Cultured wilderness in Jasper National Park

Journal of Canadian Studies, Fall 1999 by I S MacLaren

The upper Athabasca River valley in Jasper National Park has witnessed considerable human influence over the past 200 hundred years. By analysing a wide variety of influences at different times during the past two centuries, this essay considers again the meaning that Canadians accord the idea of wilderness, generally, and the idea of wilderness in the context of national parks, specifically. The discussion is guided by the view that wilderness is itself a human construct, deeply informed by human values, even if those values alter from one epoque to another.

Situe dans le parc national jasper, le haut de la valee de la riviere Athabasca a W le theatre d'une activite humaine considerable au cours des 200 dernieres annees. En analysant une vaste gamme d'influences A diverses epoques au cours; des deux derniers siecles, cet essai considere encore une fois l'importance que les Canadiens accordent generalement a l'idee d'un milieu sauvage, et particulierement a l'idee d'un milieu sauvage dans le contexte des parcs nationaux. La discussion est orient6e par l'opinion qu'un milieu sauvage est lui-m@me un concept humain, profondement influence par les valeurs humaines, rn@me si ces valeurs changent d'une epoque A l'autre.

Debatable as some find it, the idea of wilderness is a paradox. Replete with tensions, it foists a culturally determined set of assumptions on space perceived in an absolute way to lie beyond culture. This essay studies the tensions in that idea through a 200-year period of human presence in the upper Athabasca River valley of Jasper National Park (JNP). Its theoretical thrust depends chiefly from the orientation of William Cronon's introduction and essay, "The Trouble with Wilderness," in Uncommon Ground (1995), his edition of papers about the human place in nature. In that introduction, Cronon discusses the paradoxical use we make of words like nature and wilderness. We make them stand for universal reality while enduing them with all our "most personal and culturally specific values" (51). And he concludes with the identification of nature as a paradox, "the uncommon ground we cannot help but share" (56).1

As for its content, this essay is informed to a great extent by the work of the Culture, Ecology and Restoration (CER) Project, an ongoing interdisciplinary study of human influence on the Athabasca River valley (Fig. 1).2 This valley, a very wide one as western Canadian mountain valleys go, can serve as a synecdoche for Canadian wilderness. Because it dominates the 10,880 km^sup 2^ of JNP, it needs very centrally to be understood as part of a grand Canadian symbol of identity.3 Citizens flock to national parks and feel Canadian in them. They do so especially in the western mountain parks. As the first park in the national system, Banff remains the brightest jewel in the crown, and its neighbouring mountain parks the next brightest. Moreover, mountains readily inspire awe in such a way as to seem to exceed their own spatial dimensions. In the case of the Canadian dominion, sublime geography served as both the obstacle to and, once matched by technology in the form of railways, the symbol of nation-making aspirations. History and geography have thus conspired powerfully; consequently, the mountain parks have transcended regional identity to become national, and, with their designation in 1984 as a World Heritage site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), global. In interdisciplinary research in the social and natural sciences, the CER Project studies the historical changes in, and ideologies that have informed, human influences on a protected area, with a view to understanding the interconnectedness of the human and non-human worlds and, thereby, to contributing to decisions about how to manage for ecological integrity.

Like other protected areas, JNP mirrors what we people have valued at every stage of our and its evolution. just as we must disabuse ourselves of the idea that wilderness can be defined "as a collection of organisms to be saved like paintings in a well-endowed museum" (Sauer 34), so we must disabuse ourselves of the idea that our desire for leisure in wilderness settings (hiking or shopping, camping or fine dining, cross-country or downhill skiing) can occur without our exerting a profound impact on non-human realms. Whether it is the dredging of the river bottom for the gravel and sand that keep in good condition the highways that take us there, or the accommodations needed inside a park for those people - waitresses or wardens, tour operators or gas station attendants - who expedite and gratify our desire for leisure, the dimensions of our use of wilderness are paradoxical. But we are only being historically consistent: each epoque offers indications that the presence of Euro-North Americans in the valley has been marked by paradoxes. The overarching paradox appears to be that we recognize and value wilderness, at least in the context of national parks, through the images we deploy to invent it; the human defines the non-human. This essay invokes this "we" by inviting the reader's alignment with, not dissociation from, the uncomfortable paradoxes and tensions in the attitudes and actions of various historical figures and moments it brings under discussion.4 I