New France is for sale!!

JD Irving, the clear-cutting lumber giant of the Maritimes, or the 'tree-growing people' as they like to call themselves, has arranged for an American real estate broker, LandVest of Portland, Maine, http://www.landvest.com/, to sell approximately 170,000 acres (70,000 hectares) of South West Nova Scotia to the highest bidder.

The acreage is listed in three blocks, and you can see some photos of these beautiful lands on Landvest's website here

http://www.landvest.com/property/NS0101/1/ .



The sale is a sealed bid auction due to close on April 9th.

The first block is Weymouth Timberlands in Digby Co. (128,000 acres) including most of the Sissiboo River drainage area, Long Tusket Lake, Silver River, and historic New France.

Anyone who knows me knows this is a very special place for me and Himself, and for all our friends in Digby County.

This historic area was settled by a French family who built a village in the woods - the first electrified town in Nova Scotia, with a railway to Weymouth, and a hydro-power plant, a pub, and every amenity you can imagine.

The village is in ruins now, but you can still walk around New France, camp nearby near one of the lakes, canoe down the old Mi'k Maq paddling routes, used for thousands of years to enable the original settlers of this place to travel easily through the region.

This river and lake system, and the forests that surround them is one of the few places left in South Western Nova Scotia where you can completely get away from it all. Acid rain has already wreaked havoc on it, but it is slowly starting to recover from that.

Let's not lose it to someone who doesn't care about it like we do.

I don't know the other two blocks as well, but I can imagine they are beautiful too, judging from the photos. They include:

Tusket River Lakes in Clare and Yarmouth Co. (28,000 acres) including Barrio Lake, Barrio Falls and the east bank of the Tusket to North Kempt; and Carleton River Lakes in Clare and Yarmouth Co. (17,000 acres) including the east and south sides of Ogden Lake and the east bank of the Carleton River to Lake Fanning.

A group called Buy Back Nova Scotia has started a coalition of diverse individuals and groups to urge the government of Nova Scotia to purchase these Irving lands and thereby halt the further sale of provincial beauty spots to those who might restrict access to the lands, rivers and streams, lakes and wetlands. Maintaining public access to lands and waters for recreation is critical and will become more so in the future.

The people involved are conservationists and ATVers, foresters, fishermen, hunters and hikers, bicyclists and birders, canoeists, campers and cross country skiers, photographers and writers.

Despite their differences about how to spend time in the wilderness, they are working together on this issue, to urge municipal and provincial politicians to purchase the JD Irving lands before more of the province disappears behind “No Trespassing’ signs and locked gates.

A public meeting to rally tri-county support for BUY BACK NOVA SCOTIA has been organized for Sunday, March 8, at 2 p.m., in the gym at the Yarmouth campus, NSCC.

A letter-writing campaign has begun too.

Please help with this. Details of who to write to on http://www.buybacknovascotia.com/