Nova Scotia bans hiking and use of vehicles in woods due to wildfire fears

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/hiking-ban-vehicles-wildfire-concerns-1.7019695

by zahlman • 12 months ago

38 29 12 months ago

zahlman• 12 months ago

Title edited for length and clarity from the original: N.S. bans hiking and use of vehicles in woods as dry conditions raise wildfire fears

For context, the government of Canada provides https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/interactive-map to track wildfires. At time of submission, Nova Scotia is currently reporting a single wildfire — under control, at an area of 1.3 hectares. It seems there were a couple more when the story was posted. Even other Maritime provinces are currently dealing with much worse, to say nothing of the northern Prairies.

mikeyouse• 12 months ago

There are several hundred other wildfires currently burning across the country which has burned nearly 18 million acres this year, making it the second worst season in recorded history.. when your fire assets are all in other provinces, it makes sense to be cautious “at home”.

dghlsakjg5• 11 months ago

Nova Scotia is currently reporting a single wildfire — under control, at an area of 1.3 hectares. It seems there were a couple more when the story was posted. Even other Maritime provinces are currently dealing with much worse, to say nothing of the northern Prairies.

Seems like Nova Scotia's fire prevention tactics (like this) are working! The time to keep people out of the woods to prevent a fire is before there is a fire.

metalman• 12 months ago

35°c, in the shade here, almost precisly on the 45'th parallel, the ground in baked hard, evrything is starting to wilt a bit, peole are getting water trucked in to there dug wells, just checked weather across the country and we seem to be about the hottest, will last a few more days, my fridge quit first thing this morning, my horse has never sought shade till today, almost no mosquitos, temp tonight will be in the mid teens, and then back up again, only good thing, is that there is no wind.........normal NS weather/climate is much much cooler and damp....to the point that mycologists come here to do field work, the only place with more mushrooms bieng somwhere in siberia

pacificmaelstrm• 12 months ago

Seems like excessive government overreach. Even California hasn't gone so far as to ban mere hiking as far as I'm aware.

Failures by the government in forestry management and firefighting shouldn't be used to restrict people's ability to enjoy nature and use public land.

They still need to solve the root problems... Lighting starts fires too and they can't outlaw that.

justusthane• 12 months ago

I’m fairly certain it has much more to do with climate change than forest management, and that’s a pretty hard root cause to immediately address.

Two quick statistics I found (both government-provided) state that 40% and 85% of wildfires, Canada and US respectively, are started by humans.

Wildfires are so bad in Canada right now. If access to Crown land has to be restricted to prevent it all from literally going up in flames, than so be it.

lfuller2• 12 months ago

It’s not only crown land in this case - it’s all land, public or private.

strken• 12 months ago

Most states of Australia (which, yes, is the anglosphere capital of government overreach) ban most hiking on government land on days that are rated catastrophic fire danger.

Not for months at a time, though.

tharkun__2• 12 months ago

Also, to be fair, most people here on HN will probably go with their own habits: They'd be great stewards of nature. They don't smoke / would always carry their butts out, never throw out any trash, pick up whatever they might accidentally loose even the smallest piece. Even the ones they didn't notice falling out. Definitely nothing that could ever start a fire!

Governments / park administration on the other hand have to calculate with the worst of the worst (or at the very least what seems to be the "general public" in many instances now).

If you were in their shoes and had to make that kind of calculation would you really come to a different conclusion?

Comparison from my town: Our municipal water supply uses ground water. Personally we've always let our lawn get brown during hot spells in summer. Why waste water I could drink either this year or in future years on a green lawn?

Yet most of my neighbors would water their lawn, either manually or automatically. Same around most of town.

I applaud the municipality for enacting strict watering bans and water use restrictions including patrols! It's an inconvenience sometimes but overall it's better for all of us. This years it's pretty dry and it's been a few years that we've had these enacted and I'm noticing a much higher number of brown and dry lawns around me, which super awesome to see actually! Except for where the septic leach fields are. That's always lush green for all of us! :)

misswaterfairy2• 12 months ago

Seems like excessive government overreach.

Wildfires start often without warning, and can spread very quickly, especially in hot, dry, windy conditions. We can never predict where a fire will start, as it could be one of many causes. Firefighting is always reactive in this regard.

This move is purely to protect people from being seriously injured, or (horrifically) burnt alive, by unexpectedly ignited fast-moving wildfires. Fire trucks and firefighters are not an unlimited resource, they can be overstretched in long campaign events with further unexpected ignitions.

As others have alluded to Australia is often accused of government overreach, but I can say that these decisions are not taken lightly as we don't want to be alarmist or restrict people's freedoms, but we also need to balance the very real threat to public safety that wildfire poses, and causes, and the available resources we have to manage new ignitions should they break out.

