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No Trespassing. Private Road. No Parking.
These are the signs that are more and more frequently seen along Nova Scotia’s coastline. As Canadians access the shore for recreation, science, or even just to take in the natural beauty of the coast, they are being increasingly met with physical barriers to the beach, few options to park or use public transportation to get to the coast, and problems with litter and marine debris in the areas they can access.
Private property ownership dominates Nova Scotia’s coastline, and while the public wants access, property owners also want to enjoy privacy and avoid the degradation of their land. In other words, in a province known as Canada’s Ocean Playground, people are increasingly asking – a playground for who?
In Nova Scotia, we have a right to be on the coastline below the high water mark, but no protected right to get there. But should we? Right of Way is a podcast that explores the issue of coastal access in Nova Scotia (and Canada more broadly) through the stories of property owners, communities, scientists, policy makers, environmental activists, surfers, hikers, and more. Join us weekly for new episodes.
Right of Way is recorded, produced, and hosted by Nicolas Winkler (www.nicolaswinkler.com) and Hannah Harrison (www.hannahharrison.ca). Funding for this podcast is generously provided by the Royal Canadian Geographic Society (www.rcgs.org) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca). Podcast artwork by Laura Bonga (@bongas.art). Sound editing by Podstarter (www.podstarter.io). Learn more by visiting www.coastalaccessproject.com.
Nothing really has been done to protect or increase access to our shoreline, and we've just seen a continual loss of that access.
Hannah Harrison:Coastal access is a really excellent example of the stories that we tell about ourselves. And that is that that people have this relationship with the sea. They have this relationship with the coastlines, and we all really value that. I think that's a core shared thing in Nova Scotia.
Nicolas Winkler:We tell ourselves this story that Nova Scotia is Canada's ocean playground.
Hannah Harrison:And that story is changing.
Nicolas Winkler:That narrative and that sort of discourse that we tell ourselves doesn't really hold up to scrutiny as as well as we might imagine or would like it to. The coastal access podcast is really a project that examines and explores the issue about how Nova Scotians get to the coast, how Nova Scotians try or have to navigate the access on the coast, and it interrogates the stories and and really that narrative about Canada's ocean playground. Hi. My name is Nicholas Winkler, and I'm a freelance photographer and filmmaker, and I focus mostly on ocean issues.
Hannah Harrison:My name is Hannah Harrison. I'm an assistant professor and a researcher at Dalhousie University in the Marine Affairs program.
Nicolas Winkler:I was born in a landlocked country in Switzerland, but at a young age, moved to the Caribbean and kinda discovered my passion for the on the water world as a as a young child.
Hannah Harrison:I'm a coastal person both by trade and by personality. I grew up, by the coast in South Central Alaska.
Nicolas Winkler:As a scuba diver, when I first came to Nova Scotia, I had to figure out where the dive sites were. You would talk to people who had been in the diving community for a long time that would tell you about these great dive sites that you can go to because now there were houses.
Hannah Harrison:And we started digging back in newspaper articles and finding, wow, this same issue almost to a letter pops up over and over and over again every few years.
Nicolas Winkler:But because it occurs in different contexts, at different timescales, at different points in time, communities are often having to sort of reinvent the wheel each
Hannah Harrison:time. And so we thought well, you know, let's ask some people what's going on when they have these experiences in these communities when there's a change about coastal access. And over and over, we heard really similar stories of community members who felt that they were really being disenfranchised from something that was really critically important to them and simultaneously from property owners who maybe are moving from somewhere else and in their minds are just exercising their right as a private property owner to to ask people not to be on their property.
Guest 2:Sometimes it's I can see that there's 20 traps sitting on that person's property, but I can't get to them unless I hike 2 kilometers around because that person doesn't want us to go over the property because someone in the past has wrecked it, or they just are protected of their property.
Guest 3:And I thought, how dare this woman keep these seniors and everybody else in the community away from that water?
Hannah Harrison:What could we all be doing a little bit better? And how could we be respecting this ethic that we hopefully share about the coast? You're listening to Right of Way, a podcast about how Nova Scotians get to the coast.
Nicolas Winkler:If you wanna learn more about coastal access issues in Nova Scotia, you can visit the coastal project website at coastalaccessproject.com. Thank you for listening.