PAUL KEELING
Special to Globe and Mail Update

The B.C. government is going ahead with its plan to permit the
development of privately operated, roofed accommodations in 12
provincial parks, which could include provisions for “major resorts.”
The Environment Ministry’s Park Lodge Strategy, which aims
to “provide park users with a wider range of options,” is likely
intended to capitalize on tourism generated by the 2010 Olympics. It
is clearly incompatible with B.C. Parks’ mission to protect the
province’s natural heritage.

B.C. Environment Minister Barry Penner has said that “parks play a
vital role in conservation, but parks are also for people.” This line
is extremely misleading. It conflates the ordinary use of the
term “park,” which refers to city green spaces that have sports
fields, walkways and planted grass, with large protected wilderness
areas containing complex ecosystems that have a high degree of
natural value.

Mr. Penner’s statement implies that the policy objectives for “parks”
in the first sense apply to “parks” in the second sense. But the
mantra that “parks are for people” conceals very important
differences in the types of public motivations, goals and values that
underpin the existence of, say, Vancouver’s Stanley “Park” and Wells
Gray Provincial “Park.” In the case of the provincial parks, the
truth is closer to the inverse of Mr. Penner’s statement, which is
that provincial parks are for people, but they play a vital role in
conservation. Phrased this way, the implication is entirely different
for the proper balance between natural value and human use.

Provincial parks are predicated on a deeper and more complex set of
public values than are our more familiar city and town “parks” where
we play Frisbee and have picnics. The inappropriateness of new lodges
and resorts in wild backcountry areas becomes obvious once we get
this clear.
Rick Drysdale - The definition of park: 1 a : an enclosed piece…
The only way lodges should be put into provincial parks is
Provincialy…
‘Many of us may never see the Spatsizi Plateau or Stevens Lake…
Nothing new for the government of BC…let’s just sell it all…

Even if we accept that provincial parks are “for people,” it does
not follow that the government’s “Park Lodge Strategy” is the best
way to benefit the people who will use the provincial parks. This is
because an important aspect of what we want to conserve in the first
place is people’s access to land that is in an undeveloped,
wilderness condition.

We are conserving people’s experience of those conditions. This rings
especially true if one extends the range of “people” to include
people of future generations, whose need for primitive escape and
solitude in an increasingly mechanized and artificial world may be
very great.

Mr. Penner can only mean that “parks are for profit,” not “parks are
for people.”

It seems incredible not to recognize that there are essential
criteria that make Wells Gray Provincial Park the kind of place that
it is, and that the absence of private lodges is one of them. For
most people, the difference in kind between the Matterhorn or Mount
Fuji and Mount Robson is self-evident.

As a Swiss professional mountain guide once said to me, after I had
praised the scenic beauty of his native Alps, “Yes, but you have ze
vilderness.”

If German and Dutch outdoor enthusiasts want to enjoy pretty scenery
from the balcony of a chalet, they go to the Alps. This Swiss
foreigner recognizes something that is truly outstanding and unique
in Canada — its high degree of natural value and rare opportunities
for contact with wilderness and primitive forms of recreation. It is
a tragedy that B.C.’s Environment Minister, whose responsibility it
is to protect these areas, does not. Mr. Penner’s plan is like having
Coke machines or hot dog stands inside a cathedral to attract a
larger congregation. To even propose such a thing is just to not
understand what a cathedral is.

Many of us may never see the Spatsizi Plateau or Stevens Lake in
Wells Gray, but we are glad they are there anyway, in an undeveloped
condition. We are comforted to know there are wild plants and
animals, rivers, lakes and mountains out there undergoing
evolutionary, ecological and geological processes independently of
human purposes or concerns.

As conservation biologist Reed Noss puts it, “we need places where we
can get lost, frozen, starved, or mauled by a grizzly.” We need such
places, even if we never visit them personally, because they embody
precious lessons of restraint and humility in an increasingly
technological and commercialized world. Wilderness reminds us where
we came from, where we are, and where we might be going.

It provides a larger context outside of ourselves in which to make
sense of our lives and destinies. Wilderness is a public good that
must be protected.