06/11/2026
In the winter of 2025, I was watching the news when I first saw Nina Newington speaking about the future of Nova Scotia’s old-growth forests. She and hundreds of others were attending the Shoulder to Shoulder: We Are All Treaty People rally in downtown Halifax. The crowd had gathered to protest aggressive clear-cutting, the heavy-handed $50,000 fines introduced under Bill 127, and to stand in solidarity with land defenders at Hunters Mountain. What struck me most wasn’t a tone of anger, but rather Nina’s voice of absolute reason. She spoke with a calm, grounded logic that cut through the noise and laid bare exactly why these issues matter.
Intrigued by her perspective, I sought Nina out. I visited her at Camp NOW — Need Our Wilderness — a camp set up to protest plans to log an area she and others have been working for years to protect in the dead of winter, during during mud season, and came back again in the spring to capture footage for a short documentary about these ancient forests and the citizens defending them. On one trip, Nina guided me deep into an old-growth stand nestled on a peninsula between Corbett and Dalhousie Lakes. Beneath a canopy of matronly yellow birch and red maple, she showed me a rare colony of Frosted Glass Whisker stubble lichens tucked inside a red maple cavity. Finding such microscopic organisms, she explained, requires recognizing specific old-forest habitats—humid, shady, sheltered spaces that are instantly erased the moment an industrial logging road cuts through the wilderness.
Through our conversations, Nina exposed the profound divide between the holistic reality of a living ecosystem and the rigid, detached metrics used by the Department of Natural Resources (DNR). She illustrated this disconnect using a nearby 16.9-hectare forest stand; despite its ecological maturity, the vast majority of it was left unprotected due to arbitrary mapping boundaries. It is a striking systemic contradiction that leaves the forest vulnerable to commercial harvesting, highlighting an oddity where economic demand for valuable softwoods seems to override the very rules meant to protect old-growth habitats.
Wabanaki - The Last Stand They call this a harvest block. But you can’t harvest a soul Deep within the rare, old-growth transition zones of Nova Scotia, a quiet defiance is taking place. For seven years, Nina has stood as a guardian in the path of the machines, documenting and defending the ancien...
