Banff National Park's Popularity Leads to Crisis
1/5/97
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Popularity Brings a Huge Canadian Park to Crisis
By ANTHONY DePALMA
Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company
January 5, 1997
BANFF NATIONAL PARK, Alberta -- For the better part of a century, the
majestic peaks and rugged valleys of this park in the Rocky Mountains have
defined the romance of the Canadian West and the rigors of carving
a modern nation out of the wilderness.
But times have changed. Now there is a Hard Rock Cafe in the park, on the
corner of Banff Avenue and Caribou Street, and a few doors down from a
restaurant that serves buffalo fondue is a Ralph Lauren shop.
In fact, the crowds of visitors are so thick that their meeting up with
elk, moose and grizzly bears has become commonplace -- with danger for the
tourists and the animals alike.
With three major ski areas, two communities, 5,600 hotel rooms, 1,300
businesses, the Canadian Pacific railroad, the four-lane Trans-Canada
Highway, 27 holes of golf and over five million visitors a year, Banff
National Park is more popular than ever. And more endangered.
An extensive study of Canada's oldest national park and best-known World
Heritage Site concludes that there is a crisis at Banff so severe that
unless something is done soon, it will cease to be a park.
That finding has set off alarm bells in Canada, where the park's bountiful
natural beauty and unique place in history make it a touchstone of this
country's national identity.
The study, conducted by a team of academics and independent scientists,
found:
-- Banff's back country is crisscrossed by eroding and heavily used trails.
-- Native species of fish are being overwhelmed by stocked trout.
-- The growing number of cars and other vehicles in the park is claiming
the lives of an increasing number of elk, bears and other animals.
-- Road building and other development has artificially divided the herds
of animals, raising the problem of inbreeding.
When the study was released in October, its conclusions so alarmed Heritage
Minister Sheila Copps that she ordered that no new land be made available
for development in the park.
Ms. Copps is expected to take further action in late January and has left
the door open for additional restrictions, possibly including limits on
access to back-country areas.
"If we don't get our act together today, this park may not exist in 50
years," Ms. Copps said when the study was made public.
The lines have been drawn for a classic battle between use and conservation
in one of Canada's most beloved icons. Like Yellowstone and Yosemite
National Parks in the United States, Banff stirs strong emotions, and
like the natural grandeur that the parks contain, almost everything about
the conflict is larger than life.
"What's happening at Banff is that we are losing a fundamental aspect of
the Canadian soul," said Harvey Locke, past president of the Canadian Parks
and Wilderness Society, a citizens' organization. "It's being sold off to
make money."
Brad J. Pierce, president of the Association for Mountain Parks, Protection
and Enjoyment, also a citizens' group, countered: "This study was prepared
by academics who live in an ivory tower. They have created a doomsday
scenario for the park that is totally unjustified."
In the United States, the Interior Department recently restricted flights
by helicopters and small planes over the Grand Canyon, harbingers of a
long-contemplated strategy that would eventually all but eliminate cars
from the Grand Canyon and other popular American parks.
From its inception, Banff was linked to tourism and to Canada's sense of
nationhood as well.
A century ago, engineers pushing the Canadian Pacific Railway westward,
completing a rail link that the province of British Columbia had made a
condition for joining the new Canadian federation, decided to route the new
line through the verdant Bow Valley.
When they discovered hot springs and inspired vistas in the valley, the
railroad officials immediately recognized the area's potential for tourist
development.
The railroaders pushed the government to declare the hot springs a national
park, like the new Yellowstone Park that had been set aside in the United
States in 1871. In 1885, 10 square miles around the spring was designated
as Canada's first national park, and the railroad built the Banff Springs
Hotel to offer comfort in the midst of the wild.
The rest of the town of Banff, and to a lesser extent the nearby hamlet of
Lake Louise, grew up around railroad hotels.
Completion of the Trans-Canada Highway in the mid-1960s, and the opening of
an international airport in Calgary, about 75 miles to the east, made Banff
easily accessible to global tourism.
Although Canada's national parks act provided for areas of outstanding
natural beauty to be preserved for future generations, tourism took
precedence under Prime Ministers Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien.
To accommodate the boom in downhill skiing, the Banff Springs Hotel was
renovated for year-round use. To keep the hotel full, its managers
advertised heavily in Japan. The park now brings in $4.4 billion a year to
the province of Alberta.
All this marketing success only sharpened the conflict between environment
and economy. In 1994 a temporary ban on all new development was imposed
while the independent study was conducted.
The study faulted Canada's national parks service, Parks Canada, for
allowing too much development. Among its recommendations was one for
fencing off the entire town of Banff and another suggesting tearing down
several hotels.
Robert Page, dean of the faculty of environmental design at the University
of Calgary and leader of the study, said runaway development on Banff
Avenue and mile-long lines of recreational vehicles during the summer were
only the most visible symptoms of distress.
"We're basically concerned with the character of the park," Page said. "If
levels of development continue to expand at current rates, then
characteristics expected in a national park, including the protection of
wildlife, will no longer be there in a decade or two."
Although the town sites occupy less than 1 percent of the park's 2,564
square miles, they are in the warmer valley bottoms that wildlife also
favor. Besides splitting the Bow Valley in two, the railroad and
highway are creating genetically isolated groups of the moose and grizzly
bears that avoid crossing the road and rarely use existing underpasses.
Suppressing natural fires, which is necessary to protect human visitors,
has made existing forests grow older than they would have naturally,
eliminating some species like the trembling aspen.
Rivers have been dammed to form a recreational lake, and an air strip, an
army cadet camp and a penned-in buffalo exhibition all disrupt the normal
cycles of wildlife.
Locke said that by the time that Banff was officially incorporated as a
town in 1990, more development had been proposed for Banff National Park,
primarily in the town, then existed in all of Yellowstone National Park,
which is 900 square miles larger than Banff.
But Banff's current mayor, Ted Hart, said the community was surprised at
the report's conclusions. "There is not a crisis here, in my opinion," he
said. "Rather, there's a growing recognition by the people who have an
interest here that we cannot let development get out of hand."
Mayor Hart said that before 1990, Parks Canada had approved some projects
that the new town council would have blocked, including a three-story mall
on the corner of Banff Avenue and Wolf Street.
The federal government rejected the study's call to shut down hotels,
though it limited the population of the town -- which now stands at 7,600 -
- to 10,000. Hart said he doubted that the government would order the town
to be fenced, and he called the proposed back-country limits "ludicrous."
The town is developing its own growth plan, which will become part of the
new management plan that Parks Canada must submit to Parliament in the
spring.
Page said Banff was so important now because the very nature of Canada as a
nation was being threatened by continued separatist agitation in Quebec.
"After the flag and the national anthem, parks are the most important
symbol of Canadian identity," he said. "They are part of what ties
Canadians together."