‘Can there be any experiences of nature today that are not tarnished by climate anxiety?’ Professor and writer, Anna Sheftel, looks at the Western culture of memory and the role nature tourism plays in obscuring the ecological devastation wreaked elsewhere. Here, she looks back at a recent trip to the Canadian Rockies, where her awe and appreciation is inextricably mixed with grief, ‘the feeling that it is disappearing’ – and an awareness of how civilisation’s relationships with land have always been transactional, colonial and extractive.
IT IS DIFFICULT TO WRITE about the Canadian Rockies without cliches. I grew upon the east coast of Canada, in Montreal, feeling like they might exist only on postcards. The Rockies were a world away from the diminutive lakes and mountains I knew – welcoming and lush but unintimidating. Every time I caught a glimpse of the otherworldly turquoise waters of Lake Louise, I wondered if I would ever be able to experience them for myself. My family and I finally embarked on this adventure last summer, when my three kids were old enough to remember (some of) the trip, and we were finally free of bulky strollers.
Our road trip took us up past Canmore, through Banff to Jasper to Valemount, and then into the interior of British Columbia. I dipped my toes in every glacier-fed lake and stream that I encountered. The water was bracingly cold and made me feel whole. We craned our necks at the immensity of the mountains, these giants that seemed to continue endlessly. We marvelled at wildflowers and moss and found short hikes that felt like they took us to other worlds. We admired wildlife, with the wonderful sense that this was their turf, not ours. We stood on glaciers and picnicked at stunning overlooks and were in awe at the beauty that is possible in this world, a beauty that is dangerous and wild. It was a privilege to be guests there. It all felt so huge, so much bigger than us, in a deeply humbling way.
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In his seminal essay about les lieux de mémoire, French historian Pierre Nora wrote that, 'We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left.' He argued that lieux de mémoire, or sites of memory, are places that we choose to put our memories, ghettoising them into prescribed, contained locations, so that everywhere else we can enjoy convenient amnesia. When I recently discussed this piece with a graduate student, she pointed out to me how Eurocentric such a perspective was; indeed, Nora was making an important observation about western culture, but the dynamics of memory, and its place in our communities, are profoundly different in Indigenous cultures, among others.
The Canadian Rockies were an apt place to think about western cultures of memory. I felt uneasy the whole trip; my awe was always tinged with melancholy. The Rockies evoked Nora’s lieux de mémoire in two ways. First, it felt like there was no enjoyment of the natural beauty of this part of the world without feeling like it was already being relegated to memory. The reality of nature tourism in this era of climate crisis is that every gasp at impossibly turquoise waters is filled with a sense of grief, the feeling that it is disappearing, a fading photograph. This was even evident in the calculus of planning our trip. We left for the airport within minutes of the last day of school, as early in the summer as possible, hoping to avoid the worst of forest fire season. We planned this trip as soon as our kids were old enough, wanting to go while we still could. It was a race against the clock, all the beauty only reminding us that it was fleeting.
Even with that sense of urgency, we still could not have anticipated that just one month after our trip, a large part of Jasper, one of the key towns in the Rockies, would burn to the ground. This included the lovely motel we stayed in. We had fretted over just how fleeting it all was, but we did not expect it to happen this quickly. Within a month, one of our favourite stops on the trip was already intangible, relegated to memory.
Nowhere did this mix of awe and grief feel more evident than on our visit to the Columbia Ice Fields, where we got to experience the awesome Athabasca glacier. We hyped our kids up for weeks: you will get to stand on a real glacier! And a bus with giant wheels will take us there! My partner recounted his fond memories of visiting the glacier as a child, when he was about the same age as our eldest. At the time, the glacier apparently almost reached the road. When we spotted it for the first time on this trip, you had to look out into the distance to see it. We went to the glacier not only because it was an exciting experience to offer to our children, but also because we knew we were running out of time.
Can there be any experiences of nature today that are not tarnished by climate anxiety? Are we visiting our rivers and mountains as though we are sitting with a dying relative? I wondered what it had felt like for my partner to encounter this same place as a child. Had been able to simply be present and appreciate it for what it was, with no melancholy? It seemed impossible.
