By: Janet Whitman
HALIFAX: The Mabou Highlands now has more than 6,000 acres of protected coastal wilderness as a group of long-time American summer residents continue to make good on a decades-old pledge to preserve the landscape and its largely untouched habitat.
The latest addition comes from Bob and Lee Ann Kinzer and it marks the third property the couple has protected with the Nova Scotia Nature Trust (NSNT).
“They are working on more,” Bonnie Sutherland, executive director of the Dartmouth-based not-for-profit conservation charity, said in a recent interview. “They are examples of the really wonderful people that we deal with in our work who share our concern about the environment and have a personal commitment to do what they can to make a difference. They’ve protected their own lands. They’re reaching out to their neighbours and other people in the community and really helping to continue to drive this project along.”
The protected area stretches along the coastline between Mabou and Inverness and inland to the mountains.
Donations and sales to the trust by the group of landowners helped spur the Crown to protect all the adjacent land, which is now a designated wilderness area, said Sutherland.
“It wasn’t seen as a real priority for the province. But I think our effort inspired a lot of people to encourage the government to protect that land.”
Together, the Crown and private land, which add up to more than 6,000 acres, can make a significance difference, she added.
“Without the protected private land, the Crown land is just up on top of the plateau. It really doesn’t have that landscape connectivity and connection between the old-growth forest and the highlands and ravine and the coastline,” she said. “But between the Nature Trust and the Crown, that is now an incredibly diverse, connected, large-scale wilderness.”
The trust’s latest annual financial statements show it owned $21.3 million worth of land in the province at the end of March, up from $18 million a year earlier. It also had conservation easement agreements with property owners worth $3.1 million, unchanged from a year earlier.
During its last fiscal year ending March 31, the trust bought 13 properties for $2.7 million, plus a donated value of $15,800, and received four donated land properties with a value of $676,700.
The run-up in real-estate prices during the COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t make protecting ecologically important land any easier.
“There’s never been so much competition for rural land. The prices have been shooting way up,” said Sutherland. “Some landowners who may have been contemplating donating their land are now seeing this amazing opportunity to set themselves up for life by selling their property.”
While many buyers are paying far above the appraised, fair-market value for land, the trust doesn’t, said Sutherland.
Rather than relying on real-estate listings, much of the land the trust protects comes in the form of donations, easements, split-receipt gifts or purchases largely generated through its targeted landowner outreach programs, she said.
“The paying-above-market-value phenomenon has just meant that some land securement opportunities are not available to us.”
In Cape Breton, it was the residents who approached the trust. Some of them are so eager to protect the land they have taken on the outreach themselves.
Included among them is David Rumsey, whose first visit to the Mabou Highlands was as a university student when he helped a friend build a cabin.
He ended up buying land of his own, much of which he is now protecting with the Nature Trust.
The conservation effort by Rumsey and other landowners started in the late 1990s when he and Jean Rosner discovered that Nova Scotia had a nature trust.
Rosner’s mother, Carmelita Hinton, had the notion of protecting the landscape and its habitat decades earlier, after she started bringing her students from Vermont to Cape Breton in the 1920s to enjoy the natural beauty.
Over the years, the mother and daughter encouraged conservation-minded neighbours and colleagues to buy neighbouring lands to prevent them from being developed as had happened to much of the landscape in the United States.
“Together they had a vision that they could ensure that this very special place could be protected forever,” said Sutherland. “It often begins with one small property and then we add another 50 acres and another 50 acres.”