For my readers who are craving another Dash, Brock, or Colleen story, have no fear. There is a hike and a homemade chilli sauce adventure to write about. But now, a rant. This is not so much tongue-in-cheek as gnash-my-teeth while I pull at my hair and ask Brock to search for single family homes in Warsaw, Poland. The provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick have delivered perfect rant fodder, and Canada’s rant king, Rick Mercer, is nowhere to be found. So, short of me delivering this on video and in perfect staccato while I wind my way through a graffiti-bedizened alley, I give to you a Mercer-style rant. The thing needs to be said.

Not to be outdone by the City of Toronto’s Great Tobogganing Ban of 2024, Canada’s province of Nova Scotia has issued a ban on walking in the woods until the middle of October. To prevent wildfires. In a province where the woods cover three quarters of the land, where it is difficult to spit and not hit woods, and where seventy per cent of the woods sit on private land, one million residents have been ordered to find space on the remaining treeless patches to walk, fish, pitch a tent, or hold a family picnic.

Using a capacity for reason found only in public service bureaucracies, the government is allowing an estimated one hundred and thirty-seven homeless people to remain in the woods, where they are walking, fishing, pitching tents, and cooking over open fires.

“Most wildfires are caused by human activity,” said Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston justifying the ban by conjuring up vivid mental pictures of, well, nothing. Leave it to the rest of us to wonder if human activity means arson and illegal bonfires or, as the ban’s scope suggests, a guy in gators, knee-deep in the rushing waters of the Musquodoboit, waiting for trout to bite.

Those who are not homeless and dare to step into the woods God created for them face a fine of up to $25,000.00, equal to a Lexus sedan on Auto Trader and more than the recent fines levied against those who have set woods on fire. Unlike their Toronto counterparts, who may have been too busy tobogganing to hand out tickets, Nova Scotia authorities are enforcing their law. Six days into the ban, CBC reported that nearly $300,000.00 in tickets had been issued.

The writing is on the wall for Nova Scotians desiring the shelter of trees. Seniors seeking shade must confine themselves to darkened, air-conditioned rooms. Children wanting to play outside must bake on sun-drenched play structures or beaches. And radical environmentalists wanting to demonstrate their zeal must trade hugging a tree for gluing themselves to the pavement, confident they will be able to pay the $25.00 mischief fine with the loose change exasperated drivers hurl at them.

In a shameless act of “keeping up with the Joneses”, Nova Scotia’s neighbouring province, New Brunswick, has issued a woods ban of its own. This is not only to stop wildfires, New Brunswick Premier Susan Holt said, but also to prevent, from Saint John to Nigadoo, and from Edmundston to Sackville, the possibility of falling down and hurting yourself.

Falling down and hurting yourself? Welcome to my life since I started walking.

Thank goodness walking in the woods was not banned in the small Ontario town where I grew up in the mid-1970’s. Such a law would have been the undoing of my mother’s summer parenting strategy of sending me to the woods until the streetlights came on. After a winter of being wrestled into a snowsuit and told to go and play in a snowbank until the streetlights came on, I was unfazed by the independence and thankful for the warmer weather. Finishing my Corn Flakes and hopping on my bike, I pedalled to the forest up the street to spend hours imagining fairies in the moss, hoping my best friend, Kim, would show up, and praying the boy who liked putting garter snakes down our t-shirts would not. And because knowing when the streetlights went on was the sole responsibility of my seven-year-old self, I would occasionally trudge out of the trees to check them.

Unbeknownst to me or the woman putting me through outdoor survival training, a few activists had an environmental movement on slow simmer, waiting for the right time to declare this awesome planet that is barely understood by us to be a used-up and decaying invalid in need of saving by us. On April 22, 1970, Earth Day Round One attracted twenty million Americans who strapped gas masks to their faces, chanted, “Act or die!” at anyone who would listen, and waved signs that read “We have met the enemy, and he is us” at fellow humans trying to complete the commute home so they could put the potatoes on. The slow simmer came to a boil when, in 1990, Earth Day Round Two spanned 141 countries, involved 200 million people, and started a global panic that would turn a fight-the-man effort to remove garbage from the parks and chemicals from the water into an obey-the-man offensive seemingly aimed at removing humans from the earth.

The government announcements are impacting Nova Scotians as they would any group of humans whipped into a frenzy of fear, told their fellow citizens are to blame, and promised a pat on the back if they report anyone with a toe past the treeline. Neighbour is shouting at neighbour, citizen is calling out citizen, and anyone unwilling to dispense shame to someone’s face is posting on Facebook, a virtual town square stockade where Nova Scotians are busy exposing the “idiots” in their midst and declaring that “people suck.” That is not burning woods we smell over the Atlantic seaboard, but a scorched cloud of censure and judgment of one’s fellow man.

Truth be told, I would like to have a bit more 1970’s, when people were less suspicious of human activity and cared more about the state of their neighbourhoods. I have seen enough black and white photos of 1970 Earth Day activists picking garbage up from city streets and parks to wish that even some of them were around today. They could march through the green space across from my house and pick up the Coke cans crushed against tree trunks, the McDonald’s napkins fluttering in the bushes, and the Tim Horton’s coffee cups littering the grass like double double landmines. Since today’s government officials and environmental activists are too busy saving a 4.5-billion-year-old gargantuan planet from human activity to worry about picking up the garbage, I will grab my rubber gloves and kitchen catcher again and pick it up myself.

That is okay. It means I get to go into the woods, wonder at the beauty God created for us, and remember that while He is asking us to keep the place clean, He is not ordering us to keep out. While I am there, I might even imagine fairies in the moss.

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