On the tour, a variety of young people, who have come to the Rockies from around the world, did an excellent job of explaining the ice field, the glaciers it feeds, its centrality to the ecosystem, its long history and the various ways in which they protect it. We filled our water bottles with beautiful clear glacier water. The enthusiastic young English guide told us that it would be gone in 40-60 years. It would become a lake. I looked at my partner, who had been so eager to share one of his most cherished childhood memories with his kids (who mostly complained about how cold it was). They would not be able to take their own kids there.
The question of how the glacier is melting is a complicated one. A remnant from the last ice age, it is normal and expected for glaciers to slowly melt. Nature is not static. The Rockies themselves were formed by erosion and change. The mountains are still growing. But the speed with which this glacier was melting, and its acceleration, were exacerbated by our very human hubris. There was an unease in how it was talked about on the tour for this reason; it was a natural thing and an unfolding disaster at the same time.
The enormity of these questions contrasted starkly with the speech another guide gave us at the conclusion of the tour. He said that he hoped the tour had helped us to understand the importance of glaciers to our ecosystems, and that 'when you go home, try to do one thing to help the environment'. This statement was so pithy in comparison to the grandiosity of this melting glacier that it felt insulting. We all knew it was a lie; that this would not save the glacier.
This brought me back to questions of memory, particularly my scholarly interest in the ethics and politics of representing violence. In Susan Sontag’s important essay, Regarding the Pain of Others, she cautioned against the faulty assumption that to see violence is to abhor it. We have witnessed too much violence streamed on social media in the past two decades to disagree with her at this point. How then, can images, stories, representations of injustice, convince people to oppose that injustice? How do we encourage deep, ethical engagement, rather than sensationalism or voyeurism, that taps into our moral, political and social obligations? As I stewed about the guide’s pithy invocation, I realised that Sontag’s warnings not to oversimplify the causality between viewing and acting also applied very much to the climate crisis. Why was I bringing my children here? Yes, I wanted them to see how beautiful the world is. But I also wanted them to love it so much that they would care for it, that they would understand the importance of protecting all of this.
How do we encourage deep, ethical engagement, rather than sensationalism or voyeurism, that taps into our moral, political and social obligations?
To invoke Sontag, to view the shrinking glacier is not to automatically want to save the shrinking glacier. We were of course not the only tourists marvelling at the beauty of the Rockies. Everywhere we went, we were surrounded by crowds from around the world, endless streams of RVs and trailers. At the iconic Lake Louise, the very centre of the Rockies tourist hubbub, I reflected that I actually enjoyed being surrounded by these tourists, all in awe together. The next day, we took a short hike to view the iridescent Peyto Lake. Again, the same sense of camaraderie prevailed. When we reached the lookout, a couple who had driven up from Arizona agreed to take a photo of our family together if we took a photo of them. 'Have you ever seen anything like it?' they asked. We agreed that we had not; that this was extraordinary. A light snow danced in the air around us.
Next to the lookout, a sign that explained that the glacier that fed Peyto Lake was receding, too, with a photograph of what the glacier looked like in 1885. Back then it came all the way down to the lake; now you could barely see it. We had bonded with our fellow tourists over the beauty, but was there any bond in our grief, mourning the slow disappearance of these landscapes? Did it create in us a collective urge to protect them? I knew this was not the case. We were all consuming this beauty, but that did not automatically translate into an ecological instinct. We returned to a parking lot full of SUVs and RVs.
This brings me to the second reason that the Rockies serve as a lieux de mémoire. My colleague at Concordia University, Huron-Wendat artist, filmmaker and scholar Nicolas Renaud, gave an informal talk to our department in which he explained the conflict between governmental approaches to conservation, which value protecting the land such that we might be able to continue extracting from it, and Indigenous approaches, in which we are in relation with the land, and understand that disrupting one part of an ecosystem impacts the whole. He argued that, for example, Quebec’s system of national parks, SEPAQ, served as a sort of cover; we delineated the areas that we would protect, so that everything else would be ripe for exploitation. This also came with considerable dispossession of Indigenous lands and practices. Robin Wall Kimmerer made the same point in her bestselling book, Braiding Sweetgrass: ‘How we approach restoration of land depends, of course, on what we believe that “land” means. If land is just real estate, then restoration looks very different than if land is the source of a subsistence economy and a spiritual home …We have to think about what land means.’
