The Case For More Protected Wild Spaces

October 6, 2025

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• National Parks
• Protected Areas
• Public Lands
• WLA Archive

The wilderness seemed vast and quiet in Alberta, but even back then, people were starting to think about our impacts on nature.

By Sara Heerema, AWA conservation outreach specialist

Read the PDF version here.

 

It’s no secret that our parks are getting busier. Many of us have started the yearly tradition of logging into the Alberta Parks website hours before campground registrations open, hoping to be early enough in line to book something three months out. Driving west on Highway 40, you’ll be lucky to pass Barrier Lake without a snaking line of cars parked on either side of the road. Popular tourist trails are wall-to-wall with people every weekend of the summer. A common phrase I hear from those who love the outdoors is: “There are just too many people now — it’s not like it used to be.”

My family moved to Calgary in the 1960s, around the same time that AWA came into existence. Our family house was at the edge of town, and my mom’s walk to school meandered between a farm and the vast expanse of prairie that used to border the city. The family would routinely pack into their Chevrolet and travel down the dirt road into Kananaskis Country, exploring Peter Lougheed, Bow Valley, and Spray Valley long before they were designated as provincial parks. My uncles would pack a canvas tent and their fishing rods, venturing deep into the woods for days on end with no contact with the outside world. The wilderness seemed vast and quiet in Alberta, but even back then, people were starting to think about our impacts on nature.

Scapegoating the masses

The landscape I grew up in is inarguably different from the one they did, although I like to think that my love for wild Alberta is no less ardent. And while I agree that Alberta’s wilderness is not like it used to be, I struggle to contend that more people getting into nature is the real issue.

Personally, I don’t find it to be the enormous struggle it’s made out to be to find solitude in nature. There are places I’ll avoid if possible (like the aforementioned Barrier Lake), but the majority of visiting tourists congregate in just a few of our most popular destinations. Even locals tend to stick to certain spots — a beach day at Fish Creek Provincial Park, or a winter ski at the Canmore Nordic Centre. If you feel like taking more of a back road into our public lands, there are still vast stretches of hiking trails and campsites where you may not see another person all day.

When the first provincial park was created almost 100 years ago, in 1932, Alberta had a population of roughly 360,000 people. At this point, the park system was intended mainly to find good places to develop campsites and recreation areas for families who were already frequenting these areas. Huge sections of the province were still undeveloped and available for the public to camp, hike, fish, hunt, and otherwise recreate as they wished. By 1965, when AWA was founded, Alberta’s population had skyrocketed to around 1,426,000. The idea of parks was transforming; conservation became an underlying principle of the parks system, and the Parks Act was amended to include protection for wilderness and natural areas. More than half of our provincial parks (46 out of 78) were designated between 1951 and 1971, and 1971 saw over five million attendees to provincial parks, showing a growing interest in outdoor experiences. Our population has now grown to almost 4,400,000, and yet, in 2022 our provincial parks visitation was reported as over 10 million, which is only double the attendees in more than 50 years, despite more than tripling the population. We might be seeing more visitors in some areas, but the peak time of exponential visitor growth is seemingly over.

During this period of rapidly growing interest in our natural areas around the 1970s, it seemed we were moving towards a better network of protected areas as well, with AWA successfully campaigning for more protections in areas like the Willmore Wilderness Park in the late 1970s, working on developing the 1976 Coal Policy for the province, and successfully opposing development projects near the present-day Lake Louise and Sunshine ski resorts as the decade came to an end. The 1980s were rockier, with land-use changes intensifying, but things bounced back somewhat in the 1990s and early 2000s with a renewed spike in public consultation over public lands, and the recognition of large swaths of underrepresented landscapes as areas in need of more protection. The Special Places program was established, which designated the majority of our provincial parks land area in the province, despite allowing some of the pre-existing land use activities to continue.

In recent years, it seems as though the progress we’ve made over the decades is stalling, with land-use planning giving priority to industry and development, rather than protection of our dwindling natural areas and equitable access for people. This was made most evident in early 2020, when the Government of Alberta released the Optimizing Alberta Parks plan, which mandated the closure or removal of 175 provincial recreation sites. The strong public backlash during the Defend Alberta Parks campaign not only reversed the decision but also showed how passionate we Albertans can be when it comes to preserving our protected areas in the province.

Despite the backlash following the Optimizing Alberta Parks plan, our parks and public lands have been slated for more and more development and industrial usage since then, from the coal mining leases underway in our Eastern Slopes, to the clear-cutting slated for Kananaskis Country, to the Red Tape Reduction Statutes Amendment Act and All-Season Resorts Act. We are in a period of continuous and compounding decisions being made that threaten the ecological integrity of our entire protected areas network, both inside and out of the provincial parks.

Plan for Parks in 2025: What will we see?

As the new Plan for Parks draft goes through the consultation process in Alberta, the question on everyone’s mind is how much we can trust that a shinier version of the plan will actually reflect the values and best interests of Albertans and our natural wonders. The plan sets out a 10-year guideline for decision-making in Alberta’s provincial parks. Although seemingly promising at first glance, the plan has some glaring holes that offer less protection for the places we love than I would hope.

