Poor little Gardom Lake!
It hardly has a ‘hope-in-Hell’ for retaining its relentlessly-vanishing wondrous natural attributes. The terrible odds against sustaining its ecological identity arise from two fundamental factors.
Firstly, “parkland,” whether it be national, provincial, regional or municipal, is valued almost wholly by its managers and public users for user-frequency and intensity-of-use.
This is the old, dated and single-minded, “Parks are for People’ dictum, where natural ecological features are merely a backdrop for our entertainment –while they last, that is!
Park budgets often depend on numbers of visitors, so, of course, huge compromises of ecological values are inevitable in such a narrow view.
Secondly, there is a deeply-ingrained, historically-driven, selfish attitude that (Heaven forbid!) we, as users of the outdoors, should ever have to consider – much less practise – self-restraint, back-off, ‘let-it-be’ perspectives on those great outdoors on their behalf.
Our track-record on simply leaving nature alone is poor to abysmal.
I’m very much afraid that until natural ecological features like the flora and fauna of a given area – like Gardom Lake – are accorded value for their own sake, and not exclusively ours, their future looks bleak, indeed.
Tom Crowley