Are the Rockies our Canadian lieux de mémoire for the natural world, the place we go to remember nature so that we can destroy it everywhere else? All throughout the national parks in this region you see attempts to incorporate Indigenous knowledge and to acknowledge Indigenous stewardship of the land. But it is always in tension. At the Columbia icefield, guides were careful to make a thorough land acknowledgment but then went on to tell the story of the explorer who 'discovered' the area, seemingly not noticing the contradiction.
We were still engaging with [the landscape} transactionally, for how it made us feel. Nature tourism does not inherently obligate reflection on what the land means.
As breathtaking as the landscape was, we were still engaging with it transactionally, for how it made us feel. Nature tourism does not inherently obligate reflection on what the land means.
Nicolas Renaud and Brian Virostek’s 2023 documentary film, Holiday Native Land, makes this argument starkly. The film is composed entirely of archival footage from 1920-1970 advertising nature tourism and national parks across Canada. The Rockies are repeatedly referred to as a 'mountain playground' and a disembodied narrator recounts admiringly of all the work done in Jasper to make the mountains and lakes accessible and enjoyable, reassuring us that, 'it is a wilderness under order and control'. Depictions of Indigenous relationships to these lands are alternately shown as violent and destructive, needing to be contained, or as kitschy local colour that helps make a family trip feel more authentic, a remnant of the past that can be enjoyed in an otherwise modern experience of nature. The film’s images demonstrate that while a core part of Canadian identity has long been an appreciation for the diverse natural beauty of these lands, that appreciation has always been transactional, colonial and extractive.
I wondered what a more relational approach to the Rockies would look like. The feeling that we had while we were taking in these waters and mountains alongside tourists from around the world, was real. How could we transform that feeling into actual relationships with these lands, beyond the confines of protected national parks? Were we capable of taking on the obligations that such relationships would ask of us?
Before we went to the Rockies, we took a quick trip to Drumheller, to admire the dinosaur bones and fossils and badlands. We passed endless farmland with a constant stream of pumpjacks dotting the landscape, extracting oil bit by bit, acre by acre. This was two hours away from those precious lakes and glaciers. We felt no ill will towards the farmers just trying to make a living, but rather balked at an economic system that gave rise to this. The contrast was stark; we protect the most beautiful bits so that we can destroy the rest. How can these pumpjacks and national parks coexist? The answer is that they were designed to coexist; our relationships to both are extractive. And of course we needed that oil to power the car that took us through this magical landscape.
Back home, this is the same logic that underpinned the Northvolt project here in Quebec. Premier Francois Legault bragged about attracting a massive electric car battery factory to the province, which, in order to be built, would require destroying wetlands and clearcutting on the proposed 171-hectare site. And it is the same logic with which the Quebec government is currently working to pass a new forestry law, Bill 97, which would give one third of Quebec’s remaining forests to the industry for clearcutting, allow one third to be ‘multiuse’, meaning that they would also be open to clearcutting, and then protecting and conserving the remaining third. Maïté Blanchette Vézina, Quebec’s Minister of Natural Resources and Forests, proclaimed in a press conference about the law that she came from a family of people who worked in the forests, ‘who live with the forest and not at its expense, people who love it deeply’. This claim to a personal attachment serves as moral cover. But what a twisted form of love this is, to protect some as a pretext for destroying the rest. It is the love of an abusive parent.
French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs coined the term 'collective memory', which underpins the scholarly field of Memory Studies. He argued that, 'The past is not preserved but reconstructed in the present,' meaning that there is no authentic memory; it is a product of our current preoccupations and politics. In the case of our family road trip, the inverse also felt true. Our present itself was being reconstructed as the past. The Jasper we loved would be a thing of the past only a month later. As we looked out on turquoise waters and mountains that reached higher than the clouds, it was already a memory.
Anna Sheftel is Principal and Professor in the School of Community and Public Affairs at Concordia University in Tiohtiá:ke / Montréal. She writes about oral histories and memory of violence, and what it means to listen ethically in a troubled world.
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Very excellent! thank you! Question: where can one view HOLIDAY NATIVE LAND-film in its entirety?
Thanks for this thoughtful article. I noticed one of your photos is labelled "Lake Minnetanka." It's actually "Lake Minnewanka."