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Michael is on a quest to get his environmental footprint as low as humanly possible. So he built his own off-grid Tiny House. But downsizing and minimizing weren’t enough. He had to take more drastic measures, altering his lifestyle in some extreme ways, all in the name of saving the planet. But when it comes to his goal, he still feels in over his head. He doesn’t know if all the downsizing, minimizing, reducing, reusing, recycling, and sacrificing make a difference. It’s time to bring in the experts.
Join Michael as he sits down with scientists, policymakers, industry leaders, and environmental experts to figure out how to effectively reduce his footprint in all aspects of life. From food and fast fashion to cars and caskets, he gets into what the worst culprits really are and how we can all make more informed choices when it comes to the impact we have on the planet.
If you have feedback or would like to be a guest on In Over My Head, please email: info@inovermyhead.com
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This season was made possible with support from the government of Alberta's Heritage Preservation Partnership Program and Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, Southern Alberta.
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Well, I'm on over my head, no one told me tryin' to keep my footprint harder than I thought it could be. I'm in over my head, what do I really need, tryin' to save the planet, oh will someone please save me?
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Welcome to In Over My Head, I'm Michael Bartz. For this season. I'll be taking a look back at our Alberta parks. So often our national parks get all the attention, but we need to remember our provincial parks.
These spaces contribute to a healthier planet and we need to protect them. One way to appreciate them more is to get to know their history. And trust me, there is a lot to discover. My first conversation
had me learning about why our provincial parks were created and some of the challenges they faced along the way.
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Hi, I'm Jessica DeWitt. I'm an environmental historian, editor and digital strategist. I am the Provincial Parks gal. So I went into my PhD at the University of Saskatchewan. I'm originally, I'm American, and I
moved here and the reason I moved to Canada was that I wanted to do a comparative history of Canadian and American parks, specifically at the state and provincial level. And I wasn't going to learn Canadian history in the US. So I came here and one of the reasons I picked up, one of the myriad of reasons that I picked up this dissertation is that practically no one has written about provincial and state parks. There is one monograph in the states that talks about the state park movement in its entirety that
was written by a former, I believe, head of Florida State Parks. And there wasn't before my study, a single thing that talked about provincial parks in Canada, Canada-wide.
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And there's only a handful of monographs on either side of the border and almost none of them are written by academic historians. They're written by hobbyist historians or written by people who have been commissioned by certain park systems, et cetera, to write histories, which of course creates a very different kind of history. So I think one of the things I wanted to deal with in my dissertation is to acknowledge that there is a massive gap in our knowledge and understanding of parks at this middle
level. And I argue, and I continue to argue, that they're actually much more important to our overall history because more people visit them. There are more of them, they're more accessible. For instance,
myself growing up, and I've never been to American National Park and growing up in rural Pennsylvania, I never dreamed of ever even being able to go to a national park. And I think that sometimes in Western
Canada people have a swayed idea of that because things seem so close, like Banff is right there. But national parks are still very inaccessible to a lot of people, whether it's distance or money, and you need money to cover the distance. And state and provincial parks were developed specifically to fill that gap in many ways. So the relative way that both professional historians and popular historians have ignored
provincial parks and state parks is troubling to me.
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Why do you think they're not focusing on provincial parks? Why are the national parks getting all the attention?
(03:35):
One of the reasons is that national parks are easier to write about because they have one singular national narrative that can be linked to that changes through time, of course, and it differs from park to
park a little bit, but you can always tie it into that. And that also means that the records for a lot of these parks are easier to find because they're going to be at the Library and Archives Canada, they're going to
be at the Library of Congress in the States. So it's just easier to link them into a national narrative. Also because state and provincial parks are so familiar to people, they get overlooked, I believe, because we
often don't think of the thing that is closest to us as being important. So if you are used to say, going camping at a small provincial park, 40 minutes from your home when you're growing up, you're not thinking of that as being a significant event.
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Whereas if we're thinking of the grand narratives that can be connected to Banff or to Yellowstone, et cetera, those really take people's imagination. It's also just exceptionally hard to research state and
provincial parks, which I found out when I started this dissertation. No one stopped me though. They probably should have been like, just maybe this is going to be difficult. And going into this, I had no idea
how to make this study happen. And it took a long time to kind of get my head around it. I now know why there aren't that many done because there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of provincial
and state parks. Each state park system is, or provincial park system is completely different. You cannot get the same clean narrative out of them. It takes a lot more work. And I think that's one reason that
they're ignored.
