Jesse Collins, and then some.

As if there was ever any doubt, Canada is the most beautiful country in the world.

And in a move that all of us—from every political stripe—should applaud, Stephen Harper’s government has put a plan in place to help keep it that way. From The Washington Post’s coverage of the story:

Canada’s government yesterday set aside 25 million acres of wilderness — 11 times the size of Yellowstone National Park — for conservation, a move that environmentalists called one of North America’s most important acts of nature preservation.

A 3.7 million-acre wildlife area will be created in the Northwest Territories called the Ramparts. (Ducks Unlimited Of Canada)

Also from the Post:

“The whole scale of the boreal landscape is staggering for an American,” Joshua Reichert, managing director of the Pew Environment Group, which helped shepherd the projects, said by telephone from Philadelphia. “We have a lot of what we consider vast landscapes in the West, but nothing like the boreal. You really have to fly over it — it just goes on and on.”

Yellowstone National Park, which includes land in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, is about 2.2 million acres.

The land designated yesterday “isn’t just Canada. This is a global resource and a worldwide treasure,” said Steven Kallick, the Seattle-based manager of the International Boreal Conservation Campaign for the Pew Environment Group. “It’s the largest largely intact forest left in the planet. It rivals the Amazon and Siberia in size. It’s one of the few places left in the world like it.”