Algonquin Park Essay

Introduction

The Algonquin Park is the largest provincial park not only in Ontario, but in all of Canada with the total area being 7,635 kilometers (Sadeghi, ). The park is a source of wealth through a plethora of recreational activities and also a source of vast ecosystems that go throughout the park. These features attract over 12 million visitors every year. As a result, the Algonquin Park brings in lots of cash flow with their recreational activities and from the tourism point of view the park provides great value. However, with the expansion of the recreational activities in the park, it comes with many drawbacks. To create space for such activities, trees and ground must be destroyed. This has caused many problems as the environmental

The Algonquin Provincial Park has an insane amount of recreation activities that bring in big money. Some of these recreation activities are camping, hunting, skiing, and biking. Having the variety of activities comes at a cost for the park itself though. In order to make space for such recreation, companies must log and make roads, which leads to hurting the ecosystems in the park. When roads are constructed, soil is destroyed and taken away, which is needed for healthy ecological systems. The loss of fertile soils results in less productive land for agriculture, pollution of waterways, and increased flooding (Ho). A recommendation to combat this issue is to use careful guidelines and planning for how to minimize the negative effects, while maximizing the positive effects of having tourism. One example of using guidelines to minimize negatives is to limit the number of people doing recreation activities at the same time. As a result, tourists will not be able to overcrowd the park and the park will not have to expand the road traffic, which damages the ecosystems of the Algonquin Provincial Park. Additionally, recently the officials overseeing the park have created a limit on the number of consecutive days someone stays in the Algonquin Park, which I believe is very wise. According to

The First Nation’s communities were on the Algonquin land long before anyone else and it originally belonged to them. Their territory at one time covered 90% of the Algonquin Park, where they practiced their culture and sustained the lives of their group. In present time, however, the First Nation communities are getting left in the dust in decision making for the territory they owned once upon a time. While I understand things happened when the Europeans moved over to the North America, I do not think it is completely fair for the people that reside in the park to have no power in how their land is used. These communities did a much better job in preserving the ecological life of the park than people do in today’s world. On the contrary, I will say the economic benefits have surpassed anything that the First Nation communities achieved. Also, I know that the government has most of the control of the Algonquin Provincial Park, which prevents the First Nation people from having say. I would recommend that the First Nation communities have a speaker for them that can meet with government officials that have control of the park, and they can see if they can make any sort of compromise that might benefit both