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Do you remember when you were, you said it was difficult to find some of that information. Do you remember ever being frustrated or any kind of times where it was?
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Absolutely. So for my dissertation, I ended up looking at Alberta and Ontario and Canada and Idaho and Pennsylvania in the States. And I don't know the exact number, but that's well over 500 parks. And I
remember just, I was like, how am I ever going to make sense of the development of 500 parks over a hundred years? Which is when, if you ever look at my dissertation, those listening, there is a visualization that I ended up doing that helped me immensely, which plots types of parks through time. So I kind of went with a visual temporal model to wrap my mind around it.
(06:30):
Yeah. I guess we can talk a bit about the history of Alberta parks that was included in your dissertation. Tell me kind of how some of these parks started in Alberta.
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So Alberta was quite late to starting their provincial park system, and one of the main reasons for that is because of the Natural Resources Act of 1930 didn't happen until 1930. So Alberta didn't have control of
its natural resources or its land until then. So they had no way of making parks. But as soon as that happened, the United Farmers of Alberta who were in power at the time really jumped on it. They saw this
happening, and I believe John Brownlee was in charge of the party at the time, and he had gone to England and seen these beautiful parks and he was inspired. And this also corresponds with the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. So I think a lot of us are very familiar with those scenes of dried farmlands and struggling families in the West. And as a party that largely saw itself as representing the rural populace in Alberta, the UFA was very concerned about this, and they saw that people were
leaving the province in droves because of, it was just really hard.
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And they saw these parks, a potential provincial park system, as kind of helping to stop that from happening, stop people from leaving. So in 1932, they on one day created eight different parks and all of these parks were created on small lakes. They were beach parks and they were very small parks and they were created on beaches because the UFA thought that if we created parks that were on these beaches that were in rural areas, that these rural families could gather there and being near this wet
lake would make them want to stay. We think of farm life as isolating, but back then it was particularly isolating. So they saw these places as kind of gathering spots for rural families. That was another reason
that they thought people were leaving was because they were isolated and lonely. And if they had these places to get wet and swim and to meet other farm families, they thought that this would boost morale
and people would stay in the province. So that was largely, I think, a very interesting impetus behind these first eight parks.
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I dunno if you found this in your research, but did it help? Did people stay partly because of the park?
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I don't know. I did not find any evidence to suggest whether or not this actually boosted morale. I think we'd have to do a much deeper dive, which we might talk about later with ordinary people. It's really
hard to find accounts like someone, a farmer from that time being like, I went over to the new local beach, it was great.
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Now I'm staying. Yeah,
(09:36):
I'm staying. Everything's good. And it also was spurred by anti-urbanism. The UFA was very anti-urban, and they did not want people to move to the cities or out of the province. So it's like keep people rural.
So these parks are going to keep people rural. So they also were not thinking of the urban population really at all in these first eight parks. This is for rural residents.
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And actually maybe let's, since we're talking about the thirties and stuff, let's talk about maybe the first provincial park in Alberta, which was Aspen Beach Provincial Park, and Gull Lake was there. Tell me a little
about that.
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Yeah, so Aspen Beach is called the first provincial park, but they were all created on the same day. So I think it's the first provincial park. It was first alphabetically, but so Aspen Beach on Gaul Lake, so it's fairly close to Red Deer. It's a small beach. I think it was 17 acres when it was first created, very small. It was a beach that was already used by an established cottage community that was on the lake. So
Cottagers that probably, I would assume, I don't have the data in this, but I would assume they're mainly Edmonton folk. So the province creates this park and they immediately create, build a pier out into the
lake, which is heralded as this big thing. They're very proud of this pier. The problem is that within a couple years of creating this park and building this pier, the lake starts to drop significantly very quickly
with, I don't remember the exact dates, but by the end of the 1930s.
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So within less than a decade, the pier is completely on dry land. So that's fast. That's a fast change. So folks are very upset about this and the province is exceptionally upset. And we also have to talk about
how the fact during this time, there's a change in government. So you go from the UFA who makes the parks in 1932, and just three years later, 1935, the Alberta Social Credit government comes into power
for a very long time. And the Alberta social credit government is much more conservative, particularly fiscally. So they inherit these eight parks and they're not impressed because they aren't making money,
they're money pits, and they end up closing four of them. But we'll go back to Aspen Beach. So Aspen Beach, the water is dropping, there's studies people, no one is completely sure why the water level in
this, it is a natural lake was dropping.
