Why this Halifax citizen group wants to protect the backlands from development

A citizen group is making it their mission to protect some backlands outside of Halifax — before it's considered for development.

The Backlands Coalition made a presentation to a Halifax Regional Municipality committee on Thursday, in hopes of protecting the wilderness area between Purcells Cove and Herring Cove Road in Spryfield, N.S.

With development already happening nearby and Halifax's population rapidly growing, the group is raising the question of how to balance the need for green space with the need for more housing.

It's top of mind for Boris Worm, a Halifax ecologist and member of the coalition who helped with the presentation to council on Thursday.

He spoke with CBC Radio's Mainstreet following the presentation. His conversation with host Jeff Douglas has been edited for clarity and length. 

Tell us a little more about the Backlands Coalition, and your role with the group.

The Backlands Coalition is a large coalition of citizen groups, neighborhood associations, like mine. I live in Ferguson's Cove and my neighborhood association joined the Backlands Coalition.

We also have some non-governmental organizations like the Halifax Field Naturalists, for example. The overall vision is that there's this treasure in our backyard under threat from increasing development and it's recognized, by more and more people now, as an urban wilderness. 

It's in fact the most accessible, closest wilderness we have here in Halifax, which of course is the largest urban centre in Eastern Canada, so it's a real juxtaposition and increasingly that's being recognized and so the idea is to preserve that both for nature and people.

And it's becoming incredibly popular, right?

Yeah, it absolutely is. There is the McIntosh Run Watershed Association which has been working since the dawn of time, pretty much on that area, and they've been starting to build trails in earnest since 2016. 

Now, in 2021, they did a survey and they calculated that 110,000 people, or one in four Haligonians, on average, have used those trails and that was up 300 per cent from pre-pandemic levels. That just tells you how accessible it is. 

We have lots of wilderness in Nova Scotia, but most of it is too far for us to just go on a hike or stroll, right? It's an outing and we may do that a couple times a year, but I think we need these accessible spaces and the pandemic really brought that home. 

Frankly, I walked there all the time just for my mental health, right? I saw lots of other people who did that, and it became very, very popular.

Of course, human beings love to use it, but it is wilderness. What kind of wildlife make their home there?

Yeah, it's not just a playground. It's also a natural treasure. It has this unique habitat called the jack pine-crowberry barrens and it's globally rare, but even in our province, it's a unique ecosystem that's fire dependent.

You may remember in 2009, we had this big Spryfield fire? That was the backlands and it burned 60 per cent of the area. Now that's something that wilderness does. Once in a while, it burns, and this particular ecosystem is dependent on burning because the seeds of the jack pine only germinate after a burn.

Now, a lot of that area has a special habit of attracting species we find nowhere else. There's a lot of endangered species such as mainland moose, for example, or night jars which we observe in the summer. 

People in the last few days have been tracking a large number of hawks who use the area on their migration, so lots of ducks on the wetlands and ponds and waterways and on and on and on. It's a very rich area and people who live nearby see bobcats quite regularly.

What was the goal of the presentation to city councillors today?

This was the second of two presentations we've done. One was through the environment and sustainability committee because it's an environmental and sustainability issue and the city has come up with this green network plan to basically create this belt of green spaces around Halifax, or I should say preserve that belt because we are lucky we have those green spaces and once they're developed, we're not getting them back. 

We have to plan ahead and have that long-term vision and the green network plan was kind of in the drawer for a while and now there's a co-ordinator hired, as of I think this month, and we're very excited to work with that person to make the backlands part of that green network. 

This is an area that is accessible to downtown. If it were to be developed — we need housing and it is within transit access — how do you balance those things? Is this a place that could be developed and house people?

No, it couldn't. I mean, there's a lot of development in the area, don't get me wrong. I mean Spryfield is incredibly fast growing and there's a lot of development north of Herring Cove Road. I should probably have mentioned that we're talking about the area between Purcells Cove and Herring Cove Road, so between the community of Spryfield and Herring Cove, Purcells Cove, and it is accessible. That's its benefit.

But it's incredibly rough terrain. There's no sewer and water on the Purcells Cove side, so the only development opportunity would be to have very large bulldozed lots — million dollar lots, essentially.

Very, very hard to develop, very costly, that would house handfuls of people, but not solve the housing crisis, and if you juxtapose this with the value it has for 110,000 people using that area for other reasons, you really think there's a probably better, more easily developed area that have sewer and water that can be developed.

And we do have those on the other side, on Herring Cove side, there is sewer and water and there is some high-density development happening in the Spryfield area and that's probably one of the better places to do it. 

But we see that development encroach on this green space and all we're asking for the city is, "Heads up, this is something that the community really wants." We got over 1,500 letters to the city, not just from people in the area, from people all over Nova Scotia and other provinces, saying we need this space.

This is obviously rough terrain and very difficult, maybe even unattractive, to develop. It does create tension between this understanding that we need to develop housing and quality of life. As a scientist, does it make sense that science should decide?

As a scientist, 100 per cent I'm looking at the value from say an endangered species perspective, from a carbon-storage perspective, from a watershed management perspective. Those are all scientific layers of information that have been assembled over a long time and a lot of people have done a lot of work in this area to document these values and that's definitely one of the layers we want to use and they very strongly point towards the value of this area. 

We live in a democracy, right? And if the community says this is what we want, we see the need for housing, we see the need for carefully planned development. We also see the need for green spaces to keep us sane and to keep that quality of life that attracts so many people to our province. 

It's a very poor choice for housing because of the terrain, because of the fire risk as well that I mentioned, so I think science is important and it has a big check mark on this particular puzzle. But I think the community that has gathered over a decade now to really document the importance of these lands is also a very important consideration and I felt that the councillors today really recognized that.

You got a good reception?

I felt that. Today we were talking to the community planning and economic development committee and so they have a little bit of a different agenda than the sustainability committee we previously talked to. 

They're really into this vision for Halifax. How do we plan this right? Recognizing the need for housing, recognizing the need for green spaces, recognizing the need for climate change adaptation in our region for storm water management — all these things, I mean, it's complex, right? 

And so we were talking about all of these aspects with respect to the backlands and we felt that people were very supportive. A lot of people have not been to this area, so I think once you see it, you kind of understand.