The Myth of the Great Outdoors
- Andreas Kondos Sheppard
- Feb 2
- 5 min read
Andreas Kondos Sheppard
As a boy, I used to frequently take road trips across the continental divide – that vast mountain gap marking the division of North America’s Pacific and Atlantic watersheds (1). Not only was this a place of remarkable ecological change, but so too was it of natural beauty. The checker-board clear cuts of my home in the Columbia Valley gave way to protected park land; first in glimpses, then stands, and finally, whole valleys of untouched, un-felled timber, climbing the cracked “dinner-plate” mountains of the Canadian Rockies. “Here”, I thought to myself, “is true wilderness”.
I could not comprehend how absurdly wrong I was.
Let’s reverse a bit in time – say, 200 or so years. In this age, the West was still relatively “untamed”, as we would call it by our modern standards; vast, ecologically intact, ‘wilderness’. Of course, it was, and has been since time immemorial, inhabited by the Indigenous Peoples of the continent. Nevertheless, in this era, the West was seen as a near unlimited and untapped source of furs, especially those of the beaver – that mighty semi-aquatic rodent / engineer (2). It was in this ‘pristine’ West that explorers, from Lewis & Clark to Simon Fraser to David Thompson, would set about crossing and documenting the various routes available to access the Pacific Ocean (3)(4). And suddenly, the West, that once impenetrable ‘wilderness’, did not seem so vast after all. Come the 1880s and western expansion had truly kicked into full gear – Manifesting Destiny in the USA, the C.P.R. connecting Canada’s Pacific with its Atlantic in the East, and caught in the middle with increasingly scarce space to move, the Indigenous Peoples of the continent.
It was in this climate that the fable of the “Great Frontier” began to establish – with a distinctive flavour of decline (5). The idea of a fading natural space, a frontier where men could shed the shackles of “feminizing civilization” and return “home” to some conception of an untouched wilderness, took hold. And it was in this romantic backdrop that the first ‘environmental’ movements of North America took shape. The writings of fellows like John Muir and Gifford Pinchot influenced heavily the American psyche, and both the national parks and national forest systems sprung from this frame of thought (6). In Canada, a similar train of thought spurred forth. And in 1885, the first true “National Park” of Canada was established: Banff (7). Almost exactly 120 years later, the author of this piece would be born in the town of this Park’s namesake.
Banff itself was established after the discovery of an extraordinary site – an underground lattice of geothermal springs, hot water heated not by the actions of man, but by the activity of the Earth itself (8). In 1883, railway workers happened upon these thermal springs, sparking a chain of events that led to the creation of Canada’s first national park (7). These springs were quickly developed and monopolized, and soon the surrounding area itself would be subject to rapid development, including the construction of the now legendary Banff Springs Hotel by the C.P.R., which opened in 1888. Today, the hot springs at the Cave & Basin are protected due to ecological sensitivity, and the Banff Springs is no longer owned by the C.P.R. (8)(9).
It was also in the establishment of this same National Park that the Indigenous peoples of the region were ordered to exit this land, in order to preserve the ‘untouched and natural beauty’ of the park (10). And yet, in the early twentieth century, a peculiar practice, one distinctly associated with Banff National Park, emerged: The Indian Days (10). For a few months of the year, visitors were invited to ‘see the Indian in its natural habitat’, in much the same manner animals in a zoo, or specimens in a museum are showcased (10).
Yet behind this annual ‘display’ of authentic Indigenous culture, a strict set of rules were imposed on the invited Indigenous peoples – be on best behaviour, or be subject to penalty ranging from expulsion to actual jail time (10). Be the ‘Indian’ the tourists want to see. A remnant of a fading culture, that same idea of the fading frontier, but attached to actual cultures, traditions, and ways of life that date back to time immemorial. And that was the way it was.
Of course, these festivals no longer occur and the National Parks can reasonably claim to have a better working relationship with the Indigenous Peoples who have always known these lands than they once did, yet nevertheless, a myth from this era had prevailed (11). And that is the myth of the ‘pristine wilderness’. A way of the world that is no longer around: poisoned by Humanity, our excess, indulgence, and very existence. ‘The solution to the environmental crisis’, many would argue, ‘is to return to a more fundamental, primitive way of life, one less taxing on the land, on the world, and one that does not spoil it in the same way we have today. A way of life where we do not interfere with wild, pristine spaces, and simply let these spaces be as they always were.’ There are many issues with this idea. Perhaps the main one to mention is that humans are not a distinct or separate thing to nature, but simply another part of it. We are, as much as we would like to think ourselves somehow distinct from it, a part of nature. A part with a distinctive and outsized impact, sure, but we are still one with nature. To assume we need to remove ourselves from nature to restore it is a flawed and dangerous belief. It is a belief that saw the landscape of Banff be forever altered by the removal of cultures that had emerged alongside the land, an attempt to preserve what people thought the park ‘should' look like.
And so looking back at those childhood drives, crossing the continental divide and observing the untouched nature, I have since taken a more educated look at the topic. Those pristine valleys were not as they once were, but rather a managed and catered image by ourselves to restore the land back to what we, in our western worldview, see as “untouched”. Learning from the mistakes of our past in management is crucial to rectifying and avoiding mistakes like this in the future. We must learn that we are fundamentally a part of the outdoors, however uncomfortable that notion may be, and accept that it is our duty to take care of something we have always known.
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