Rock Bottom

The red Stop the Quarry signs begin outside the town of Digby, Nova Scotia, and continue all the way down the Neck.

The long southwestern arm of the North Mountain, the Digby Neck is the extension of the worn and forested ridge to the west of the Annapolis Valley, which, including Long and Brier Islands, runs for some sixty kilometres before sinking into the sea after Westport. Just over two kilometres wide, the Neck divides the Bay of Fundy from the more tranquil, sheltered waters of St. Mary’s Bay. The peninsula is like a great wharf reaching into what was once one of Nova Scotia’s most fertile fishing grounds. Whales of all kinds still travel here for Fundy’s cool waters and an easy feed of plankton, northern shrimp, and herring, so that some lobster fishers use their boats for whale-watching tours in the off-season.

Subtle differences in the character of the villages along the Neck have played into an extraordinary dispute that started five years ago now, concerning a mega-quarry that an American-owned company, Bilcon of Nova Scotia, wants to build at Whites Point, outside Little River on the Fundy shore. Sandy Cove, a village at the Neck’s narrow midway point, is a salubrious place where many Canadians from out of province visit or — as my wife and I do — keep a summer home. American families also come here, many able to trace their ties to the days before the modern nation existed, when land grants were accorded to United Empire Loyalists. The area was once home to summer camps, inns, and a schoolhouse, and still boasts handsome white houses and churches that nestle around Sandy Cove’s protected wharf, on St. Mary’s Bay, and on the short road over the ridge to the village’s Fundy side and the only sandy beach on the peninsula. In summer, brave children jump off the wharf into Fundy’s freezing water, as others lie on the sand by Jerome’s Rock, named after the sailor who, in 1863, was washed ashore, unable to speak, with his legs amputated above the knees. Few want the quarry here.

Centreville, a little farther north, conjures a darker mood. Perhaps this is because Little Arthur, a bootlegger, used to sell liquor here to men who could not afford the trip to Digby, or to fishers who wanted a drink on Sunday. Or perhaps it is because Centreville is home to the Johnsons, one of two families from North Carolina who made the Little River purchase with a view to building the quarry in the first place. Or maybe it’s because Randy and Cindy Nesbitt, the decent, hard-working couple who run Wilson’s on the Neck, a gas station and dry goods store, wore those Bilcon of Nova Scotia baseball caps and even erected a great big billboard saying A Step Forward: Start the Quarry.

If Sandy Cove is a community Bilcon could not penetrate and Centreville is the company’s unofficial seat, then Little River, about three-quarters of the way down the Neck, is where the battle for the pockets and minds of locals has been most divisively fought. Like Sandy Cove, the village is a picture-postcard-perfect community of white clapboard homes dating back to the arrival of the Loyalists, and newer ones belonging to prosperous fishers who stack their hundreds of lobster traps along their asphalt driveways in the off-season. At the junction with the 217, there is a Baptist church, a small post office, and a whale-watching kiosk. Travel the east road along to the wharf, and you will pass a series of fishers’ sheds, warehouses, and a lobster pound. Take the road to the lookout on the western side, and you will feel colder, stronger breezes and see the boats that work the Bay of Fundy — the lobster fishing season here starting in November and working through the bitter, surf-whipping storms of winter. You will be standing on a bluff made of basalt and looking across ocean pathways over which, nearly four centuries ago, Virginian colonists travelled in order to plunder Champlain’s original Annapolis habitation. These two factors — the abundance of basalt here and its proximity to deep water — have pitted neighbour against neighbour, father against son, and have brought the region to the precipice of a radically different tomorrow.

Bilcon of Nova Scotia is the fully owned Canadian arm of Clayton Concrete Block and Sand, a large New Jersey–based aggregate producer also known as Clayton Block. It is impatiently waiting to begin construction on what could eventually be one of the largest quarries in Canada. Its plan is to blast the approximately 150 hectares of land it owns at Whites Point to as low as ten metres above sea level, then load the crushed basalt onto container ships for transport to New Jersey and eventual use from Massachusetts to Florida. The 40,000 tons of aggregate Bilcon plans to export each week is more than any quarry on the Neck produces in a year, and will dramatically alter the appearance and ecosystem of this delicate, environmentally sensitive region. Quarries already exist on the Neck, but it is the scale of Bilcon’s project and the permission it gives to other companies that many residents of the Neck and the Annapolis Valley legitimately fear. In the absence of any local zoning laws or a provincial coastal management policy, there is nothing to stop Clayton Block — or any other company in its wake — from exploiting the North Mountain in its entirety. Applications have already been made for other quarries, at Upper Granville, and Victoria Beach, nearer Annapolis.

Founded in 1951, Clayton Block is the largest producer of concrete and crushed stone in New Jersey. It employs 850 people and is one of the last such companies in the state to be family owned and operated. But in the past decade, mergers have led to a situation in which Clayton Block now competes with consolidated companies that control 90 percent of the lucrative New York City market, and also supply much of the 1.5 million tons of aggregate it requires to meet its own manufacturing needs. This, and other exigencies of economic globalization, has put considerable pressure on Clayton Block to find its own secure source of aggregate. Markets for aggregate tend to be close to the source, as the single highest cost is often truck transport to the cities, highways, and building sites where their product is required. So when Mark Lowe, a Canadian from Nova Scotia, approached the Claytons with information about a huge amount of high-quality basalt that could be shipped annually by sea — ocean transport reduces the cost of aggregate dramatically — the family was very, very interested.

“This is a business for profit, which is not a dirty word in here,” said Bill Clayton Jr. We met in the boardroom of his company’s offices in Lakewood, New Jersey, in July 2007, ten days after the public hearings in Digby for the project had ended.

The Claytons’ involvement in the quarry began in 2002; five years on, the project still had not been approved. The public hearings were the culmination of a joint federal-provincial environmental review, and the panel’s report was to be submitted in mid-October. Pending its conclusions, the provincial and federal governments would deliver the necessary permits — or not. The New Jersey family was waiting. Testily.

“Your government talks about being ‘open for business,’ and we believed that,” said Bill Jr. “We go there, we’re told by the departments that work these things that they’re very interested in mining, they’re very interested in business, and that in fact mining is an allowed use in the area.” Clearly, the man was pissed off.