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It's probably a combination of the fact that it was a drought. So it's the 1930s and also just use agricultural use, taking the water before it's coming, the water from the sources that feed the lake. So
it's probably a combination of manmade and natural forces. But basically, the So-Cred government is just absolutely disgusted with this park. And I found letters where they're talking about how if this lake is
receding, then the park is useless. So if the pier is not underwater, then the park is useless and it's a sand heap and just so much derogatory commentary on this park, so much so that by the 1940s, they
give it back to the cottage community. They don't want it, they want nothing to do with it, and they give it back to the cottage community. So yeah, it's hard to get into all the details here, but it's a really great
example of how the parks are built on a certain idea of nature. And also I find that when we create a park, we expect that land to remain the same. It's museum-izing nature, and that's not how natural
systems work, whether it's natural or human cause factors that are making the changes, the parks are going to change through time. This just happened very dramatically. So the cottages having it during
that decade didn't go very well because they wouldn't let anyone else use the beach basically.
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So there's lots of complaints that the park was no longer welcoming to outside folk. Sometime in the 1950s, I believe the provincial park takes it back a bit reluctantly, and they go through all these studies
to figure out why this lake is receding. And then they go through all these studies on how they can fix it, and they actually come up with the idea of pumping water into Gull Lake from the blind man river is
what they settle on. And to this day for recreation purposes, water is pumped into Gull Lake and it actually causes environmental problems, the pumping of this, taking water from a river. So you're causing that kind of degradation and you're also causing issues with agricultural runoff. And it's actually the pumping of water into the lake has caused the water quality to go down considerably. But it's all worth it because the lake is visually good to look at.
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It's not farther away from the beach than you expect. It's just, I think a very interesting case study of the lengths at which we will manipulate nature specifically for recreation. To me, you just adjust and be like,
okay, the lake is a little bit farther away than we was when we, we'll just move the beach out, we'll build another pier. But no, that's not the reaction that the Alberta government had in mind. And I think we don't think of all of these maneuverings behind the scenes of these parks, even these relatively small parks to make them what we see today or to maintain them as we see them today.
(16:05):
Yeah, I guess. So let's fast forward a little bit. So during the fifties, there's a big boom, there's a lot of provincial parks happening, and then you kind of get into the seventies. And another park that really interested me was the Fish Creek Provincial Park. Yes. Tell me about that.
(16:18):
Yes. So in the 1970s in Canada, there's a near-urban park movement that spreads from Ontario across the country. And this was suddenly an idea almost out of nowhere, that provinces were responsible for
urban recreation and providing places for urban folks to go that were accessible because before this urban parks were the domain of the city for the most part. And so in Calgary, we have Fish Creek
Provincial Park, and it was created from former ranch land primarily. And it was really interesting because this is one of the, with this near urban park movement, you have some of the first inklings of going to the public for their opinion on parks. And this wasn't the case before this decade that I found usually parks are created top-down. I think today we have much more involvement of people, and the internet has made it much easier to poll people on what they think.
(17:23):
But it wasn't until 1970s that you really see folks, government folks really reaching out to the public. So what they do is they put this survey in the paper, and it's a fairly large survey. It's really colorful, it has
great illustrations, it's meant to catch their eye, and it's asking them about a proposed park at Fish Creek. And the response to this I think is fairly remarkable from the file that I found. There are 25,000 to 35,000
responses, which for a survey that's in a newspaper, I think that's pretty good. Most people are going to look at that and just throw it in the trash. Even today when it's easier to answer an online survey, most
of the time we're like, can we click out of this faster? So you have this, all of these impassioned responses, and some of the best ones, which I think you saw, one of the biggest concerns was that it was going to be a place for hippies.
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And so one of my favorite quotes, which I named the section after, is no motorcycles, hippies or Catholics. And I think that really gets to the heart of what was in the survey. The conservatism of Calgary's citizens really comes to the fore about who they think should use a park, what a park should be, what populace should the park should cater to, and just really this intense fear of the counterculture and that this is just going to be a place where people tent and do free love. And also just that this is
going to be something that the government just sinks all of our cash into, which I think is very Alberta. And we can see examples of this today, of course, just this discussed with government spending, but
these are the write-in responses. But almost all of the write-in responses were very interesting and notable.
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But that's the thing about write-in responses is that it's usually people who have something really good to say or really negative to say, but need to say. It's a fascinating example of just the ways that people
can think of parks as being a negative thing. I think they're often presented that everyone loves parks and parks are such good things, and it's much more complicated than that. And oftentimes people are
very hesitant for parks to be built. And I think Fish Creek is one of those examples other than also just capturing a really, really interesting period of time in history. And if people are interested in rowdyism in
Parks, I suggest checking out Ben Bradley's work because he's been working specifically on this. He's found some really great stuff.
