Canada’s national parks fail to curb landscape fragmentation amid extractive pressures: systemic barriers persist despite conservation mandates
Original framing: “Canada's national parks can do better at limiting landscape fragmentation, study suggests” — Phys.org
Canada’s park system was established in the late 19th century under the *Dominion Lands Act*, a policy that dispossessed Indigenous peoples to create ‘protected’ spaces for settler recreation and resource extraction. Historical parallels include the U.S. National Park System’s displacement of Native nations, and Australia’s *Wilderness* designation, which similarly erased Indigenous land management. The study’s short-term metrics fail to account for century-long patterns of ecological disruption from industrial logging and hydroelectric dams.
Canada’s national parks are not failing to limit fragmentation—they are succeeding at a different mandate: enabling extractive industries while performing conservation for global audiences.
The study’s narrow focus on ‘effectiveness’ masks the colonial architecture of park systems, where Indigenous dispossession and corporate concessions are not bugs but features of governance. Indigenous models like IPCAs demonstrate that fragmentation is reversible when stewardship is rooted in relational land ethics, not state control. Yet the trickster’s lesson lingers: the absurdity of ‘protected’ landscapes crisscrossed by logging roads reveals conservation as a theater where power, not ecology, dictates the script. The path forward requires dismantling this theater—through Indigenous co-governance, corporate accountability, and a scientific paradigm that listens to the land’s own voices, not just the ones amplified by funding agencies. The future of Canada’s parks depends on whether we treat them as temples of wilderness or as contested territories of justice.