As the former editor of Canada’s premier men’s fashion and lifestyle magazine, Jeremy Freed didn’t forecast a move to Nova Scotia. Born and raised in downtown Toronto, he shaped a successful career in the city, crafting quintessential cosmopolitan stories about menswear and watches, architecture and design, luxury travel and food. His freelance work has appeared internationally, in GQ, Azure, House & Home and many other publications, with assignments placing him at Paris Fashion Week and at the foot of glaciers in Greenland. Nova Scotia wasn’t exactly a logical next landing.

But 2020 had something new in store. Jeremy Freed and his wife joined Toronto’s urban exodus that began just months into the COVID-19 pandemic. From mid-2020 to -2021, more than 70,000 people left the city, and Nova Scotia was a hot ticket for these “pandemigrants”, as Jeremy himself coins. Ontarians moved to the province in droves, contributing to a record-breaking inflow of interprovincials to Nova Scotia that continues to this day.

“As a downtown dweller of Toronto, access to nature is limited. My wife and I would visit Humber River and the Toronto Islands regularly. You never really feel like you’re out of the city, but we made the most of it.” Jeremy recounts, “I was that guy cross-country skiing to work after a big snowstorm.”

“I did, however, start noticing the birds again,” adds Jeremy. His father is an avid birder, and as a child, Jeremy has fond memories of birding trips to Point Pelee National Park in Ontario and Sanibel Island in Florida. Jeremy details the reawakening of his birding enthusiasm in The big birding boom: Thanks to technology and a collective desire to get outside, bird watching is more popular than ever, an article written for The Globe and Mail during the time of his own migration east. In it, Jeremy calls out some of his new Nova Scotian backyard neighbours: a “choir of song sparrows, several species of woodpeckers, and a large flock of crows.”

It wasn’t just avian friends Jeremy hoped to meet after relocating to the Halifax area. Knowing beautiful, untouched places were now far closer than a 4:01 hour drive along the 401, Jeremy was anxious to connect with the nature and community surrounding him. Using time spared by COVID lockdowns, Jeremy began researching how to enjoy the great outdoors with like-minded folk. He became a member of the Halifax Northwest Trails Association and Friends of Blue Mountain-Birch Cove Lakes Wilderness, and somewhere along these fresh-trodden paths, he stumbled upon the Nova Scotia Nature Trust.

“I work in media, so I always watch the news, trying to stay engaged and informed. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of bad stuff out there, particularly regarding the environment. When I started following the Nova Scotia Nature Trust, month after month, I began receiving good news about all these lands being protected and donated. It was such a welcome shift aligning with why we chose to move here in the first place. When the time came, it made sense to adjust my giving and contribute to the Nature Trust”.

From his home in Clayton Park, Jeremy maintains his career remotely as a journalist and content creator and has recently welcomed a baby girl to his family. “She’s going to love it here. The quality of life, there’s no comparison. Staring out over the ocean, breathing in the air, it’s magic”, says Jeremy. As he reminds us in Thunder Bay Rocks: In search of the awesome at Sleeping Giant Provincial Park, an article penned for Porter Airlines’ re:Porter magazine, “The feeling of awe can be hard to come by. In this age of relative miracles, when humanity’s collected knowledge is just a few clicks away, cars drive on their own, and a tap on a screen can summon sushi and wine onto my doorstep in minutes, it’s strangely, increasingly rare to be overcome by wonder.”

The Nova Scotia Nature Trust is thankful Jeremy has joined its community and hopes he continues to find awe and wonder in a life styled by Nova Scotia. It does seem he may have been fashioned for it all along.

As a new monthly donor, Jeremy Freed joins other “Nature Makers” that help bring stability to the work of the Nova Scotia Nature Trust. Monthly donations provide a dependable source of funds that can be used to plan ahead and act quickly when it’s most critical. To find out more about becoming a “Nature Maker” monthly donor, please contact Cynthia McLaren Lloyd, Donor Relations Coordinator at cynthia@nsnt.ca.