On Rowdyism. Yeah, tell me about that.
So this is something that's connected to this idea of hippies and just this fear of the parks are spaces where people are uncontrolled and
there's a fear of drinking and substance use. And this is also when the regulation of park behavior becomes even more pronounced. So parks are places where you have to act in a certain way.
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There's also a very big racialized aspect of this. I've written about how if a bunch of a white family extended family is having a union and they're drinking some beers, people are going to turn the other way. But if a group of indigenous unhoused folks are just in the park drinking some beers, that's not going to be okay. So we kind of use these ideas of what park behaviour is to regulate by a class and race and age. We're going to be suspicious of teenagers. And I've found things that say teenagers shouldn't be allowed to be alone. They need to be supervised in these parks or so when we think of parks. Yeah, I think it's important to think of them as very regulated spaces. We have people who patrol them to make
sure that you are doing the right things and there's good ways of being in nature and bad ways of being in nature.
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Yeah. I guess maybe we can talk a bit more about the importance of including regular people in Alberta Park's history, the provincial park. So yeah, tell me about that.
(22:31):
Yeah, so I think this connects to my background significantly. So I'm American, originally I grew up in rural western Pennsylvania in Cooks Pennsylvania, which is a community on the outskirts of Cook Forest
State Park. And my parents owned rental cabins, so that was their industry when I was growing up. So I grew up with an idea of parks as places of work. I grew up with an understanding of parks as livelihood, and that the health of a park meant the health of my family or my community. So I find that I go into park history a bit differently than other people because of that perspective. I see the place as a place of work
first. And I don't think most people do. Most people think of them as vacation spots. They don't think of them as serious places. They're like places of fun, of good memories, not of toil and difficulty and
extremely hard work because small business tourism is extremely hard work.
(23:36):
So I think that's important for thinking about how I approach these things. So most park history, whether it's written by academics or by more popular folks, more popular writers focuses on origin stories. So a lot of park histories cover how did this park come to be? And then the story ends, or they talk a lot about the government officials or the activists, the bigger activists that made the park happen. And then it ends. And the problem with this is that the story continues, and it also makes park
history into a kind of policy history type deal. And there's a lot of reasons for this. And one of them is that the sources for this kind of history is just so much easier to find. You're going to find it in the government archives, you're going to sign it in the provincial archives, and it's going to be easily labeled.
(24:44):
But what I argue is that we have to think of the ordinary people who the park actually matters to, and that includes park visitors. But even more importantly, we have to think about the people who rely on the park for their livelihood, and also the people who have been pushed to the peripherals of parks by park creation. So in Canada, that's namely indigenous folks. And so thinking about gateway communities, so gateway communities are those outside of parks that kind of have the facilities that have the accommodations, et cetera. And thinking about how do these people take care of the park? And if you read the work, the writings of many government officials or environmentalists, they will act
that these people who work in parks or who are on the peripheries of parks are bad for the parks, that they can't be stewards because they're making money to make money off of a park if you're not the government or someone who is super wealthy is seen as being bad for nature and not in the park's interest. So I like to push back on those narratives and try to open up the way that we look at park history and we think of parks not just as places of recreation, not just as places as supposed nature preservation, but places of actual work and actual cultural significance to the people who live there, not just the people who come from afar.
(26:30):
And reading your work, you also talked about how some of those people are kind of unintentional environmentalists, right? The stewardship work they're doing to maintain that land. I think it was in the States, it wasn't in Alberta, but there was that one river that they were maintaining, right? Yes. Yeah. Tell me a bit about that.
(26:48):
Yeah, so I love the idea of unintentional environmentalism or expedient environmentalism. And so I argue that, and I'm building off of a lot of writers and scholars of colour, I need to point out such as
Carolyn Finney who has written about this, that our idea of environmentalism or environmentalists as people is very whitewashed. It assumes that a people understanding of ecology, if you don't understand
how ecological systems work, a lot of environmental, mainstream environmentalism kind of writes you off. So you have to have a certain level of education, you have the time to devote to specifically
environmental work. You have to have the assets to make that happen. And so what happens is that there's a very, an idea environmentalism that cuts out a lot of people. And if you open it up to thinking of unintentional or expedient environmentalism, you really open it up to anyone who cares about that land.
