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Preserving
our "Close-to-Home" Wilderness Areas
By: Richard Munn
My copy of "Nastawgan" arrived in the mail the other
day. Nastawgan is the quarterly journal published by the
Wilderness Canoe Association. As I was leafing through it,
I was struck by a connection between two seemingly unrelated
articles.
The first article was "The Memory" by Greg Went.
It was about the depressing feeling that comes with driving home
from the last canoe trip of the season. One sentence
jumped out at me.
"Driving South. The direction always seems to be
south after a wilderness canoe trip. Wondered why.
It's probably because wilderness has been pretty much eliminated
from the other points of the compass."
The second article was written by Erhard Kraus. It was
titled "Big Problems at McCrae Lake." This lake
is part of the Gibson-McDonald canoe route in central Ontario.
It is also a popular day-trip location. Erhard wrote about
the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resource's approval of a
snowmobile trail and 150 ft. long steel bridge right at the
falls on McCrae. Essentially, the most scenic spot on the
lake will now be destroyed by the presence of a large steel
bridge. It will also be subject to motorized ATV traffic
and the accompanying garbage and desecration that generally
accompanies such a trail.
Is McCrae Lake a remote, pristine wilderness area? Hardly.
Its accessibility means that the area is heavily used, and the
dedicated volunteers with the Friends of McCrae Lake group spend
a fair amount of time cleaning up garbage and restoring
campsites. Nonetheless, the area is still a canoe route
that provides some degree of 'retreat into the wilderness' for
thousands of novice paddlers every year. As Erhard puts
it, "...many of us have kept this place as an option for a
quick day trip, useful to show an out-of-town visitor how
beautiful canoe country can be."
The remote (mostly northern) areas of our country have a degree
of built-in protection simply because they are more difficult to
access logistically. Trips to the far north require
investments of time and money that limit the number of visitors.
This is not to say that even remote routes cannot experience
environmental pressure and abuse from visitors, but their
remoteness does afford a bit of a buffer from the heavy use that
causes impact.
This says to me that we have to be all the more vigilant about
protecting the 'close-to-home' wilderness areas in our country.
Bill Mason once wrote:
"Being a wilderness enthusiast is a lot like sitting on an
ice floe. Every day the floe gets smaller as pieces break
off and float away. you know that it will continue to get
smaller day by day, never bigger. That is the reality that
all lovers of wild lands have to face."
The impact of losing a route or even part of a route in the
heavily-populated areas of our country is quite high.
There are so few pockets of wilderness in the southern parts of
our country that the loss of such an area to development is all
the more tragic. The ice floe has just become
irreversibly smaller.
A large part of the problem is the lack of a consistent,
coherent voice to speak on behalf of Canadian paddlers.
Until that problem is solved, the only interim solution is for
individual paddlers to make themselves heard, loud and clear, on
issues relating to the preservation of these all-important
pockets of wilderness.
We have to learn to be vocal about speaking out on these issues.
We have to let those in power know that wilderness has value
simply for its own sake.
This is not high-ground moralizing. In fact, it is
somewhat of a 'mea culpa' on the issue of being an active voice
for wilderness preservation. Like many of you, I have done
the minimum and sent a few emails expressing concern about
wilderness issues. I actively promote no-trace camping.
I always finish a canoe trip carrying out other people's
garbage. But is that enough?
Erhard describes a process whereby people can register
themselves as 'stakeholders' for particular areas. If
plans are in the works for development or any other issue
affecting that area, the Ministry of Natural Resources will
contact these stakeholders for comment. In the case of
McCrae Lake, no canoeing group or individual was registered as a
stakeholder, and the wilderness lobby lost the opportunity to
provide input. The road and bridge proposal went
unchallenged and is now an unfortunate reality.
This single incident has been a wake-up call for me. I
will now pursue a more active role in wilderness preservation.
I encourage everyone who cares about our dwindling wilderness
areas to do the same. Do other provinces and territories
have similar programs and processes? If they do, I would
welcome hearing about them in order that I might publicize them
as much as possible on this site
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