Letter to Ontario Parks Leadership

Dear Parks Leadership, 

We are writing to you today as two lifelong lovers of The Park (aged 69 and 76). We wish to give you a heads-up about our anti-campfire stance. Our goal is to counteract The Park’s promotion of campfires on your social media accounts and in other marketing. We are writing this letter just days after the morning skies were tinged an eerie orange with wildfire smoke. It is confounding to us to look out at a crisis and then open Instagram or Facebook to see Ontario Parks marketing the campfire as a core, romantic centerpiece of the outdoor experience. We beg to differ. 

We recently questioned a campfire-promotion post on the park’s feed. Our comments—and those of other like-minded campers—were quickly deleted. Both the promotion of campfires and the deletion of our suggestion to cease such promotion signals to us that Ontario Parks knows it is upholding an obsolete worldview that pretends humans can carry on as such. We encourage The Park, Ontario Parks and MECP to be bold, and to transition to a new campfire-free ethic.

We understand your institutional perspective. We know that campfires represent a cultural nostalgia. We also understand the economic reality—that firewood sales are a revenue stream. But as stewards of this land, we are compelled to say: 

Nostalgia notwithstanding, the party is over.

Treating campfires as a harmless tradition is nice and everything but does not align with today’s ecological realities. Your messages confuse campers who seek government leadership about the fires: on the one hand, we read cozy campfire blurbs, and on the other, towns evacuate and homes and memories are lost. We don’t mean to lecture you but here goes: campfires release greenhouse gases, pollute air quality with fine particulate, and worse, normalize a culture of burning that bleeds into pristine backcountry zones where fires cannot be easily managed. Everywhere we trek in The Park’s interior, we see the black scars of charred rocks and sterile soil that people leave on the landscape anywhere they wish. We dismantle these rogue fire pits (not to mention remove graffiti and pack out others’ garbage). When you promote a bygone nostalgia, it contradicts ‘Leave No Trace.’ 

We want Ontario Parks to decouple its conservation funding from biomass burning and transition to a clean camping ethic. We will be publicly advocating for:

1. Shifting the social media narrative away from the campfire habit and toward low-impact activities like dark-sky appreciation—even though that activity is also compromised by smoky haze. We have other activities to suggest.
2. Replacing firewood sales with clean revenue streams—such as park-managed rentals of high-efficiency propane fire bowls and clean camp stoves. We have other revenue streams to suggest.

Our intent is not to shame local park staff who are doing their best under current provincial communications frameworks. It is meant to signal that the public is ready for change.  

We hope that The Park—with its history of environmental leadership and artistic appreciation—will lead the way in redefining what it means to come to the wilderness.

Thank you for reading our perspective. We welcome the chance to discuss this further.

Sincerely,

Valerie Hickey and Mary Ann West

PS. We envision The Park leading the way by eliminating fire pits. Camper attendance would not decline. On the contrary, you would gain national and international acclaim. Parks Canada is already adopting alternate measures in its campgrounds and back country, as are other world-class parks. A clear fire ethic would give campers peace of mind that our parks know the right thing to do.