Nearly every year, I make a long journey north from Vancouver to the 55th parallel, where I bought an old homesteader’s shack just to prove the adage about fools and their money. Until recently, I could make the last leg of the trip only by train, or by boat across the broad Skeena River; these days, there’s an hour-long dirt road, narrow enough toward the end that tree limbs leave Canadian pinstripes on my vehicle. Once I arrive, there is no running water, no power, no Wi-Fi. It wouldn’t be a surprise—intellectually, at least—to meet a cougar, wolf, black bear, or grizzly on the short walk from the cabin to the outhouse.
Despite these facts, human history is present and accounted for. My shack is on the outskirts of an old ghost town that’s being revived by a scattering of regular visitors; an ancient Gitxsan First Nation fishing site, still in use, is nearby. When the wind is still, I hear semis gearing down along the Yellowhead Highway on the other side of the river. It’s a blend of nature and culture that feels uniquely Canadian and is, in my brazen opinion, our most valuable contribution to the perennial debate about how humans should live on this planet.
Canada is the wildest place on earth, and I say this as a person who has travelled from Mongolia to Malawi, Samoa to Ecuador. The presence of large predators, for example, is a defining marker of wildness. Well, Canada is the planet’s greatest repository of bears. There are more polar bears here, by far, than anywhere else. The grizzly is still found on well over half of its historical range in Canada, compared to small fragments of its range in the Lower 48 states to our south. Black bears turn up nearly everywhere: I once saw a bumper sticker in a Yukon cottage that had been modified from “Respect bears in their home” to read “Expect bears in your home.” It strikes me that a defining quality of Canadians is that most of us have a bear story to tell.
Illustration by Sean Lewis
Perhaps wolves define your idea of what’s wild? They’re found coast to coast to coast. The entire boreal forest, stretching more than 5,000 km and covering half the country, is home to wolves. Forests themselves are a measure of wildness, and Canada has more of the world’s intact woodlands than any other nation, including the hugeness that is Russia. When I tell people in other countries that it isn’t especially difficult, in Canada, to find a river to paddle or a landscape to walk for days on end without seeing another soul, they are awestruck in a way that no other aspect of our country comes close to inspiring.
Yes, the globe has other wild corners. The Russian Far East. The depths of the Amazon Rainforest. The Australian Outback. The African continent’s famous troves of big, free-roaming fauna. Antarctica. Against each of these comparators, Canada emerges as wilder. Russia, for example, suffers widespread “empty forest syndrome” due to inadequately controlled hunting; the image of Africa’s natural riches comes almost entirely from its parks; Antarctica is vast and undeveloped, but its largest fully terrestrial wild animal is Belgica antarctica, a flightless midge not much larger than a no-see-um. Even routine visits to rural areas in Canada offer a wilder lens on life than can be found across most of the world. Ours is a still-wild country.
It’s also among the most human places on earth. When prehistoric expats from Asia looked for real estate in North America at the end of the Ice Age, apparently sweeping down the West Coast or an ice-free corridor east of the Rocky Mountains, or both, nearly all of what would be Canada was buried beneath glaciers. They settled south of the ice. As the frozen sheets pulled back, not only wild animals and plants but also people were ready to move onto the countryside. The Canadian landscape evolved under human influence from the first. Our species, Homo sapiens, is as “native” here as the bison or the sugar maple.
For a long time, Canada refused to acknowledge this deep humanness, preferring the counterfeit notion that its colonists civilized a near-empty land. Next to no one still believes this terra nullius fabrication, but it bears repeating that early Europeans with names such as Cabot, Cartier, and Mackenzie encountered people nearly everywhere they went; in a typical account, from central B.C. in 1898, a correspondent reports that early travellers were never out of sight of smoke from Indigenous households. Whole regions were transformed by Indigenous hands. They carried out widespread burning on the Prairies and large-scale land clearing for agriculture in southern Ontario; on the West Coast, communities built rock walls across entire bays to create clam-digging beaches; fences in the Yukon and Newfoundland, some spanning 50 km, guided migrating caribou into ambushes laid by hunters. Facts like these are only new to our ears because now we’re listening.
But if our history tells us that the wild world is surprisingly human, it also teaches that the human world can be surprisingly wild. Ours has always been a difficult land, implacable and refusenik; it has always had wilderness. The Hudson Bay Lowlands, a swamp the size of Japan, were only ever thinly populated, while there are High Arctic islands in the Queen Elizabeth Archipelago that still feel human footsteps only every decade or so. Large areas of the Barrenlands, a flattened sprawl of permafrost and muskeg stretching westward from the northern reaches of Hudson Bay, are so inhospitable that Indigenous Peoples travelled there only during the caribou migration; cruise the region in Google Earth today, and you will spot hardly an airstrip, let alone a road. Even on British Columbia’s coast, which may have been home to hundreds of thousands of people when the first European explorers arrived, the alpine meadows were only visited, never settled, while the depths of some temperate rainforests had not been disturbed by so much as a forest fire in 10,000 years.
In the late 18th century, when European sojourners visited the place that would eventually become Vancouver, the area was home to thousands of Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) people, but also filled with sights that today we associate with remote backcountry. Grizzly bears shambled beneath old-growth trees taller than any still standing in Canada today; wolves howled; salmon spawned by the thousands in small creeks; humpback whales sang offshore. It wasn’t wilderness—and yet it was wild.
