R oadless areas are our last chance to retain some wilderness on our public lands. There are not many choices left. More than 18,000 kilometres of forest roads have been constructed and reconstructed with public funding in the last 15 years. During this period, Ontario taxpayers paid more than $430 million to build roads into the wilderness for the forest industry.

In the past few years, provincial and federal funding has been reduced drastically, but road construction hasn't stopped. On the contrary, recent increases in the price of pulp and paper have prompted forest companies to expand their operations. Forest management units with little industrial demand until recently are now under intense pressure to supply wood. Companies are even trying to secure licenses in areas not covered by the Timber Environmental Assessment.

Of great concern is MNR's apparent reluctance to directly address condition 106 of the timber environmental assessment, to "develop a provincial policy on roadless wilderness areas". It is unclear how MNR intends to deal with either the letter or the spirit of this condition.

Ontario's Timber Environmental Assessment concluded that good forest management would occur on our public lands when forest managers recognized non-timber values, such as roadless wilderness, old growth, featured wildlife species, areas of natural and scientific interest and other "new approaches to managing the forest". Unless and until these non-timber values are built into public-land management, Ontario will not have the kind of forest management that the timber environmental assessment expected.

Roadless areas are almost invariably old-growth ecosystems, within which natural disturbances have resulted in communities that mature over many generations. Various definitions of old-growth forests have stressed the age and size of individual trees, the structure, fauna and ecology of old-growth systems and the level of human and natural disturbances. Nevertheless, the core definition provided by the Society of American Foresters, that "old-growth forests are relatively old and undisturbed by humans" is very similar to definitions of wilderness that are in wide use.

Roadless wilderness offers the only opportunities to protect true old-growth systems large enough for the natural interaction of landscape processes such as wind-throw, storm and insect damage, community succession and, in some cases, fire.

The environmental assessment directed MNR to prepare a red and white pine conservation strategy by May 1995. An Old Growth Forest Policy Advisory Committee completed this work and adopted a key objective for protection, "to protect representative ecosystems of old growth red and white pine in each site district in Ontario within the natural range of pine."

Based on this strategy, inventories and protection priorities have focused on the Temagami-Algoma Highlands region, where some of the most significant concentrations of old-growth pine remain. However, similar studies are needed elsewhere in the natural range of pine, and for other types of old growth, such as our Great Lakes deciduous forests, of which old-growth examples are extremely few and small.

To satisfy condition 103, the Advisory Committee also recommended that MNR apply a similar strategy to identify and protect other old-growth ecosystems in Ontario. This deadline was not met and the committee's recommendation has not yet been adopted by MNR.

O ver the years, MNR's identification of significant natural areas and candidate parks has resulted in an outstanding park system. While incomplete and of variable quality, the evaluation methods have been based on ecological districts and have resulted in the identification of hundreds of significant natural areas across Ontario. These studies have usually identified between 2% to 4% of ecological districts as significant natural areas, and most sites are at the scale of nature reserves, not wilderness areas.

The selection of the large parks that are now needed to complete Ontario's promised park system may require other approaches.

Increasingly, an alternate method may be to document where roadless areas remain. From this point of view, some conclusions about larger-scale wilderness protection may be clear.

• In the Lake of the Woods region, the last chance for significant wilderness protection is on the islands and peninsulas of the Lake of the Woods, such as the Aulneau Peninsula, and in some of the mainland's untouched wetlands.
• In the Lake Wabigoon and Lake St. Joseph regions, any significant wilderness protection will have to be north of the present cutting limits
• By itself, Kesagami isn't characteristic of the wilderness of either the James Bay or Lake Abitibi regions, but there are still opportunities for wilderness protection in those regions, especially among the extensive bogs and fens of the clay plains.

• Lady Evelyn-Smoothwater, although a superb area, cannot fully represent the wilderness character of the Temagami-Algoma Highlands region. The Algoma Highlands contain some of the last great chances for conserving large, pristine, Great Lakes pine and maple forests.
• The magnificent wilderness of Lake Superior's shores and islands are known throughout the world. Pukaskwa and Lake Superior parks should be linked and, together with other Ontario and U.S. protected areas, be recognized as an international world biosphere reserve.
• Killarney barely meets the minimum-size standard for a wilderness park, and isn't representative of the wilderness of the Georgian Bay region. The archipelagos and rock barrens of Georgian Bay and the North Channel may be some of the best remaining opportunities.
• Vast areas of Manitoulin Island's forests, rock plains and shores are owned by individual landowners and companies. These lands represent outstanding opportunities for private and public land conservation.
• Large natural landscapes extend inland from Georgian Bay. One of these is within 120 kilometres of Metropolitan Toronto, in Matchedash, Muskoka and Georgian Bay townships. A protected wilderness area of at least 10,000 hectares could extend from the Gibson River and Big Chute southeast through the Horseshoe Lakes to Long Lake.
• Only 17 percent of Algonquin Park is protected from logging and other industrial uses. The park's protected areas must be expanded if Algonquin is to be considered the flagship of Ontario's park system.

Economic diversification is critical, and remote tourism and ecotourism are growing businesses in many parts of Canada. Tourism based on hunting and fishing are very important to most areas and other tourism activities have great potential for expansion.

Provincial parks hosted 62% more visitors in 1993 than in 1981. An average of 500 people per day canoed Temagami's lakes and rivers from May to September 1994. More than 130,000 people hiked the Bruce Trail from July to November 1994. Quotas are in place in Algonquin to deal with the 800,000 visits each year. A single public campground operated on the northern Bruce Peninsula in the 1970s -- there are now 6 other private campgrounds at capacity during peak season.

In northern Ontario, 24,900 person-years of direct employment were generated as a result of tourism spending in the north -- $1 billion of gross domestic product. More than 650 of the 1600 licensed resource-based tourism operations in northern Ontario are in remote areas.

Recently, the Canadian Forestry Service evaluated potential areas for ecotourism in the Temagami-Algoma Highlands region, using criteria such as absence of permanent settlements, areas more than two kilometres from existing roads, and areas with no forestry or mining activities. In that region, the remote-tourism, ancient-forest and roadless-area studies all generally agree on the most important areas to protect from road construction and resource extraction, not surprising given that these approaches all focus on the same last-chances roadless areas.

Wilderness is a very human concept and people definitely have a place in the wilderness. Quality wilderness tourism, however, requires quality wilderness.

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