"Panic Park": Environmental Protest and the Politics of Parks in British Columbia's Skagit Valley

Abstract

In 1967, BC Hydro's Executive Director E.M. Gunderson, referring to recent environmental criticism of the Social Credit government, observed to W.A.C. Bennett, "the setting up of another park would do much to offset the criticism being given the government by the public." Using this statement as a jumping-off point, my paper examines two parks set up by two successive BC governments, those of W. A. C. Bennett’s Social Credit Party and Dave Barrett’s New Democratic Party, in the Skagit River Valley. I examine how each was created as a way to do just what Gunderson suggested -- as easy government responses to environmental criticism of a plan to flood the Skagit River Valley to provide power for Seattle, Washington. Both parks allowed the Social Credit Government and the NDP to argue that they were environmentally friendly without substantially changing the plan to flood the valley. Ultimately, I argue, contrary to how historians have generally interpreted the increase of parks as a result of the environmental movement, in British Columbia parks served to distract the public from the fact that government approaches to the environment remained basically the same as in the first half of the twentieth century.