The Exhaustion of Wood Buffalo National Park

Wood Buffalo National Park, Canada's largest and the world's second-largest national park, faces severe ecological and cultural degradation due to industrial mega-projects like BC Hydro's W.A.C. Bennett Dam and tar sands oil extraction. These extractivist activities have decimated wildlife and disrupted sacred Indigenous relations with land, leading to a 2014 petition by the Mikisew Cree First Nation to UNESCO to list the park as endangered. The study highlights how these events reflect broader tensions in environmental politics, wilderness conservation, and Indigenous-settler relations within a colonial framework.

Vannini, P., & Vannini, A. (2019). The Exhaustion of Wood Buffalo National Park. International Review of Qualitative Research, 12(3), 278–303. https://doi.org/10.1525/irqr.2019.12.3.278