The Treasures of Tursujuq: One of North America's Largest National Parks

How big is six-and-a-half million acres? Think of a community a hundred miles away from you. That's how wide a square would be from one side to the other that encompassed six-and-a-half million acres. Now imagine it without any highways or roads of any kind. Or towns.

With little fanfare, the Inuit people of Nunavik in northern Quebec, the Grand Council of the Cree, and the Government of Quebec announced the creation of Tursujuq National Park—a 6.5 million acre protected area along the eastern shore of Hudson Bay. Not only is this remarkable for its size—it's the largest protected area in eastern North America and one of the top 10 largest parks on the continent—but perhaps even more incredible is that the park is several million acres larger than it had been expected to be a few years ago. In today's world we have grown to expect to see the amount of land protected whittled down from what is often originally proposed by Aboriginal communities and others. But exactly the opposite occurred here; Quebec government officials listened and agreed with the Inuit and Cree communities of the region.

Read the original post, The Treasures of Tursujuq: One of North America's Largest National Parks, on National Geographic's website.