How industrial forestry and climate change created the NS wildfire problem

This story was co-produced with the Halifax Examiner .

Nina Newington was at her logging protest camp deep in the tinder-dry woods of Nova Scotia's Annapolis County early Tuesday afternoon when she learned the woods were being closed. She would need to get out of the bush within the next three hours or risk a $25,000 fine.

Tim Houston, the province's premier, had just banned anyone from entering the province's woodlands until Oct. 15 or until substantial rain reduces wildfire risk. Private landowners can still move about on their own property, but are forbidden from hosting others “to use wooded areas of their properties.”

Newington, who heads a group of citizen scientists called Save Our Old Forests, had spent the previous four months camped out on Crown land in a cluster of cutb