(28:00):
And if a person is invested in that space and they're wanting to take care of it, the impetus behind that, does that matter? Is it more virtuous to be an outsider who comes in and has a master's degree in biology and can be like, this river has these X, Y, Z issues and this is bad and I'm going to fix it. Is that necessarily better than the person who has lived on the river, who relies on it for their livelihood, who recognizes that the degradation of that river is bad because it affects the place that they live in? It
affects them personally. And so they fight for the cleanliness of the river because of that reason. I think we put on a pedestal one over the other, and it just cuts out a lot of people and also alienates a lot of
rural folks and indigenous folks from these conversations.
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So just thinking of what is the reason behind wanting to preserve a park? So where I grew up, peoplenoticed the park not being taken care of as much, and for the community I grew up in, that was a big
deal because that affected the bottom line. And it's a tourism community that is their province. They're not that great. So if they lose some of them because the park isn't being taken care of, then that's an issue. So they have a stake in it that is beyond thinking, oh, this park needs to be taken care of because it's a park and it's beautiful and yada yada.
(29:44):
And so I don't know with your research in Alberta specifically, but I'm just curious, maybe back home or in the States, do you have anyone that comes to mind that worked in the park or was doing that sort of
work that you think stands out for you?
(30:00):
Yeah, I didn't get a chance to talk to anyone in Alberta for my dissertation because my dissertation was so large, I had to cut out some things. And it's funny because when I originally, so I wrote the chapter that you originally read when I wrote it, I expected those things to be like their own chapters. I expected to be able to be like, here I am doing the work. And then I ended up having to cut back significantly. I didn't have the time or the resources to write these histories of ordinary people because they take more time, they take relationship building, they take sitting in archives for weeks on end trying to find random things. You can't just bust into a community for a week and think that you're going to get these stories. But so I didn't get a chance to talk to anyone Alberta yet, maybe in the future.
(30:55):
But when I was in my undergrad, I did a study of the park that I grew up in, and I interviewed 32 former and current business owners at the time. And I think one of my favourite stories that I think illustrates this
point is I talked to, there's several canoe liveries where I grew up and I talked to one of the owners of these canoe liveries, and he was very hesitant to speak to me about a lot of topics, particularly the way
that he managed the river, because in the past he had been attacked by conservationists. So there's ways that they would, his canoe livery moves rocks in the river. It's a very shallow river. So they would move and make passageways for folks, and there were other ways they would clean up garbage. They would do all these things in the river that both helped their business.
(31:57):
But also were taking kind of a stewardship of the river. Conservationists see this as one of the main threats to the river, but he sees it as an act of love, not just of, he does make money from it, but for him taking care of the river and making sure that people can enjoy the river is an act of love, not just for the river and the land, but also to the people who come to enjoy it. But there's a genuine fear of backlash. And I think that that's not uncommon. And that when I was growing up, there was also the main person who was associated with park was Anthony Cook, who was of the Cook family, so a descendant. And he was exceptionally critical of business owners in the area because they're bad for the environment of the park, but he makes his money off of oil.
(32:59):
So it's just like coming in. A lot of conservationists or perceived activists will come in and be critical. And I think that also boils down a lot to the ways that indigenous people, particularly if we're looking at
Alberta, if we're thinking of the way they're pushed to the peripheries, and that's another way that parks are highly regulated spaces, it's becoming better. They're starting to have some more changes to laws. But when parks were created in the 20th century, they're saying that part of that was indigenous people can't use this land anymore because that isn't the right way to use the land. They can't hunt here, they can't fish here, they can't encamp here, they can't use the land because that's bad for it. It's
not the right way to use the land. It's not rich white folks riding the train in from Toronto and taking their picture with a rock that's the right way to use the land. So gosh, I feel like I'm rambling right now, but all of these things are so interconnected.
(34:14):
And I guess generally, Jessica, you view provincial parks and their history very important to you personally and as an scholar, I guess. Yeah. If you could summarize, why is it important for us to actually study and look at this history of provincial parks? Why should we be doing this?
(34:32):
Gosh, that is the $100,000 question. Okay. Well, I think it's critical to understand any institution that plays a major role in your society, and we more easily see this with national parks. People are like, oh yeah, I get it. Banff is really important. But I think we need to take a step back and think about these provincial parks and that particularly within last several years, with the latest swing of trying to close many of them, that we have to understand why they exist in the first place. Sometimes having a very
Pollyanna view of parks and not thinking critically about them as places of profit, as places that are not natural actually makes it more difficult to protect them today because government officials understand
whether they may not use it in their propaganda about parks, but they understand that parks are more than that, that they are tools, they're tools of profit for the government of ways to make themselves
look good, et cetera.
