have to be able to reach out and grab a great big group of trees and pull them in all at the same time.

Jan Sumner: 45:48

So that's not something that you know lightweight machinery can do, and sometimes it stalls in the middle of the day or you've got a problem or something you know your energy source might have run dry, whatever it is.

Jan Sumner: 46:02

You've got all kinds of variables and that cuts into your profits, and if you've literally had to mortgage to get that piece of machinery, it's your lifeblood. It basically is between a successful harvest and something that can make money and not. And that's because we have to harvest at that scale, and if we weren't harvesting that scale, could we have machinery that had a lighter touch at a different approach and what's also interesting and I don't have the facts right now to back me up but I believe there has been a trend over many, many years that we're actually harvesting, you know, at a rate that is much higher than we did at one time, but the number of jobs has actually decreased because of mechanization. So we've been able to mechanize many of these jobs, which has decreased the number of jobs, even though we might be at the same, or even increased production. So yeah, it's a challenge.

Kaya Adleman: 47:18

Yeah, and it does get back to these core themes. So, yeah, it's a challenge for us to try to think of how to do more sustainable, more ecologically sensitive second growth harvesting. It makes it hard to be a participant in that industry.

Jan Sumner: 47:35

Yeah, the money's just not there. What I was left with is this just again creates the question in my mind how could we actually start to change how we do things? And I've always thought of it, and I mentioned this a little bit earlier is it's where we harvest, how we harvest and how much we harvest? And those are the questions I think the central questions that we need to answer, especially as we reach. In some areas, we've already converted the forest and so we're now at second growth and we need to be rethinking how we're doing things.

Kaya Adleman: 48:08

Yeah, great conversation today. Yeah, likewise, and if you want to read any article further articles about this you won't find them on Facebook or meta platforms, but you can go to our show notes, where we will have all the articles linked on our web page. Yeah, feel free to share our show notes.

Jan Sumner: 48:30

Yes, I think you can share those, probably on social media. Yeah, definitely, definitely you can. You can also share the podcast, obviously, and allow people to listen to this and make their own decisions. I mean, you know, you are all really intelligent people and you'll make your own decisions and you'll you'll either agree or disagree and come to some other conclusions, but we wanted to make sure we offer this so that public relations materials weren't landing in a in a void of other information. So thanks for listening.

Kaya Adleman: 48:57

Yeah, thanks Joan, and thanks Jan.

Jan Sumner: 49:00

If you like listening to the clear cut and want to keep the content coming, support the show. It would mean a lot to Kai and I. The link to do so will be in the episode description below.

Kaya Adleman: 49:11

You can also become a supporter by going to our website at wwwwildlandsleagueorg. Slash the clear cut and also make sure to leave us a review on your favorite podcast streaming platform. It would really help the podcast and stay tuned for new episodes by following us on social media.

Jan Sumner: 49:32

That's at Wildlands League on Instagram, twitter and Facebook or LinkedIn, of course.

Kaya Adleman: 49:38

See you next time.