Beyond the next ridge, while campers boil up their morning coffee, chainsaws and logging equipment are tearing into another hillside. It is a sad but little known fact that more than 70 per cent of the "park" is actually open to logging. Beyond the public access points, hidden behind barriers, thousands of kilometres of logging roads criss-cross the park's magnificent landscape, enabling heavy equipment and trucks to ship out wood.

When canoeists arrive at the park, they see pristine lakes and rivers surrounded by glorious stands of pine, oak, maple and birch. There are unique populations of brook and lake trout in the park's waters. Moose, deer and bears still live in the woods. But eastern elk and woodland caribou that once roamed freely within the park's boundaries have disappeared, driven north or to extinction by the chainsaws and logging roads. And the brook and lake trout may be living on borrowed time because easy access to their haunts threatens them with the same fate as Newfoundland's cod.

Algonquin Park was created in the late 1800s, just after Yellowstone became the world's first protected area and Banff became Canada's first. While today we think of these three areas as protecting wildlife, in fact all three were established to hold back the willy-nilly pace of settlement that was occurring all over North America. This did not include protection from industrial activities such as logging.

True wilderness protection eventually won out over development in Yellowstone and Banff. By the late 1990s, ecosystem protection was enshrined in laws governing the use of both of those parks. But Ontario's beloved "wilderness retreat" functions to this day as a sort of Potemkin's village. While millions of tourists arriving at Pearson International Airport every year are greeted by a sign that says "Algonquin Provincial Park, 250 kilometres," a more accurate greeting might be "Algonquin Industrial Zone, 250 kilometres."

At the CPAWS-Wildlands League (Ontario chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society), we are working to convince the Ontario government to change the way Algonquin Park is managed. Call us crazy, but we think that if it's called a park, then it really should be one, and that means it should be managed in a way that protects it for its ecological integrity.

Wilderness parks exist for a reason - they are intended to be anchors of biodiversity within the sea of human civilization that is rapidly depleting our planet's resources. Our country's provincial and national parks are a uniquely Canadian commitment to the land. They are part of our national soul. Through the establishment of parks, Canadians are saying that some things should last forever.

There is plenty of land in Ontario outside of Algonquin Park that is available for logging. Today, within the greater Algonquin economic region, which includes such towns as North Bay, Huntsville, Whitney and Pembroke, logging accounts for less than two per cent of all employment, and it is shrinking.

We are asking Premier Dalton McGuinty to review the practice of logging in the park and to develop a plan to phase it out. This is not something that can happen overnight, but setting a 20-year goal for eliminating logging in the park and replacing it with a diversified economic development strategy is realistic.

The sooner the government starts closing logging roads, the more likely it is that elk can be reintroduced to the habitat they enjoyed for millennia before settlers came to Canada. And the better the chance that isolated populations of brook and lake trout will survive.

This fall, the Ontario government is expected to introduce legislation to amend the Ontario Parks Act - last revised in 1954. To be effective, the act needs to establish that nature, or ecological integrity, is the first management priority for protected areas. Our understanding is that the draft legislation actually does that, with one glaring exception - Algonquin Park apparently will be excluded from the act.

This is simply wrong. Put Algonquin Park in the act, because if you call it a park, it really should protect wilderness. The alternative, which we don't support, is to stop calling Algonquin a park and name it what it is - an industrial zone.

---

---