Battle Over The Buzz Monks Want Logging Giant To Keep Noisy Chain Saws Out Of Earshot

A giant forestry company has run into a feisty adversary in the woods of Nova Scotia: a tiny order of Catholic monks battling to prevent the buzz of chain saws from disrupting their silent meditation.

Several times a week, members of the order rise by 3 a.m. and drive from the isolated Nova Nada spiritual retreat to a message center nearly 40 miles away to wage an e-mail, phone and fax crusade against J.D. Irving Ltd.

In simplest terms, they want Irving’s loggers to buzz off, to keep their chain saws and trucks at least two miles away from the monastery.

“We’re weary, but we feel this is God’s will,” Sister Sharon Doyle, the monastery’s chief spokeswoman, said by phone from the message center in Yarmouth. “It has mushroomed - it’s about the rights of little people in the face of multinationals.”

The monastery, which has no phones, has received hundreds of messages of support since the dispute became public. It also has rejected the company’s compromise offer to conduct no logging within one mile of Nova Nada.

For Irving, the showdown is a potential public-relations nightmare. Yet the private company, part of a family business empire with vast holdings in the Maritime provinces, is reluctant to give in.

“We want to be a good neighbor,” company spokeswoman Mary Keith said. “But there are people whose livelihood depends on the operation we have there. … We both have communities we’re serving in our own way.”

An Irving sawmill near Nova Nada employs more than 300 people, and hundreds more earn money from Irving for wood-cutting and other services. The company has been widely praised for responsible forestry practices.

Nova Nada was established on a 65-acre lakeside tract in 1972 by a small Carmelite order that also operates retreats in Colorado and Ireland.

Its dozen or so permanent residents include men and women - Sister Doyle says the women prefer to be called monks, not nuns. Joined by about 500 paying guests a year, the monks observe periods of silence each night between 8 p.m. and 9 a.m., as well as for one full day each week.

Last summer, the silence was broken. Monks resorted to ear plugs as work crews cut logging roads near the monastery and began felling thick stands of white spruce.

Negotiations ensued, at first amicably. But Sister Doyle and her colleagues were angered by Irving’s unilateral proposal Nov. 5 that called for no logging within a mile of the monastery and logging within two miles for no more than five weeks each year.

“Any logging within two miles will ruin us,” Sister Doyle said. “They knew we would refuse it.”

Keith said she visited Nova Nada herself and couldn’t hear a chain saw from a distance of one mile.

“Is it worth putting people out of work if in fact the one-mile zone will serve as a reasonable buffer?” Keith asked. “Why can’t we at least give this solution a try?”

But Doyle scoffed, saying she would swear on a Bible that power saws and trucks could be heard more than two miles away.

“This particular family never concedes land,” she said of the Irvings. “It’s about power, about fear of setting a precedent.”

One possible solution to the standoff would be intervention by the Nova Scotia government. The monastery has asked the Natural Resource Ministry to assess whether some provincial land could be offered to Irving in exchange for turning the area around Nova Nada into a nature reserve.

“But we don’t want the onus to be on the province,” Sister Doyle said. “We think the onus is on Irving. Why should one of Canada’s wealthiest families be so concerned about a few thousand acres?”