The draft Plan for Parks has come about after an initial phase of public consultation, where Albertans made it abundantly clear that protecting our natural spaces and wildlife is a key priority. Seventy-five percent of respondents from the public survey said that they valued parks for their protection of biodiversity and representative landscapes. But despite an obvious public interest in preserving natural spaces, and the benefits that would come from expanding the protected areas network (quieter trails, new areas to discover, improved accessibility, etc.), plans to expand the network are shaky at best, and absent at worst.

Alberta Parks and the Alberta government mention that they will be “working to secure new land to fill gaps in Alberta’s parks system” through regional planning processes. In theory, this is a strong start to improving our network of protected areas in the province. However, these regional planning processes are not guaranteed to actually protect landscapes or species in a timely manner, or at all. For instance, the newly expanded Gipsy-Gordon Wildland Provincial Park contributes just over 600 square kilometres of additional wildland area to be conserved. However, plans for the expansion and official designation of this area began years ago when the Lower Athabasca Regional Plan was finalized in 2013, meaning that designating this area as protected took roughly 12 years to come into effect. The Upper Smoky Sub-Regional Plan, currently in the process of development, slates critical habitat for our endangered caribou to be clear-cut.

Falling short of intended goals is a common theme in land-use planning, and the process of implementing protection policies often takes much longer than we would prefer. In light of this, newly designated areas like Gipsy-Gordon Wildland serve to demonstrate that we need ambitious goals for expanding protected areas right now, based on the assumption that progress towards them will be slow, or not met at all.

Connections for the future

Thinking about the future of Alberta’s parks and public lands, an issue I see is the implicit assumption that in order to make parks better for people, we have to restrict the amount of nature we allow. Development for hotels and shops, or creating “diverse recreation opportunities” like expanding the trail network for motorized vehicles, is touted as a way to give Albertans what they are assumed to want from our parks: something to do. Of course, the real motive is often more cliché — to provide a profit for a few people who attempt to run our public lands like a private business.

All of these plans make more room for people to exist in an approximation of nature, comfortably, as if nature must be packaged up to make it enjoyable or palatable for us. When we are sold that narrative from the very people in charge of our natural areas, it obscures the inherent truth about the land: we are an intrinsic part of it, not a separate designation. Something I fear that we’ve partially lost in both the public psyche, and our guiding plans, is the joy we can get from simply existing within wild areas — sitting quietly beside a stream, listening to birdsong, watching a ground squirrel slowly creep towards your food bag, or knowing the names of the plants surrounding you during a lunch break.

During the Defend Alberta Parks campaign, people’s outrage at the changes being made was strongly influenced by how their own identities were tied to the protected areas at risk. Albertans shared their stories of camping at sunrise or fishing along the river in places that meant something to them. The outrage at their prospective loss was not only about the land-use changes; it was about how leaving these areas vulnerable left a piece of us vulnerable, too. It was about how our own joy and awe are tied to these places in a way that makes it impossible for us to stay silent when they are at risk.

Part of this connection comes from our human desire to protect that which we love above that which we don’t; most of us would choose our siblings’ or close friends’ well-being over that of a stranger. Another side of the story is that connecting to and protecting the natural world has tangible benefits to us, ranging from water filtration to the more complicated well-being and mental health impacts. Experiencing the natural world helps us to love it, loving it influences us to protect it, and protecting it means that the benefits we receive are maintained.

Don’t get me wrong, having more people on the landscape is bound to cause some negative impacts, from trail overuse, to increased garbage and pollution, to higher rates of negative wildlife encounters. There are also different scales of impact — a hundred people hiking a trail has much lower impact than a hundred OHVers. Areas like the Bighorn show severe damage from OHV trails crossing through waterbodies and eroding sensitive soils. There is certainly a need to acknowledge when ecological limits for an area have been reached, and to restrict activity accordingly.

But, dissuading people from visiting public lands or making the outdoors unwelcoming is almost guaranteed to do more harm than good. Without knowing the land, how will people feel compelled to fight for it? Without knowing the difference between a killdeer and a piping plover, what will drive us to save the latter from extinction? As we allow people to lose touch with nature, it’s no wonder that decisions are made that masquerade as being in our best interest, with nature as the unfortunate sacrifice. I suggest we redirect our energy into educating people about our different natural regions, how to recreate on the land more responsibly, and how to get involved in protecting more land for the future.

As we await the final plan, and the resulting outcome for our parks system, it’s a good time to reflect on what we want our province to look like in, say, 60 more years, and make it clear that we need a system that prioritizes protection. When we look at the challenges our parks are facing, we must also consider that many protected areas and public lands in Alberta have less protection than those included under the Provincial Parks Act. It is crucial to be stepping up to the plate and investing in more wilderness protection, not less. Rather than idly watching more and more of our public lands being offered up to industry and development, I hope to see people’s love for the land transform into action directed towards protecting the wilderness we have left.