Author: Aaron Millar / Source: Positive News
Olympus, the Grand Canyon, Uluru and the Serengeti: national parks are home to many of the wonders of our natural world. Aaron Millar explores their importance in conservation and how these protected spaces encourage us to feel environmental empathy
The great environmentalist, John Muir, said: “In wildness, lies the hope of the world”.
The outdoors is more than a pretty photograph, or a glimpse through a car window screen, it’s an essential part of who we are. You may spend your days in front of a computer; you may have never scaled a mountain or jumped in a freezing river at dawn, but make no mistake: the wilderness is inside you.This Earth Day, on 22 April, a worldwide celebration of environmental protection held every year since 1970, we must remember not just the challenges ahead, but the successes we continue to achieve. Below are the stories of three national parks around the world. They’re not famous; they don’t make the headlines. But they are leading the way in the conservation of public lands.
That’s important. Conservation biologists around the world agree: our best chance of reversing the trend of habitat and species destruction is to protect large swathes of vital ecosystems. National parks help support local communities and indigenous populations, protect threatened species and key biological hotspots, preserve our history and help provide vital breakthrough in medicine, climate change and more.
They’re not perfect. At times, native people have been displaced to create them; unmanaged visitor impact has decimated certain landscapes; and there is the enticing argument that these lands shouldn’t be conserved at all, but rather preserved, allowed to return to their natural, wild state without any human footprint whatsoever.
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But we should, nonetheless, take pride. According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, national parks, and similar protected reserves, cover an astonishing 14.7 per cent of the Earth’s land surface and 10 per cent of its territorial waters. And they’re ours. Reserves can be private property, national parks are, by definition owned by the people. They represent the soul of a country. When we walk among the high peaks of the Himalayas we walk with the Tibetan people, for whom they are sacred; when we touch the red rocks of Uluru we touch the Dreamtime too. National parks don’t just show us a place, they let us feel it. They are the last bastions of wonder and awe.
They’re also how we save the planet, because environmental empathy begins by falling in love with the outdoors. That’s what John Muir meant. Climb a mountain, gaze at the stars, bathe in the soft glow of the forest: the rest will follow. At a time when we are bombarded with bad news, when there are people in power who still view the Earth as a thing to exploit rather than a living system with its own intrinsic rights, national parks are a rare beacon of light. The wilderness is who we are; and we are the hope of the world.
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