EDMONTON – National parks, such as Alberta’s Elk Island and Wood Buffalo, have been losing ground to changing demographics and a new generation of Canadians that would rather be connected electronically than to the natural world around them.
Now Parks Canada officials are using those social media tools that have been hurting them to give people a virtual tour of what they are missing and what they may never see first-hand.
“We know that this might seem to be counter-intuitive, but we think that there is potential in us exploiting those social media tools that are weakening Canadians’ connections to national parks,” said Tim Gauthier who is involved in a YouTube experiment to get more people connected to Wood Buffalo on the Alberta/Northwest Territories border.
“This is part of creating a new place for Parks Canada in the consciousness of increasingly urban Canadians. In other words, you can experience something about our national parks or historic sites online, where you and your friends spend so much time. Then you can share your impression of what you experienced with other friends through social media.”
Gauthier said the goal is to remind people that parks are important cultural icons, but it would be “icing-on-the-cake” if it brings more people to the park, he said.
Nationally, park numbers have gone up and down dramatically in recent years, but overall they are more or less the same as they were a decade ago. More than 12 million people visit each year.
Some parks, however, are struggling to get Canadians interested.
With a drop to 185,253 in 2009-10, compared with the 219,000 who visited in 2000-01, Elk Island National Park has been hard hit, but not nearly as much as some of the more remote northern parks. Several years ago, for example, not one person visited Aulavik National Park in the Northwest Territories.
Wood Buffalo, Canada’s largest national park, has been doing better in recent years because of promotions designed to attract mostly locals at particular times of the year.
But the number of visitors are still extremely small compared to what Banff and Jasper see. Fewer than 4,000 people visited Wood Buffalo last year.
The Wood Buffalo video that is now available online describes how the park is home to the last wild colony of whooping cranes, the world’s largest free roaming bison herd, the most northerly colony of garter snakes and an eclectic landscape that includes boreal forest, the remnants of a huge inland sea and one of the world’s largest freshwater deltas.
“Remote as our park is, we recognize that many Canadians may not have the time, money or the outdoor experience necessary for them to come here,” Gauthier said. “Right now, this is an experiment, but one that we expect will expand to other national parks.”
University of Alberta historian Zac Robinson is an expert on tourism and globalization and how they relate to national parks. He understands the dilemma t Parks Canada faces in trying to attract the attention of a new generation who have no desire to put on a heavy backpack and hike into the wilderness for more than a day.
He thinks the new strategy is consistent with the way Parks Canada has promoted national parks for the past century.
“The technologies of the day – whether it was railways in the late 1800s or automobiles and roads a half-century later – have always helped to make Canada’s national parks more accessible,” he said.
“Our most popular national parks in the south, for example, have towns in them, complete with shopping malls, movie theaters, and indoor ice rinks. We fool ourselves when we consider our nationally protected wilderness areas as separate from modernity’s hand, for it’s been helping shape the parks experience since the beginning. And so it’s not counterintuitive at all for Parks Canada to launch a promotional campaign through smartphone and social media. It’s a great idea.”
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