Citation:
Date Presented:
February 9, 2012Abstract:
Banff, Alberta, located just ten miles inside the border to Banff National Park, is a town driven by tourism. Everyone in this small mountain village is at most one or two points removed from the tourism industry, whether they be pouring coffee at the local bakery or pushing paper at the town hall. Banff is Canada’s first national park, and the town has been a jumping-off point to various wilderness tourist attractions since its inception. Today, Parks Canada places high value on conservation of the national park, but the park and the town of Banff both have long histories of tourism promotion, which still cast shadows of the same over the area. Because of this confluence of today's intent and yesterday's history, the town of Banff stands as a battleground—a contested field where ecological preservation and commercial development duel for priority. In this thesis, I plan to address the contested purpose of Banff National Park and the push and pull that occurs between environmental and economic concerns. Historically, the policy “pendulum” in Banff has swung between a tourism/development extreme and a conservation extreme, although for decades it lingered nearer the tourism end of the spectrum. Today, it seems to have settled close to the middle of the debate, but the debate itself still rages on. I hope to examine the town of Banff as a case study of the contestation between townspeople, seasonal workers, and Parks Canada regarding environmental and tourism issues. I would like to situate the theoretical side of my thesis in current environmental theory, although it does not apply directly to my topic. Neither, though, does anthropological theory, so I will attempt to use a combination of both to situate my theoretical argument regarding Banff National Park, the town of Banff, and the tourism and ecological concerns regarding both.