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The art of mountain living

Knowing when to say enough
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"Maintaining the national park system is almost the only nice, decent, friendly thing the Federal Government does for ordinary people."

– Writer and self-proclaimed 'redneck ecologist' Edward Abbey

I've been reading a lot of stuff of late about how fast our planet's wild places are disappearing. Old stuff. New stuff. Provocative stuff. Alarming stuff. And from all sorts of sources too. From environmental outlaw Edward Abbey to Buddhist monk (and former physicist) Matthieu Richard; from Nobel laureate Octavio Paz to B.C. poet Robert Bringhurst. And no matter the source — from the most obscure to the most mainstream — a consensus of sorts is forming on the subject.

Whether it's an anthropologist decrying the ongoing genocide of indigenous tribes in the Amazon or a biologist opposing the proliferation of oil pipelines across our northwest frontier, the message is becoming increasingly clear. Our wild places are threatened like never before. Time for a paradigm shift. The world isn't ours to plunder freely anymore.

As British Columbia's own Wade Davis puts it: "To define perpetual growth on a finite planet as the sole measure of economic well-being is to engage in a form of slow collective suicide."

Think about that statement for a moment. And then think about the person who wrote those words. A man who has visited more of the planet's wild places than almost any other living being — an ethnobotanist, philosopher and cultural activist (as well as being National Geographic's current explorer-in-residence), Davis is deeply concerned with modern man's still-cavalier view of Earth. How can it be, he asks, "that the cost of destroying a natural asset, or its inherent worth if left intact, has no metric in the economic calculations that support the industrialization of the wild?"

I know. I know. It sounds totally counter-intuitive. I mean, our whole belief system in the west is based on the idea that the natural world is ours for the plucking. Alas, we're slowly discovering that human greed has no limit. And being the destructively-efficient parasites we are, the risk of us chewing our living host to death is disturbingly high.

And nowhere is that more evident than in the planet's former wild places.

Consider the Whistler Valley. Virtually untouched by the hand of western civilization as recently as 1912, the Sea to Sky corridor was despoiled twice in the intervening century. First by loggers who plucked the valley of its green riches — they say Alta Lake in the early 1950s was a sad-looking, desolate site — and then by real estate developers who moved in and transformed this former wild place into a mountain shopping mall.

Did Whistler really need to develop beds for 60,000 guests to become a vibrant, viable mountain community? Or would 30,000 have worked just as well? Did the decision to raise the bed-base ceiling at Whistler reflect the hopes and aspirations of the people living here in the 1980s? Or was it driven by outside investors who didn't have to face the long-term consequences of their actions?

Don't get me wrong. I still love Whistler's wild places. I just wish we'd been able to protect more of them. And that's my point. By debasing our local landscape with a growth-at-all-costs ethos — by industrializing our mountain product and making it more "tame" (both socially and physically) — we've been systematically emasculating the unique character of Whistler culture. Know what I mean? As Mexican writer Octavio Paz puts it: "The ideal of a single civilization for everyone implicit in the cult of progress and technique impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view in the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life."

And we've lost so many possibilities in recent years. Whistler is simply not the community it once aspired to be. It's not as vital. Not as distinct. Not as interesting. And certainly not as wild...

Although the always-prickly Edward Abbey produced the following words about Colorado's Telluride 35 years ago, they could easily apply to Whistler today:

"We all need a place to escape to... as the prison of the cities becomes ever more oppressive. But why did they have to pick on this place? One more mountain valley sacrificed to the greasy altar of industrial tourism and mechanized recreation. Soon to become like New York, like L.A., like Denver, like Santa Fe... one more place to escape from. Someday soon, if this keeps up, there will be no places left anywhere for anybody to find refuge in. Whereby all jammed together in one massive immovable plenum of flesh and machinery, then we may think: 'Ah! If only! If we had only thought...' But thought what? By that time perhaps even the thought of freedom, even the memory of what (if only) could have been, that too will be lost. Perhaps lost forever."

Protracted quote, I know. And a ridiculously long-winded introduction. Forgive me. But I had to set the stage. You see, in their infinite wisdom, the folks at B.C.'s Ministry of Environment are finally putting some thought into the management of one the province's (and Whistler's!) most valuable assets — Garibaldi Provincial Park. They say their current goal (to quote their own website) is "to review the management direction around public access in the area of the Spearhead Range and Fitzsimmons Range in Garibaldi Park."

It's about time. Now I don't know about you, but I consider our public parks to be a sacred trust. Indeed, in many ways, they're like environmental canaries in the coal mine. In other words — if our parks' wild places disappear, then we all disappear. Which suggests we should be highly vigilant about how our various governmental agencies propose "managing" such highly-prized gems. After all, this isn't just about us. This is about our kids and our kids' kids and on and on.

The MoE's website states there are three big management issues in the current "study area":

1. Whether to allow Whistler Blackcomb to continue operating its commercial heli-skiing business in the park

2. Whether to allow mountain bikers access to the park (after a 20-year ban)

3. Whether to allow the construction of three to four sleeping huts along the Spearhead Traverse.

Well, to me it's a pretty simple equation. Garibaldi Park is the diamond in the Sea to Sky crown. Still pristine, still as untamed as it was when climbers first started exploring its glaciated wilderness in the 1920s, Garibaldi is the undeniable yin to Whistler's yang. And if just for that, it needs to be fiercely protected from the vagaries of the marketplace.

Given how Whistler so quickly mushroomed into the neo-urban monster it's become, I'm now convinced that we need to draw a very clear line in the snow to protect our fast-diminishing wilderness. As far as this particular chunk of park is concerned, I believe that mechanized commercial outfits (including helicopter-skiing companies) have absolutely no business plying their trade there. It's not a negotiable point for me. If we want to keep this park wild, we have to keep the combustion-engine out! No choppers, no trucks, no quads, no motorbikes, no snowmobiles.

On the other hand, I'm all for encouraging self-propelled groups to visit the area. We need to build more trails, more access points to the alpine (other than by WB's lifts). We also need more trained guides and more hiking/climbing programs for locals and visitors.

So what about biking in the study area? Hmm. Not an easy issue to resolve. Bikes can really damage alpine zones if used irresponsibly. That said, I think the mountain bike community has matured considerably since the bad ol' days. With a clear management plan, a restricted network of multi-use trails and (perhaps) a coterie of biking "park wardens," I think a five-year pilot project could prove to be quite successful. Given Whistler's very vocal biking community (and conversely, the hiking community's just-as-passionate abhorrence for two-wheeled trekkers), I'm curious to see how the ministry will stick-handle their way through this one.

Following the same self-propelled logic, I also support building a limited network of non-commercial high-mountain sleeping shelters around the Spearhead Traverse. But with one huge caveat — every effort must be made to minimize the ecological footprint of these cabins. Indeed, if built properly they could be used as a glowing illustration of the innovative thinking and creative wilderness-management that goes on in B.C.

Now you might not agree with what I've written today. Maybe you're one of those people who still believe that bigger is always better, that progress is all about "taming" the world's messy wilderness. Whatever. People once thought the world was flat too. As for me, I've become an Abbey acolyte. "For more and more of us," he writes, "the out-of-doors is our true ancestral escape. For a mere five thousand years we have grubbed in the soil and laid brick-upon-brick to build the cities; but for a million years before that we lived the leisurely, free, and adventurous life of hunters and gatherers, warriors and tamers of horses. How can we pluck that deep root of feeling from the racial consciousness? Impossible."

Anyone up for a hike to Fissile?