I grew up in a country where not much belongs to people.
Most of my life our apartments and vehicles were privately owned, but even that wasn’t the case when I was born. Everything belonged to the government. And while we quickly developed the notion of private property, forests and fields, rivers and lakes, museums and parks remained under governmental control. And to me it always felt that it was all people’s.
Being kids we would go mushroom or berry picking in the forests, walk where we wanted to walk, hardly paid anything for museum tickets and visited gorgeous parks free of charge. We got the wood for the cabin from the forest and went fishing not even knowing what a fishing licence is. (I guess the last two weren't really right, but regulations and laws that were in place weren’t working in the mess of the falling apart country, so that’s the way it was). In my head, if there was no fence, then I could enter and it wouldn't be wrong. That was the rule for all my childhood adventures.
In the 90s some ‘big’ people started buying waterfront properties. They would put fences around half of the forest and wouldn’t let anybody access lakes. That usually was totally corrupt and illegal (and outside of some government people now, most of those fences, at least the ones that I saw, were pushed back to the legal limits).
To a point, things have changed now. Museums cost more and you have to pay to enter a couple of parks, but you still can walk in the forests and sprawl like a starfish on the meadows.
So with that kind of world perception, you probably can imagine how frustrated I was when I just came to Canada and was told that everything is private property. There is a nice field across the road from where I live now, but it belongs to someone in Alberta, so I shouldn’t really trespass. There is another one behind the tree line with some trees and bushes framing it. It’s somebody’s as well.
If you go hunting (which I don’t do, but the concept is still frustrating), you have to receive permission from landowners (how do you know which way the deer will head and on whose land it will end up?)
But it turned out that my frustration wasn’t up to the limit until recently when the announcement of changes in Alberta’s park system put another nail in the coffin of my old world perception.
In an effort to balance the budget, the Albertan government decided to close or partially close 20 provincial park spaces. The other 164 they want to sell off to be managed by third-party private companies, reports Huffington Post. In total, changes will affect about a third of the 473 provincial parks, recreation areas, heritage ranchlands, provincial wildland parks and areas, along with ecological reserves, which are managed by the Alberta government.
Outside of the fear that a lot of that gorgeous land won’t be accessible at all, it’s also sad to think that these changes will leave families that can’t afford expensive trips without options.
The closure and partial closure is supposed to save the government about $5 million. With the changes the public won’t be able to access 11 parks, the other nine just won’t have by trail clearing or garbage collection services. Some parks also won't groom and maintain their cross-country ski trails anymore. The camping fees are expected to go up as well.
I only made it as far as Banff (where I was for two days in December, so that doesn’t even count). It’s a national park, so no changes are coming that way. At least yet. But I have Alberta’s beautiful landscapes and hidden natural gems on the very top of my must-see-and-experience list and it seems that some of it will become more difficult now.
I understand that it’s hard and expensive to maintain national parks, especially when the expectations are that they have to be safe and comfortable (something that never was the case back home), but I sincerely believe that the Earth is for everyone and it should be accessible.