(35:55):
They're always being used. They're not neutral spaces at all. So even if we love parks, and I love parks, even though I'm very critical of them, I love them as well. Even if we love parks, we have to understand
the good and the bad of them to be able to protect them. We can't protect something that we don't really understand, and we can't make them better either. If we don't understand the fact that parks
exclude some people, we can't work to include those people. If we don't understand that certain ways of being in parks, the ways that we view particular behaviours in parks exclude indigenous people, then
we can't work to make it so that it doesn't do that, right? We can't make things better, and if we think parks are this perfect institution, we also can't think beyond them. And it's really hard to think beyond them because parks haven't always existed. They're relatively new in the grand scheme of things. Most of Alberta's provincial parks are well under a hundred years old if we want them to continue or if we want to move beyond that to something that we haven't even fathomed yet. Because at some point we had never even fathomed provincial parks. No one had ever thought of this idea.
(37:18):
And I guess, yeah, just to round it out, we've been learning about the history and why these parks exist and the reasons for them and some of the kind of ups and downs, I guess, if people want to get
involved, whether that's use the parks or protect them, I guess, what can people do?
(37:36):
Okay. Well, I would say that when you visit a park, I would like people to start thinking about it differently. I think that it's really helpful to be in the location when you want to start thinking differently about the place. So I would suggest that people, when they go to their favourite provincial park, to start thinking about the park a little bit differently, think about it critically, notice who is on the outskirts, what are the businesses, what are the buildings? Is there a reserve very nearby who is working at the
park? Who provides the concession stand? Think about these things. Think about what was there before the park. So I invite people to just start thinking about it in that way. So that's at an individual level to
help the parks.
(38:34):
I think people should be listening to indigenous people more. So I think take the time to understand how the different First Nations relate to the parks that are near them. And if you see a news story about
them in the park, read it and understand it. I think certainly keeping up a CPAWS or other groups that are, there's a lot of friends of certain parks organizations, and that's always a good way to keep up with what's going on in the parks and what needs to happen. And then of course, just thinking about the way that you vote, because the way that you vote right now has a lot to do with how parks are taken care of. And there may be certain parties that are friendlier to parks than others. Yeah, I think those are the main ways to think about your provincial parks, and also to just think about them as not, just think about them as, because the boundaries of parks are artificial. So if you're thinking about the land being conserved within the boundaries, I challenge people to think broader about broader ecological systems. It doesn't matter if a very small patch of prairie is conserved in a park, if on the other border, other side of the border is just massive, intensive agriculture, and be wary if people claiming that that's enough. Parks are not enough. They're not enough. And yeah.
(40:10):
Was there anything else you wanted to say? Any final thoughts?
(40:13):
So I think one thing to think about that I want people to think about when they think about park history is that in the post-World War II era, parks were a necessity for people and governments, whether they
were at the national level, the provincial level in Canada or the state, in the federal level, in the US specifically viewed parks as a necessity. And they had the duty to provide parks to their people. And that's why you see huge, massive influx of the creation of parks at the state and provincial level in the sixties and seventies, and they were willing to spend money on them. And in the eighties, that changed, and that parks have never been considered as important at the government level since then. And I want people to think about, why do you believe that parks are a necessity? Do you believe that they are right because considered to be a right for the ordinary citizen to have parks, and that is no longer the case. So I just want people to think about that and to think about, do you think that having access to a park for yourself as a right, is that a human right? It's just an interesting, very quick change. It's a very short
period where provincial state parks are considered to be the thing. And a lot of provincial parks that I visit now are hurting. They haven't had infrastructure things in decades. And so, yeah, how do we turn
that around?
(41:55):
Next time on Remembering Alberta Parks, I learn about the geological significance of Castle Wildland, Sheep River, Cypress Hills, and more,
(42:05):
Because I want for people to be able to read that or to hear this podcast or whatever, and to be able to look at those rocks and understand why they're there, what story they're telling, and to be able to see
with those different layers. Right? On the one hand, you're seeing the mountains, but then you can also practically see that ancient dry lake bed.
(42:30):
I Over My Head's remembering Alberta Parks was produced by Michael Bartz with production assistance from Shinichi Hara. Special thanks to all the guests who gave generously of their time and expertise.
(42:39):
I'm tryin' to save the planet, oh will someone please save me?
(42:49):
This season was made possible with support from the government of Alberta's Heritage Preservation Partnership Program, and Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, Southern Alberta.