Deep Roots

The stories of climate change and sea-level rise are written in the rocky shores and beaches of Nova Scotia’s Atlantic Coast. The eroded headlands and glacial till have created the migrating sand platforms, our beaches, and marshes. Drowned bays, coves, and inlets, cobble storm berms, rock ridges, and cliffs all stretch along the length of the Eastern and South Shores.

Owls Head has long been recognized as a “representative” coastal landscape, first as a candidate National Park component, then as a survivor of the community battles to emerge as a Provincial Natural Environment Park component of the Eastern Shore Seaside Park System.

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Owls Head Provincial Park and Legal Designation

Guest Post by Karen McKendry
Wilderness Outreach Coordinator, Ecology Action Centre
February 21, 2020

Owls Head Provincial Park has been proposed for legal protection as a park for a long time and effectively used as an unmanaged park since at least the 1970s. But why was it not legally protected before? And why does that matter? And what’s this plan that it was listed in?

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Back Road Bog

Protecting Canada’s Carbon Sinks

A short but beautiful video and article from WWF-Canada explains the value of carbon sinks, and protecting sites like Owls Head, Nova Scotia.

World Wildlife Federation – Canada

Visit Page

In the face of widespread wildlife loss and climate change, WWF-Canada’s new nation-wide assessment maps gaps in essential wildlife habitat protection and opportunities to protect areas that benefit biodiversity while slowing climate change.

A national habitat crisis

Just as we need housing, wildlife need somewhere to live. Half of Canada’s monitored species are in decline, by a staggering 83 per cent, and even wildlife protected under Canada’s Species at Risk Act are failing to recover. Wildlife simply can’t survive with increasingly degraded or destroyed habitats. They need to find food, mate, migrate and raise their young. Climate change only makes matters worse.

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Letter: Owls Head(ache) Provincial Park by Dusan Soudek

If you think the provincial cabinet’s secret decision to remove Owls Head Provincial Park reserve (or an “undesignated” provincial park in government-speak) from a list of public properties slated for permanent protection is of interest only to a few Eastern Shore locals, think again.

Many other provincial parks in HRM, and elsewhere in Nova Scotia, are “undesignated” under the Provincial Parks Act and hence enjoy only administrative protection—not legal protection. On the Eastern Shore, they include Paces Lake Provincial Park, Lower East Chezzetcook Provincial Park, Liscomb Point Provincial Park, and others farther east. Closer to home, they include the immensely popular McCormacks Beach Provincial Park in Eastern Passage and Herring Cove Provincial Park and Blind Bay Provincial Park outside Halifax.

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