Something great is happening in Canada. And the rest of the world is taking notice.

I am referring to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's recent national parks announcement.

His commitment in September to create 10 new national parks, five new marine conservation areas, expand three existing national parks, and better fund parks to protect their ecological integrity, all over the next five years, stands out as one of the great conservation announcements of our time.

I first heard about the Prime Minister's announcement while at a board meeting of the National Parks and Conservation Association, an 80-year-old U.S. non-profit group dedicated to the protection of our country's national parks.

We were stunned. There has rarely been anything to match it. This stands out as a globally significant conservation event on par with president Jimmy Carter's establishment of national parks protecting 30 per cent of Alaska or president Theodore Roosevelt's creation of National Forests 100 years ago.

Around the world, nature is unravelling. Habitat destruction, excessive hunting, illegal traffic in animal parts, climate change and pollution are all accelerating. Together, these human activities are causing a modern extinction event in which entire species are being wiped out.

The mechanisms we have created to protect nature, such as national parks, have not always proven to be effective to reverse this trend. In some poor countries, national parks exist only on paper. They are logged and looted for their wildlife because there is no money to hire wardens to defend them.

Even in the United States, the Bush administration is opening Yellowstone National Park to snowmobiling despite the demonstrated harm to wildlife and the air pollution it causes. The U.S. national park system suffers from a $5-billion (U.S.) backlog in basic maintenance and has no budget to protect the eroding state of its natural resources. And few new parks are on the horizon.

Canada now stands out as a beacon of hope that we can reverse this negative trend. Actions have been taken to stop commercial development from destroying parks from within. And the Prime Minister's pledge to increase funding for their management, such as by improving Parks Canada's science capacity, is critical to ensuring their ecological integrity is maintained and restored.

This is the kind of hard work civilized nations must do to keep wild nature in our world. The United States stands to benefit directly from this Canadian initiative to expand national parks. One of our finest parks is Glacier National Park in Montana, located on the border south of British Columbia and Alberta. Together with Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta, this makes up the world's first peace park, but it is incomplete.

The expansion of Waterton Park into British Columbia's Flathead Valley will fill in the missing piece of the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park and protect the most-important area for carnivores in the Rockies. Editorial writers across Montana rejoiced at the news of the Prime Minister's announcement that he wants to expand Waterton.

My hat is off to Prime Minister Chrétien and the government of Canada. Once this pledge to invest in national parks is fulfilled in the next budget, your country will be on its way to setting the gold standard for the world in national park management and establishment. Our planet needs more of this kind of leadership.
Mike Finley, former superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, is president of the Turner Foundation in Atlanta.