The language the news article uses is, in my view, misleading. "Ban" implies non-negotiable permanence and is often associated with a permanent restriction of personal freedoms, though the article, which lets face it most people don't read beyond headlines these days, is more akin to the temporary 'closure' to parts of public areas in forests and national parks, the same orders often issued by Australian fire authorities, to protect people from areas and conditions that are potentially (or are actually) dangerous to be in during elevated fire danger periods.

"Ban" sounds a lot worse than "Closure", though I also recognise this may be a legislative quirk, or confusion of terms: we have "Total Fire Ban" (government area wide, or statewide), "Park Fire Ban" and "Solid Fuel Fire Bans" (specific to individual parks, and forests respectively) that are both temporary but must be called 'bans', as those are the specific legislative tools given to us to manage ignitions.

Source: am a firefighter who has had to deal with these issues, during some very significant and internationally notable fire emergencies.

cwillu• 11 months ago

Might be a cultural difference; we routinely have fire bans, parking bans, etc, and everyone knows that it's not permanent.

lfuller2• 11 months ago

As a local to the area, a lot of the pushback is coming from the fact that this is not a closure of public parkland, but a restriction from entering any wooded area in the province - public or private.

dghlsakjg5• 12 months ago

Is the state that routinely sets records for destructive fires - in terms of dollars and people burned to death - the one that Canada should use an example? Should we take inspiration from the country that just accidentally burned down the Grand Canyon Lodge by treating a wildfire like a controlled burn?

As someone who lives in a fire zone in Canada, I can understand why this might feel like over-reach. I can also understand that when our emergency response services are stretched thin, you might make temporary civil rights restrictions to avoid a larger tragedy.

Can you enlighten me how Canada should better manage what is the largest, or second largest, forested area in any country’s territory, in areas that are so remote as to be measured in days and 100s of KMs of travel to access. There is nowhere in the lower 48 that compares to the majority of Canadian forest lands.

Have you been to Canada’s forests? There are areas that aren’t even accessible by air attack firefighters, let alone road. The fact that most of our fires are natural compared to the majority being human caused in the US is reason enough to treat fire mitigation entirely differently, and not to use the same strategies as the US.

If people (Americans especially! I’m making an assumption based on your rhetoric, and the similarity to American right wing talking points) could stop with trying to tell Canada nonsensical things about the forests, many of us would appreciate it.

smcin2• 11 months ago

The comparison is unreasonable; Nova Scotia is 21,345 mi² by area, of which 75% forest, with a population of only 1.08m.

And Nova Scotia's ban is only temporary, for 12 weeks, which is wildfire season. And this year (to Aug 12) is already Canada's second-worst wildfire season on record:

7.3 million hectares have burned [nationwide] this year so far, more than double the 10-year average for this time of year

"It's the size of New Brunswick, to put it into context," Mike Flannigan, a professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University, told CBC News.

The last three fire seasons are among the 10 worst on record, according to a federal database dating back to 1972, with 2023's devastating blazes taking the top spot.

"I've never seen three bad fire seasons in a row," Flannigan, who has been studying fires since the '70s, said.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/climate/wildfire-season-2025-1.76063...

_spduchamp• 12 months ago

I just got back from a 3 week driving/camping trip in Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and PEI. Saw one big plume of smoke from a forest fire in New Brunswick, and the skies were tinged red with smoke in NB, Quebec, and Ontario. The forests are extremely dry. My friend's well is going dry and ground water is low. Two days ago in NB, standing outside in a breeze, it felt like a hairdryer blowing, hot and dry. If the peat lands start burning, that will burn underground and they can't stop it.

To me, having just been there, and witnessing some asshole behaviour from some of the campers, it makes total sense to close down the parks. There are not enough resources to deal with more fires there. Keep in mind these are not heavily populated provinces, so there are less resources to deal with out of control fires.

SilverElfin4• 12 months ago

This is what normalizing bans gets you. The proposals to ban cars or gas stoves were authoritarian already, COVID took bans further, and now “democratic” governments around the world just view bans and other authoritarian laws like age verification or chat control as normal government tools that are totally valid to use.

dghlsakjg5• 12 months ago

Canada is, on the whole, much more tolerant of socially justified restrictions like this than the US.

NS is a small province with limited resources. If a fire starts, it will become large fast, under current conditions. If that happens they will have to bring in resources from other provinces, if they aren’t already busy (they almost certainly are).

Park and land closures due to fire risk have existed for far longer than since March 2020. This isn’t normalization of authoritarianism. This is just what a more pro-socially oriented culture than the US looks like.

SilverElfin4• 12 months ago

Reframing a violation of individual rights as good for society is literally how all authoritarianism is justified. But it still is authoritarianism.

More practically, if someone is careless enough to violate the law by lighting a fire, then this type of ban is not going to change much. Like misplaced gun control laws, it really only affects responsible law abiding citizens, and denies them their rights as individuals and taxpayers.

spauldo• 11 months ago

Has anyone let Ranger Gord know?

Nova Scotia bans hiking and use of vehicles in woods due to wildfire fears

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