Illustration by Sean Lewis
I believe this is still true of Canada. We mainly live in cities and are famously gee-whiz adopters of new technology, but in polls, we continue to name nature as our greatest symbol of Canadian identity, even above the flag, universal health care, or hockey. We don’t really need surveys to know this: it’s a gut-level understanding. We flock to chalets, cabins, and campsites in all seasons. Many of us—more and more, it seems to me—gather wild food: from the small villages of ice-fishing huts that spring up across the nation in winter, from the “country food” hunts of the North, or on day hikes, where families simply pause to fill a cap with cloudberries or hedgehog mushrooms. New Canadians sense that a connection to the land might be the closest thing there is to a shared identity: they sign up for tent-pitching classes or fill the air along mountain trails and canoe routes with the sounds of Tagalog, Brazilian Portuguese, and Yoruba. A friend who moved to Vancouver from Spain longs to see her first bear, as though she cannot feel settled until she does.
Canadians abide the wild. A despairing American biologist once said to me, “You’ll never convince North Americans to live alongside big carnivores.” I immediately pictured Churchill, Man., with its yearly influx of polar bears; the towns of Canmore and Banff, with grizzlies sometimes literally in backyards; Vancouver Island, with its hundreds of cougars. When I wander other points on the globe that have lost their large predators, the land or seascape never feels fully alive, and neither do I while I’m there. Canadians don’t need to be convinced to live alongside fearsome animals. Many of us already do.
All is not well on the environmental front in Canada, of course. This is so painfully obvious that I won’t rub the reader’s face in our clear-cut logging, overfishing, carbon pollution, species extinctions, and so on. I draw attention to Canada’s unusual blend of natural and human history not to forgive our trespasses, but rather to say: here is something precious. Exactly why Canadians have not suffered as total a collapse in relations with wild nature as the people of most other nations is not clear. It’s connected, I’m sure, to the fact that the land is huge, and our population relatively small, but it runs deeper than that. We’ve lived long enough in a country too wild to tame that it has become a part of us. When I’m not at my ragged cabin on the Skeena, I live a more typical Canadian life in Vancouver: screen time, traffic hum, nights too bright for stars. But people pick berries in the city, they fish crab off piers, gather to watch a few returning chum salmon spawn in a creek behind big-box stores. Visits from whales, beavers pioneering urban living, barred owls nesting in a park—news of any of these ripples out on social media. The still-wild country, even in a city of millions.
In this, we have much to offer the world. Consider that, in its efforts to bring back vanished species, Britain has not mustered the courage to reintroduce the lynx, hardly even the beaver, let alone the wolf—three animals that are emblematic of Canada. Consider the tiresome American culture wars over every bison, wolf, and grizzly that dares set foot outside a national park. Compare that to the grasslands of southwestern Alberta, a politically conservative region of ranchers and farmers, where despite challenges and tensions, grizzly bears have returned to landscapes where they had been driven into local extinction.
Illustration by Sean Lewis
The challenge of preserving the wild lies not only in preserving wilderness, but also in rewilding the human world. Canada, then, is a potential catalyst for the global imagination. We can start by working harder to recognize our love—I think that’s the right word—for wildness. The greatest disaster would be if Canadians divided against each other in American fashion, with some of us slapping bumper stickers on our pickup trucks that read “Earth First! We’ll Mine Another Planet Later” and “I Love Spotted Owls (They’re Delicious)” while others make an enemy of anyone who dares buy an all-terrain vehicle.
I’ve criss-crossed Canada, and it has never been my experience that an appreciation for nature is determined by voting patterns or a preference for CBC radio over Joe Rogan. Some people make a religion of leave-no-trace backpacking, others chase thrills riding snowmobiles into the alpine, still others carry guns to shoot wildlife; each one seems as likely as the next to value their time in the wild or to see the great outdoors as the temple of their spirit. We can and should debate whether there are better and worse ways of relating to the wild landscape, approaches with higher or lower impacts. But let’s first and foremost celebrate the fact that there’s a relationship at all.
It’s either that or gradually lose the natural world that has shaped us. To both love and lose your wildlife, to both make the landscape a part of your identity and see it relentlessly degraded, is not only possible but predictable. It’s the path that every other nation has drifted down. We’ve drifted down it too, only not as far. The antidote is to remain connected to the land and waters, and the simplest way to do that is to acknowledge the connection. To not only spend time in Canada’s great outdoors, to not only live among wild animals, but to constantly remind ourselves why we do.
I don’t, after all, go to my cabin to “get away from it all.” Instead, there is an “all” there that I’m making the trip to spend time with. The irritable Douglas squirrel, chattering in a Sitka spruce, and, for that matter, the tree itself, and its neighbour, the western red cedar, and so on down the riverbank. The salmon pushing upriver, the bald eagles on their midstream island. The mountains that remind me that I am a speck in space and time. The toads that sometimes hop in the back door, and the ones that don’t, living out entire lifetimes of utter indifference to whether human civilization endures or fails. The little brown bats sweeping past a Milky Way bright enough to cast shadows. All of these feel so much like neighbours that Vancouver can seem like a lonelier place—is a lonelier place—by comparison. I see bears at the cabin every year, and if a year comes along that I don’t, I will ask myself where Canada went wrong.
J.B. MacKinnon is the author of five books. His next project focuses on the natural history of cold. He is based in Vancouver.
This story originally appeared in our Early Summer ’26 issue.
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