Banff Park's
ENDLESS LOOP
History tells us the problem likely won’t go away. So how do we break the cycle?
James Barnard (J.B.) Harkin became the very first commissioner of Parks Canada in 1911, and the 25 years he spent in charge set a precedent for the rest of the century. “The founding father of national parks,” as people like to call him, helped usher in the idea that promoting tourism and environmental protectionism could go hand-in-hand.
“For much of the 20th Century,” Parks’ own Banff Management Plan said in 2010, “Banff National Park was a place of contentious debates between proponents of the tourism economy and proponents of conservation.”
Harkin’s ideas were central to that, and it’s difficult to escape his name when looking through historical or government documents. It’s undeniable he set the foundation for national parks, but as Alan MacEachern wrote, he was the very first commissioner for two and half decades “at a time when the parks were relatively free of political interference, [and] when the future policies of the park system were being conceived.” In other words, a “hero, if only by default.”
During and after his tenure, automobiles began to take a more prominent role in the park, particularly after the Trans-Canada highway was finished in the 1960s. Commercial airlines, winterized hotels and a growing ski industry combined to explode park visitation in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Environmentalism was growing too, and the questions of appropriate use became commonplace.
Between 1950 and 1967, the number of visitors to
Banff National Park increased from under 500,000 to over 2 million.
For the first time, evidence of a serious level of public concern about
development and the Park’s ecological integrity surfaced.
– Banff-Bow Valley: At the Crossroads
In the 1990s, Parks Canada was worried about permanent damage to the ecological integrity of the park because of the growing number of people—visitation hit 5.01 million people in 1995. So they commissioned the Banff-Bow Valley Study, a two and half year landmark document which incorporated research and work from experts across the country and from the Bow Valley.
The 500 recommendations the study made laid the groundwork for the future of the park at the time, including: restoring the role of fire in modifying natural vegetation; reducing human use on trails at risk of losing ecological integrity; improving communication with the public about ecological integrity; and maintaining habitat connectivity and reducing human-caused wildlife mortality (which would eventually became wildlife highway overpasses and fencing we see today).
One of the key themes of the study was that trends of management and visitation growth could not continue without doing permanent damage to the park.
In terms of visitation growth, they were worried of an upwards trend, predicting the number of visitors would reach 6.2 million by 2020. A growth rate any higher than the baseline one per cent, and the numbers of visitors reach exponentially higher, like 10.6 million by 2020 at three per cent. Instead, current visitation mirrors what they predicted a -0.5 per cent growth rate would look like: 4.2 million by 2020.
Parks Canada made efforts to reduce visitation while increasing efforts to safeguard the park from people. Eventually, visitation fell to 3.11 million in their 2008-09 fiscal year.
But when Parks Canada was developing their 2010 Banff Management Plan—the current mandate in which the park is run today—they noted that visitation trends weren’t following regional growth in Calgary and the surrounding area, and they thought public interest in national parks was actually falling. One of Parks Canada’s new primary concerns was increasing visitation and “maintaining relevance.”
For the next eight years, Banff’s visitation numbers grew until they set a new high for the 21st Century: 4.18 million in 2017-18. As a result, the debate has been renewed over the pressure on the park created by tourists.
An article from the Globe and Mail in 1982, “Tourist takes boom toll on Banff,” sounds similar to “Banff ‘bursting at the seams’ as tourism soars.”
Constant Cycle
“Parks has a real activism period where they go, 'My god, we need to use science and we have to use the best of everything,’” Cliff White said, former manager of ecological research and preservation at Parks Canada.
“Then, there's other times when just normal bureaucratic mentalities kick in. And the standard rule of bureaucracy is ‘nobody moves, nobody gets hurt.’”
One of those activism periods was the Banff-Bow Valley Study in 1994, which also guided future parks policy making with how it was conducted. A round table open to shareholders and the public to discuss issues at hand were central to its method of participatory management, and, as a retrospective review noted, these ideas could be central to how Parks Canada’s management operated in the future. It’s White’s hope that this collaborative, open management continues.
“If you're trying to solve a problem, you got to bring a bunch of people together, and they've got to work together,” he said. “So, as we iterate through this next cycle of how much tourism is too much for Banff, there'll be a lot more bringing people together."
He’s positive about the future, as is a colleague of his, Marco Musiani, a professor and researcher of wildlife ecology at the University of Calgary. Musiani, however, believes the balance that J.B. Harkin once created will forever be conflict.
“I don't think Parks Canada will ever resolve the matter of conflict between the interests of people and the interests of the environment. It cannot,” he said.
The Caribou
White and Musiani collaborated with Mark Hebblewhite on a study in 2010 looking to Banff National Park’s caribou, “the first large mammal species to disappear from a Canadian National Park in over a century.” Throughout, they trace the history of caribou and its path to extinction, which hung by a thread for nearly 20 years before they were finally gone.
Their disappearance was human-caused, and with plenty of tax dollars to protect the Banff spring snails, they ask, how could they let caribou slip away? Caribou were listed as endangered by 2000, but the study notes Environment Canada never created a recovery plan for caribou in national parks.
“We, as a society, had waited too long, and we were not doomed to the outcomes or to the extinction of caribou,” Musiani said. “There was something else to be done, and we didn’t act even with much of the evidence available. I don’t want such cases to repeat. We should learn from the past.”