Bike parks need more scrutiny
What modern society has done exceptionally well, in the last 35 years, is look the other way while an entire generation, fuelled by extreme behavior, has found every single crack and puncture in the wall of toleration that now characterizes local, regional and provincial governments including elected officials and appointed civil service managers and workers.
Local governments, and a supporting cast of civil servants and “entrepreneurs” continue to plod along as though the world was constructed by humans for their consumption. In their mind it appears all they have to do is make declarations that extreme behavior, as long as it “pays” in jobs and private profit, has no ecological costs or limits. Apparently, this “economic” opiate will bring peace and prosperity to us all.
They continue to propose outrageous schemes, like massive commercial mountain biking operations, for public landscapes that are already bursting at the ecological seams. These people are arrogant enough to brush aside biological and ecological reality that shows public land ecosystems and wildlife habitat have already been critically degraded and fragmented by 50 years of cumulative industrial-scale logging, grazing, trapping, hunting, mining, and off-roading; now they want to stuff “the kitchen sink” in as well.
In the Kootenays, a company (Retallack) is proposing a massive alpine mountain biking development in the Purcell mountains, with an extensive manmade bike road system (although up to 5-metres wide, they like to call them trails), 7,000 biker-days of use annually, a lodge, and a dozen helicopter flights daily up local valleys unloading 36 people per day, all into grizzly bear and mountain goat habitat. The application “addresses” impacts, stating “interaction” with “species at risk is possible,” and impact on local wilderness areas and wildlife is “conceivable”.
And hold onto your hat for this one; it’s all because Retallack has a “need to preserve our planet’s precious alpine wilderness for future generations to enjoy”.
In an equally astonishing claim, the local Ktunaxa Indian Band – they want to put the lodge in – claim that what amounts to an army of mountain bikers and workers in alpine wildlife habitat, will “contribute” to “protection” of their culture, apparently, through some immaculate transgression, this will also “help with the ongoing preservation of wild spaces that are critical to wildlife.”
In the Okanagan, we now have the self-proclaimed environmentalists, the Penticton Indian Band, announcing a large scale “adrenaline” park for, you guessed it, mountain bikers! It will destroy a large portion of the exceptional, and rare, grassland habitat on band land, a landscape this is now of great value to all of us.
In reality all we shall be served is another ecological and visual blight on the local landscape.
What each of these proposals are attempting to do, successfully to this point, is evade environmental impact assessment based on mindless declaration that “recreation” is just fun, money and jobs, or in the case of participation by the Aboriginal industry, absurd claims like “cultural preservation.”
Mountain biking is an activity, driven by aggressive attitudes, that fuels chronic social and environmental conflict. That’s what we have today everywhere mountain bikers are found.
Including intimidation tactics, bike promoters have been able to brow beat governments and civil servants into swallowing propaganda that bikers’ “rights” to build trails, and dealers and manufacturers jobs and income, should take precedence over the interests of the vast majority of citizens, our wildlife and our commonly owned, public landscapes.
Aside from the environmental destruction, and outright distortion and misinformation from mountain bike promoters, the most disgusting aspect of today’s failure to protect the public trust is the betrayal of the people by the civil service as they unscrupulously promote private profit over public good.