Following Livingston and the Margaree Environmental Association’s 1998 victory with Jim Campbell’s Barren, Livingston began work on his film The Battle At Our Shores from 1998-2000.
This film documented the large-scale community opposition to oil and gas exploration in the Southern Gulf of St. Lawrence. After the industry conducted a limited amount of seismic exploration, the issue was brought to a standstill. While Livingston won the fight to protect the Gulf from oil and gas exploration and development, there is one remaining site called Old Harry where permits exist.
Rudy Haase
Neal Livingston then began work on his next few films, One Day which came out in 2002, and Rudy Haase.
Rudy Haase, is a one hour documentary that Neal Livingston completed in 2007 when Rudy was 87 years old. It is a biography about Rudy, Canada’s great unknown environmental activist. Rudy lived in Nova Scotia and he successfully campaigned to preserve wilderness internationally and locally. Rudy fought against clear cutting and spraying of forests, and uranium mining.
Between 2007 and 2016, Livingston took a small break from producing films. He focused his creative, environmental activism efforts to off-screen protesting.
Muskrat Falls
Neal Livingston made a strong effort, including speaking on a panel at City Hall in St. John’s Newfoundland in 2010, to bring possible alternatives to the Muskrat Falls development to national public attention. He proposed there could be wind farms set up as needed all over Newfoundland, with local people getting much of the work to build and maintain these wind projects. Instead, we have the Muskrat Falls hydro-electric project, which is years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. It has become a political scandal, and an environmental and economic mess (see the Muskrat Falls Inquiry–Final Report 2020).
Fracking: The Battle to Save Lake Ainslie
Together with many others, Neal Livingston played a role in stopping oil and gas drilling near homes adjacent to Lake Ainslie, Cape Breton Island’s largest freshwater lake.
This exploratory drilling was to be the first oil and gas activity in recent time on Cape Breton Island.
The Margaree Environmental Association (MEA) took on the court action in this battle to stop drilling and fracking. The MEA raised enough money in 3 weeks, to take the Environment Minister of Nova Scotia to court for issuing the drilling permit.
Nova Scotia is one of the only places in the world where fracking was placed under a moratorium by 2015. Through on-going citizen activism, the moratorium now covers all of Eastern Canada, including Quebec, and Newfoundland.
Neal’s award-winning feature length documentary, 100 Short Stories, documents the battle at Lake Ainslie, and his own travails that eventually led to Black River Wind Limited developing a 6MW wind energy project. It is a wonderfully creative film, which mixes the stories of fossil fuels and renewable energy, with predatory capitalism.