Ontario's Ecotourism Comes At A Cost

Ontario's Provincial Parks are getaways from tedious city life. They are rooted in Canadian culture, and because of them Canada has an international reputation for containing some of the last, real expanses of nature. (I bet you didn't know there were 315 of them.)

I can only name three: Killarney, Algonquin, and Temagami. And that's only because I worked at a summer camp for three years that took kids on ten-day canoe trips through each of those parks.

But nature hardly remains natural when we introduce the infrastructure that comes with ecotourism: access roads to drop off points, trails maintained by park staff, rules limiting the number of people at each campsite in order to conserve resources, no cans or bottles allowed all this to preserve the aesthetic state of the park so future generations can enjoy the "wilderness".

And don't forget, most of our parks are rarely visited and over 100 of them have no active management plan.

Our provincial parks have ensured that the concept of wilderness is available for everyone to experience, from die-hard enthusiasts who need to reach deep into the interior, to people in Canada and around the world who just need to know that our parks exist. We cater to all.

Algonquin Provincial Park is designed to endure enormous human activity, to the point where the entire ecosystem is changed, but still offers different levels of wilderness value that are managed so they can be enjoyed for generations to come.

John Winters, the superintendent of Algonquin, described the park as having 15,000 km of canoe routes, 2,000 interior backcountry campsites, and a three-foot by three-foot pit-privy known as a thunder box at each campsite.

Comparing Algonquin to a wilderness class park like Killarney Provincial Park, Winters says, "In a natural environment class park there is more camping allowed, more trails, the number of facilities and services offered increases, and when that happens there is more public use of the area."

Some people don't view Algonquin as wilderness because 57% of the park is available for non-commercial system logging, said Winters, adding that the park was heavily logged in the 1940s and 50s before logging licenses were canceled and a resource management plan was drafted in 1974.

"There are parts of Algonquin where only small numbers of people visit every year. The harder it is to get there, the lower the level of use but the higher the wilderness value," says Winters. "Canada has an iconic image of wilderness."

Every fall, 15,000 tourists from Japan visit Algonquin and are satisfied by the wilderness they experience on hiking trails within a few kilometers of the highway.

Killarney is more strictly managed than Algonquin. Setting aside the thought of our parks satisfying an international urge to feel wilderness exists, Killarney's management shows how a particular form of nature can be made accessible to humans and then regulated to the point of sustainability.

Killarney uses a quota system that limits six people to each backpacking campsite and nine to each canoeing campsite, while allowing only three pieces of shelter on any campsite. Its regulatory system also makes sure every third backpacking campsite is empty each night, and rotates campsites on high frequency lakes out of service each day, says Kris Puhvel, executive director of the Friends of Killarney.

"When preparing land for ecotourism you want to regulate it then set up a system where people are using it in a low impact manner. Damage to the ecosystem depends on how well regulated it is, but without our rules and maintenance it would probably be more unaesthetic than anything," explains Puhvel.

Sometimes I forget all the good things Killarney has taught me – character, respect, appreciation for nature – and find a paranoid question welling up inside me: “why is this particular form of nature preserved for us?”

In Canada, reserving aside plots of land for recreational use started as a way of making money off of the sublime aesthetic value people found in nature.

"It started with an escape to beauty," said Paul Wilkinson, a York University environmental studies professor.

Moreover, making money from tourism was the motivation for the Canadian Pacific Railway to build a railway across Canada after attractions like the Banff hot springs popped up.

As Wilkinson has noted, there are still ways to make money from ecotourism today.

"When I was on the Panel recommending changes in the ecological integrity of Canada's national parks in 1999 to 2000, we were told at times that playing golf at Banff Springs was ecotourism because you got to see elk on the greens, or that driving in an RV and camping beside an Alaskan river after you've bought gas at $4 a gallon was not ecotourism," said Wilkinson.

There is little doubt that Ontario's provincial parks are considered ecotourism and they are certainly not making money. "Ontario Provincial Parks are grossly underfunded, grossly understaffed, [and] under extreme pressure," said Wilkinson.

Perhaps our parks exist and are kept aesthetically pleasing simply as part of our cultural identity, a means of engraining wilderness into our being.

Exploring the role our parks play in Canadian culture led me to an interesting quote from William Cronnon, "By imagining our true homes are in the wilderness we forgive ourselves the homes we actually inhabit."

Do our provincial parks offer us nothing other than the escape we need to continue living in a capitalist system that damages the environment?

A cynical thought.

Wilderness in Ontario is an escape, an education, and for some, a reassurance. It helps makes us more environmentally conscious and from it we learn a continuous lesson on how to live harmoniously with nature.

In 2002 the Federal Government took an important step in protecting Canadian wilderness that would never have happened without the lessons to be learned from Ontario's Provincial Parks and from a general respect all Canadian have for nature.

The panel recommending changes in the ecological integrity of Canada's national parks to then minister Sheila Copps saw some of its recommendations legislated by Parliament in 2002.

Ecological integrity calls for a new way for our ecotourism to interact with ecosystems: If you are unsure of the effects, don't do it. 

A classic example is the banning of white water rafting on the Jasper River because it was unclear how it would affect Harlequin ducks during breading season.

Recently Wilkinson has been working with park management to bring ecological integrity from legislation into management practice.

"We want the superintendents to have it embedded in their regulations so they can say: no, we can't do this because we don't know what will happen," explains Wilkinson.

In 2006 the same concept behind the federal ecological integrity movement was echoed in our provincial parks.

"We are never going to have any piece of land or water that's totally unaffected by humans," says Wilkinson.

"The questions are: How much is too much, and what kind of use can happen without abuse?"

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