Provincial parks clockwise from top left: Flores Island (Mark Hobson); Carmanah (Gary Fiegehen); Stein Valley (Leo Degroot); Golden Ears (Jeremy Sean Williams); South Chilcotins (Joe Foy)
BC Parks - A World Famous Legacy
From the rugged Khutzeymateen Inlet — Canada’s only grizzly bear sanctuary — to the awe-inspiring Brandywine Falls, south ward to picturesque Bromley Rock, British Columbians are the proud owners of some of the most spectacular parks in the world.
There are over 800 parks, protected areas and ecological reserves in British Columbia covering almost 12 million hectares – nearly 13% of the province’s land base. Pocket deserts, rare Garry oak meadows, arbutus groves, wild salmon runs, pristine alpine meadows, intact temperate rainforests and secluded hot springs are just some of the ecological wonders you can experience when visiting a provincial park in British Columbia.
Over 23 million people visit BC parks on an annual basis(1), contributing half a billion dollars to the provincial economy(2). At Goldstream Provincial Park alone, just 16 kilometres outside of Victoria, over 100,000 people come to wander amongst the giant western redcedars and Douglas-firs to witness and watch wild salmon returning to spawn in late fall. Struggling upstream chum, coho and chinook salmon travel thousands of kilometers to their ancestral spawning grounds to lay their eggs and die. This miracle of life and death, a stone’s throw from our capital city, is just one example of the ecological, recreational, educational and economic importance of BC’s park system.
"Of all the changes that will come in the next generation, we must prevent any of a sort that will diminish the essential beauty of this country. For if that beauty is lost, or if that wilderness escapes, the very nature of this land will have passed beyond our grasp."
- Pierre E. Trudeau
People come from around the world to visit British Columbia’s parks because we can offer something that is in short supply in the rest of the world: a clean, natural and unspoiled environment. These values make BC a desirable place to visit and a desirable place to live. In fact, over 90% of British Columbians have visited a provincial park and nearly two-thirds do so on an annual basis(3). Parks are an important part of British Columbia’s environmental legacy — a public trust where people go to walk, hike, swim, camp, bird watch and reconnect with nature. BC’s parks are also the competitive advantage to our tourism industry which generates over $9 billion to the provincial economy annually(4).
Splendor sine Occasu —
British Columbia’s Provincial Motto
Splendor without Diminishment
The importance of British Columbia’s parks and protected areas however, cannot be assessed by recreation and economic values alone. Parks and protected areas offer immeasurable value through the protection of ecosystem services. For what is the value of clean air, fresh water, wild salmon, climate moderation, bird sanctuaries, soil retention or an ancient stand of cottonwood trees? And, what is the value of the call of a loon, the lonely hoot of a Northern spotted owl or a glimpse of a mountain caribou? The protection of oldgrowth forests that filter our air and water and the protection of shaded streams and riparian areas that support wild salmon and coastal grizzly bears are just a few examples of ecosystem services which have a value that can not be measured by dollars alone.
Annual trips to rustic provincial park campgrounds are a summer tradition passed down through generations of BC families. Photo credit: Reimer Family, c. 1970
In the hundred and thirty years, since British Columbia was established as a Canadian province, urban development, industrial logging, mining and oil and gas exploration have impacted and fragmented many of our wilderness areas. A century ago huge Douglas-fir groves like the kind you can still see in Cathedral Grove, where trees reach 800 years of age and are over 10 feet in diameter, were common in BC’s low elevation temperate rainforests. Today these groves are nearly gone; targeted by logging companies for their value as raw logs, pulp, paper and two-by-fours.
But as long as there have been threats to wilderness, there have been people with a vision to protect BC’s unique wilderness areas from industrial encroachment. In 1911 BC’s first provincial park was created, the 250,000 hectare Strathcona Provincial Park. Almost a hundred years of blood, sweat and tears later we’ve created a public park system off-limits to industrial development, that is an environmental legacy not only for British Columbians and Canadians, but for the world.
Unfortunately this environmental legacy is in danger of disappearing. Over the past 20 years chronic funding shortages, lack of connectivity between parks, inadequate representation of ecosystems, increased commercialization and proposed logging, mining and road construction have steadily eroded our world class wilderness heritage. But the worst attacks have been made in the last three years, since the BC Liberals were elected to the government in May 2001. An already struggling system has been ill-prepared to survive the onslaught of mass staff layoffs, privatization initiatives, user fees, industrial development, park closures, road construction, weakening of the Park Act and huge funding cuts. Ten decades of hard work is being unraveled, leaving a once great and growing protected areas system with an uncertain future.
