The
CONSEQUENCES
of our
FOOTPRINTS
How serious are the trails we leave behind?
The problem for Banff National Park today is that the millions of people visiting each year are heading to only a handful of places: Lake Louise, Lake Moraine, Johnston’s Canyon and the Banff townsite are some of the usual suspects. The majority of the park – 6,641 sq. km of backcountry – is fairly untouched.
At least the backcountry isn’t victim to the poor management and “naked hippies” that plagued it in the 1960s and 1970s, said Cliff White, former Parks Canada manager of ecological research and preservation.
What’s made a difference is not only the evolution of parks management but what White said is the sturdy foundation Parks Canada has created. He said they know where things belong, like where wildlife can roam, where fires can burn and where humans can go for multi-day hiking trips. This foundation means they can make incremental change where needed.
Although the backcountry isn’t busy and many visitors barely stray far from the pavement, an ecological expert from the University of Calgary said humans still have a significant impact on the ecological health of the park.
Marco Musiani, a University of Calgary professor of biological sciences, spends his time looking through the lens of wildlife to study humans’ effect on the environment.
For example, “elk are benefitting from the fact that wolves avoid people,” he said. “Elk use areas close to people as a refugium from predation by wolves.”
This means that areas around high concentrations of people also tend to have a higher concentration of prey that overgraze the landscape, he said. Overgrazing means less biodiversity of plants, and, therefore, less biodiversity of other animals – like song-birds and others that benefit from plants.
“Overall, if one of our targets is to foster biodiversity, we have to be aware that sometimes, large numbers of visitors don’t contribute to biodiversity because of these cascade effects,” he said.
Fire Necessity
“The bottom line in this game is that nature bats last,” White said. “She always has, and she always will."
This is the philosophy White took to fire management, where he says regular, short burns of the Bow Valley early or late in the seasons help the cycle of growth and clear it for wildlife.
Because of pressures to maintain visitation or simply the process of paperwork, White said it doesn’t get done as often as it should anymore. As a result, the forests have grown thicker, and are only vulnerable to hot, “catastrophic” fires in the middle of the summer that might shut down parts of the parks for two months or longer.
The lack of fire also contributes to a dense forest of mature trees that leaves the park vulnerable to the mountain pine beetle, which prefers mature lodgepole pine.
“Now, who made a bunch of 80-year-old pine trees here? Well it wasn’t First Nations,” White said. “They were doing their damn best to keep lodgepole how it should be: lodgepole size, something nice for a teepee... Our culture has created an ecosystem of mountain pine beetle trees that is huge.”
“We could go back probably 800 years of fire history, and there has never been a period as of little burning as there has been in the last 100 years.”
A Balance
According to Greg Danchuk, the visitor experience manager for Banff National Park, “Parks Canada has one of the best, if not the best, ecological monitoring systems in the world.”
Danchuk knows there are risks to the environment with high levels of visitors but said they monitor a significant number of ecological indicators that allow them to closely report the condition of the park.
“If there are too many people in certain areas, if given time, there could be damage to vegetation and damage to displacing wildlife perhaps,” said Danchuk. “[It’s monitored] to ensure that the ecological integrity of this place is not being impacted.”
Much of it comes down to the balance of visitation and protecting the environment, he said, and Parks Canada is doing what they can to keep both happy.
“There’s no silver bullet with one solution that’s going to ensure everything will be perfect going into the future,” he said. “There’s a number of things that need to be undertaken, both on the conservation and protection side of things and on the visitor experience and educational experience side of things.”
While Canadians and visitors hit the backcountry, they may not understand the fine balance between a positive tourism experience and the park’s ecological health.
'Are We Achieving Islands of Wilderness?'
“I’m shocked when I look on a map, or when I fly in an airliner, and I notice the protected areas that are becoming more and more islands of wilderness,” Musiani said. “We should also think not only of what happens within parks, but what happens between parks. Are we
achieving islands of wilderness that are isolated? What will happen 50 years from now?”
A large concern is what will happen to biodiversity over many years of isolation and how disruptive human barriers will be. It’s an issue Musiani thinks needs to be addressed globally.
“We all enjoy visiting parks, we all enjoy wilderness and we all know we have a footprint,” Musiani said. “The best I can say is my research is demonstrating that even the most peaceful naturalists will have an impact on wildlife. The fact that we’re aware is the first step to long-term solutions towards diminishing those effects."
