Water Water Everywhere

Most park supporters in Canada are aware of the double-edged sword of access and damage accruing to highway and railroad development in our first and most famous national park. Some of my own generation, however, might be startled by Christopher Armstrong and H.V. Nelles’s reminder in Wilderness and Waterpower: How Banff National Park Became a Hydro-Electric Storage Reservoir that the production of hydroelectricity “was as much a factor in the history of Banff National Park as was the CPR.” If we are blasé about dams and reservoirs in Banff and region today, it is because they were built long before we arrived on the scene. Also, the human is an adaptable animal that can get used to almost any degradation over time. Armstrong and Nelles remind us that in the early 20th century, “the idea of what the park should be was as expansive as its territory.” Most Canadians of that era subscribed to the notion that a park should, first of all, be made useful to the public, and...