When it comes to preserving wilderness, two arguments tend to rise to the surface; one says people have no place in wilderness, while the other argues that if people do not have the opportunity to appreciate the wilderness, preserving it is impossible.
Both are valid arguments, but in the case of historian PearlAnn Reichwein, based on her new book Climber’s Paradise: Making Canada’s Mountain Parks, 1906–1974, connecting people and wilderness leads to a positive outcomes.
Reichwein, associate professor of Physical Education and Recreation at the University of Alberta, suggests the result of this type of relationship can be seen in the shared history of the Alpine Club of Canada (ACC) and Rocky Mountain national parks.
The ACC was founded in 1906 and its members would quickly come to see the Rocky Mountains as their home, specifically in Banff where the club built its clubhouse and one of the club’s founders, A.O. Wheeler, built a summer home near Middle Springs.
The notion of the mountain parks being the ACC’s home had a profound effect on how national parks in the Rocky Mountains and across Canada were shaped.
“The mountaineers who made up the initial membership of the Alpine Club of Canada had both a sense of place and a land ethic that figured in early conservation and environmentalism in Canada,” Reichwein writes.
“The club became a leading proponent of recreation, conservation, and tourism in the Rocky Mountain parks, and its history sheds light on the culture of alpinism and the history of the Canadian national park idea.”
The ACC championed the idea of parks for decades, while working to ensure what the club’s members had the privilege to experience, discover and create remained intact.
ACC member Phyl Munday, for example, recognized this in 1930, suggesting club members share their stories and photographs as a living record of the mountains.
“Our photographs are going to be in future and have been in the past our only record of our mountains,” she is quoted in Climber’s Paradise as writing. “The glaciated areas change considerably, and if we do not keep records of our climbs and our Camps, other countries and individuals will feel that we are losing a splendid opportunity, because they naturally turn to the Alpine Club of Canada for records … in this way we bring to the public our mountain scenery and our heritage.”
As Reichwein explores how the ACC worked to protect what they had come to value, Climber’s Paradise becomes much more than a book about climbing or climbers, but a much broader look at the history of the Rocky Mountains and Canada’s national park system.
She deftly walks a narrow ridge to ensure that Climber’s Paradise is as much about the balance of people and wilderness as it is a story about the ACC, a move that allows a wider audience to understand how people can be agents of positive cause and effect, rather than a negative force.
Based on the example of the ACC, people do have a place in national parks, but in a manner that is unobtrusive, ethical and respectful of place and principles, and is done in such a way that allows people to form a bond with the natural world. Otherwise, the old adage comes to bear: How can we protect something that we have no ties to?
“Taking people out of mountain national parks may further sever the essential ties that lead them to care about the places they know and visit, that bind nature and culture as an integrated whole, and tell the story of parks as historical landscapes that include humans,” writes Reichwein.
“The club facilitated repeated park visits seasonally, through individual lifetimes, and from one generation to the next. If the mountain parks were the backyard of the ACC, it follows that some club members adopted some of these places as part of themselves and their own being, forging potentially profound relationships …”
Through their sensitive and respectful use of wilderness, ACC members developed a land ethic that allowed them to create a deep attachment to place, just as what occurs today in the club and in individuals who have developed a similar ethic through different avenues.
“A large number of Canadians, rural and urban, invest in conservation and the environment through parks, recreation, sport, and tourism, much as the ACC did through the twentieth century,” writes Reichwein. “They have a direct stake in the environment and heritage. They are citizens, and many of them vote or engage in various forms of democratic participation. They are stakeholders in the imaginative and political process of making parks and protected areas.”
Climber’s Paradise: Making Canada’s Mountain Parks, 1906–1974, published by the University of Alberta Press, is available for $45.
