In an era of increasing uncertainty about our natural world, whether it is climate change, overpopulation, pollution or endangered species, the importance of protecting the environment and the services it provides grows. Today, Canadians realize we simply cannot afford to take our environment for granted. At the beginning of 2007, amid news of warming temperatures, shrinking glaciers and chemical contamination, poll after poll confirmed that the environment has become the key issue for Canadians – topping health care, poverty, crime and tax relief.
Read on to see how BC’s parks compare to neighbouring jurisdictions. Find out about the threats to your parks system and what you can do about it.
Mount Robson, located in east central BC near the Alberta border, is one of BC’s best known provincial parks. Unfortunately, years of funding and staff cuts are undermining the ecological integrity of the park. Photo by Leslie Degner
British Columbia's Parks
Paradise lost or Environmental Legacy?
People in Western Canada know we live in a special part of the world. From the mixed-grass prairies of Manitoba, to the rainforests of British Columbia; from the Rocky Mountains of Alberta to the Athabasca sand dunes in Saskatchewan – the diversity of our natural landscapes contribute to a quality of life that is second to none.
British Columbia has over 800 parks and protected areas, but there are just 10 full-time park rangers to safeguard 13,090,000 million hectares.1
For over 100 years we have worked to protect our special places, building provincial parks systems that are truly world class. Visiting a park allows us to reconnect with the natural world: to dip our toes in a cool clear stream or take a walk in the forest. Wilderness gives us aesthetic pleasures, but behind the roar of a river, the hoot of an owl and the hum of a bee, it is providing us with the stuff of life.
Forests purify our water, clean our air and help protect us against global warming. Bees pollinate our crops and healthy wetlands protect us against flooding. Known as “ecosystem services”, these benefits also include the provision of natural medicines, seed dispersal, soil retention, waste decomposition and the regulation of disease outbreaks.
Grizzly bears are threatened by loss of habitat, degraded fish streams, hunting, a nd poaching — all of these should be addressed in our parks system.
Given the environmental uncertainty we currently face it is more important than ever to take steps to ensure a future with healthy ecosystems. One of the best ways we can do that is to stand up for our parks and protected areas. Safeguarding our protected areas is a smart decision not only from an ecological perspective, but also makes sense economically. Our provincial parks generate over a billion dollars annually to local economies throughout Western Canada. 2
Today, from BC to Manitoba, there are over 1500 provincial protected areas covering 22 million hectares. These figures sound impressive, but in reality our parks are struggling under a barrage of threats. Logging, cuts to staff and funding, weak laws, encroaching privatization and government indifference are eroding our protected areas, putting into jeopardy the future of our parks.
