Joan Baxter (Credit: Snickerdoodle Photography)

Joan Baxter is an award-winning Canadian journalist and author, development researcher and writer, and anthropologist. She is the author of seven books, for which she has won several awards. She has reported for a wide range of international and Canadian media, both from Africa and from Canada.

She writes about healthy environments, food and farms, forests, the climate crisis and greenwashing, extractive industries, corporate capture and neoliberalism, environmental rights and social justice, and about genuine progress that does not harm the planet’s climate, people, and biodiversity.

Between 1982 and 2003, Joan lived, raised two children and worked in seven countries in Africa – Niger, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Mali and Sierra Leone. After that, she continued to make working and writing trips to the African continent, until she moved back to Canada to stay in 2016.

A list of some of her more recent articles and reports is available
here.

Joan holds a BA Honours and an MA in Anthropology from the University of Alberta, and a Bachelor of Journalism (Distinction) from the University of King’s College in Halifax.

Books and awards

Joan’s seventh and most recent book,
The Mill – Fifty Years of Pulp and Protest, was published in 2017 by Pottersfield Press. It traces the history of a controversial pulp mill in Nova Scotia, and garnered a great deal of publicity after the mill orchestrated a letter-writing campaign threatening to boycott Coles and Chapters bookstores, which led to the cancellation of a book signing in one Coles bookstore [you can read about that here].

For four months, The Mill was the best-selling book at Coles and Chapters / Indigo in Nova Scotia and it was
shortlisted for four Atlantic Book awards in 2018, including the Robbie Robertson Dartmouth Book Award, the Democracy 250 Atlantic Book Award for Historical Writing, the Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award, and the Atlantic Book Award for Scholarly Writing, which she won.

• The Mill – Fifty Years of Pulp and Protest (2017)
• Seven Grains of Paradise: A Culinary Journey in Africa (2017)
• Dust from our Eyes – an unblinkered look at Africa (2009, shortlisted for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize)
• The Hermit of Gully Lake (2006, shortlisted for the Atlantic Booksellers’ Choice Award)
• A Serious Pair of Shoes – an African journal (2000, winner of the Evelyn Richardson Award)

She has also earned awards for her contribution to environmental causes and writing. In 2018, the Nova Scotia chapter of the Canadian Association of Retired Persons (CARP) presented her with its Environmental Stewardship Award for “outstanding community contribution to a greener world.”

Her investigative Fool’s Gold series on mining and quarrying in Nova Scotia, published by for the Halifax Examiner and Cape Breton Spectator, earned silver at the 2018 Atlantic Journalism Awards.

In 2020, her series “Port Wallace Gamble” for the Halifax Examiner won a silver Atlantic Journalism Award for excellence in digital journalism, and her article “Borealization of Acadia” earned Honourable Mention for the Beth McLaughlin Environmental Journalism Award.

Background

Joan grew up in Nova Scotia on Canada’s east coast, but then moved to Edmonton to complete her B.A. Honours and M.A. degrees in Anthropology at the University of Alberta. She undertook her Masters research in Tikal, Guatemala, in 1978 and 1979. The following year she returned to Latin America, this time to Mexico, where she worked as a research assistant collecting ecological data at “Los Tuxtlas” Tropical Biology Station on the Gulf Coast.

In 1981, she headed back to Canada to study journalism at the University of King’s College in Halifax, graduating with her B.J. Journalism (Distinction). After a stint of working for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in Halifax, she headed to Niger in West Africa. There she began her freelance journalism career, contributing to the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, and The Chronicle Herald before moving to Burkina Faso in 1986, where she worked as the correspondent for the BBC World Service and Reuters.

She filed many reports on the Burkinabe revolution under President Thomas Sankara, and also on the coup d’état in which he was killed in 1987, about which you can read
here.

After Joan and her family moved to Tamale in northern Ghana in 1989, she continued to report for BBC and Canadian media, and also wrote her first two books. She also helped co-found two schools in Tamale, one the Tamale International School and the other Dahin Sheli, both of which are still flourishing today.

From 1993 until 1997, Joan worked as Senior Science Writer at ICRAF in Nairobi, Kenya, where she edited Agroforestry Today and produced the documentary film Farming with trees. After that, she moved back to West Africa as BBC correspondent in Mali, covering regional events including the conflict in Côte d’Ivoire.

Between 2003 and 2007, she worked as a consultant researcher, writer, editor and translator in Africa for international organizations including IDRC, Partnership Africa Canada, GIZ, and the Oakland Institute (where she is a Senior Fellow).

In 2006 and 2007, she was Executive Director of the Nova Scotia – Gambia Association, securing funding for major youth health education projects. In 2009, she joined the Board of USC Canada (now SeedChange).

Her work has appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique, Al Jazeera, Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, Pambazuka News, CBC radio, The National Observer, The Chronicle Herald, The Coast, The Halifax Examiner, and The Cape Breton Spectator.

She is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ),  The Writers’ Union of Canada, the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia, and the Canadian Association of Journalists.

In addition to English, Joan speaks French, German and a rusty Spanish, as well as some very basic phrases in Krio and Bambara.