I write to add my voice to those in favour of the creation of a new Metro Vancouver park at the Cape on Bowen Island.
For all my travels, I’ve always had deep ties to British Columbia. I came of age working for the provincial parks, eight seasons altogether, culminating in 1978 when I was hired as the first park ranger in Spatsizi, our largest roadless wilderness park. I spent a year in a logging camp on Haida Gwaii, worked as a hunting guide in the Stikine, and later, as a white water guide, helped pioneer the first commercial descents of the Turnagain, Taku, and Raven’s Throat, among other wild rivers. Since 1987, I’ve owned a modest fishing lodge in Tahltan territory, seven hours by road north of Smithers, the nearest town.
I mention this only to stress my commitment to our province, and my deep appreciation of the transformative power of its natural wonders. Everything I’ve achieved as a writer was made possible because I was from here; what character I have was forged from opportunities and experiences placed before me as gifts by this place.
We live in a new era, and what young people want, and what’s possible for them to achieve, has changed. Not all will be free to explore the far reaches of a province twice the size of California. But surely every kid deserves a chance to know and experience nature; as elders, we share an obligation to make such experiences possible. As my old friend Paul George said, “If you want people to protect the environment, you’ve got to get them into it.”
For this reason alone, I support the creation of a new Metro park on Bowen. It won’t be a grand wilderness refuge, but it will serve as an oasis of inspiration for thousands of young people who, by force of circumstances, rarely escape the metropolitan sprawl of the lower mainland. The issues raised by those in opposition - added traffic to roads and the ferry, questions of maintenance and policing - are certainly legitimate but they are tactical, and readily addressed. What counts is the strategic vision.
My concern lies with a disenchanted generation, perhaps two, all those who have given up hope of owning homes in the neighbourhoods where they were raised. These young men and women need to know that the real estate agents whose faces adorn the sides of every city bus are not our civic and national heroes. That decisions about zoning and land management do not always come down on the side of developers and their wealthy clients.
In making this extraordinary gift to the island, at some considerable political risk and exposure given all the other demands on its resources, Metro Vancouver is sending our youth a truly exhilarating message that our wild lands are for the many, not the few, and that nature, at least occasionally, does indeed trump development, at least on this small jewel of an island.
No park has ever come into being without opposition. The creation of protected areas has always been complicated, and never free of controversy. And yet, in the end, history only recalls the vision of the creators, never the voices of dissent. To build Central Park, the city of New York evicted 1,600 poor Black and Irish residents, seizing their small plots of land by eminent domain. And yet today, you would be hard pressed to find a single New Yorker who regrets the decision to set aside land that, in time, became a natural sanctuary visited by 42 million people every year.
Happily, no one will be dislocated to create this new park on Bowen, and its trails will be walked by hundreds of visitors over a summer season, certainly not trampled by millions. The island infrastructure can be enhanced to embrace this new traffic, just as it will grow to adjust to all the new developments taking place on the island.
Should the park go ahead, all of these minor concerns will be addressed or soon forgotten. But should the parochial triumph over the visionary, and the park be denied, the decision will hover for decades, a dark shroud of regret and recriminations.
Abraham Lincoln famously quipped that politicians think of the next election, whereas statesmen look out for the next generation. This surely is a moment to embrace the long view.
With thanks and very best wishes,
- Wade Davis, OC
