The announcement of a new regional park for Metro Vancouver isn't an everyday occurrence, so it's fair to say that the creation of South 91Ô­´´ Regional Park is a cause for celebration.

The new park, made up of roughly two-thirds of an existing municipal park and a third of newly-purchased former private land, will help expand trail networks and give people in a fast-growing community a valuable place to get back to nature.

Metro Vancouver's parks division has placed a good number of its best parks on the outer edges of the regional district – no surprise, as communities like 91Ô­´´, Surrey, Maple Ridge, and Pitt Meadows were largely farmland when the original regional district was formed in the 1960s.

While Metro's parks have plenty of amenities, like hiking trails and picnic shelters, they are not merely an attempt to give locals a bit of green space to toss a Frisbee and sit for a picnic.

Metro Parks are attempts to preserve some of the natural world in an increasingly urbanized context. Even farming, while it doesn't pave everything, is not a natural use of our land, and it's easy to forget that 200 years ago, most of the Lower Mainland was a series of dense forests, grassy meadows, creeks, ravines, floodplains, and bogs.

While our population has grown, Metro's parks have expanded too, though not as fast – 99 new hectares of land was added in 2023, and this addition will add another 44 on its own. 

Balancing the needs of the limited amount of land in the Lower Mainland is never going to be easy. We need more land for industrial and commercial purposes, for housing, for farms, for schools and rec centres and libraries, for roads and rail lines to tie everything together.

But we also need to set aside as much as we can for parks and natural spaces. Reserves of nature are good for the planet, preserving biodiversity, soaking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, giving birds and insects and mammals and amphibians space.

They're also vitally necessary for us humans.

We can't spend out lives indoors, and for many, a backyard is entirely out of the realm of financial reality. A vibrant parks network is the backyard that we can all share together.