The National Parks: America's Best Idea

Jennifer Barnett - Parks & Recreation

Renowned documentary film maker, Ken Burns, best known for his films on jazz, baseball, and the Civil War, has created a new series entitled "The National Parks: Americas Best Idea," premiering on PBS later this month.

The 12-hour, six-part documentary series, directed by Burns and co-produced with his longtime colleague, Dayton Duncan, who also wrote the script, advocates that the most special places in the nation should be preserved, not for royalty or the rich, but for everyone.

Filmed over the course of more than six years in some of nature's most spectacular locales, the documentary traces the birth of the national park idea in the mid-1800s and follows its evolution for nearly 150 years.

Using archival photographs, firstperson accounts of historical characters, personal memories and analysis from more than 40 interviews, the series chronicles the steady addition of new parks through the stories of the people who helped create them and save them from destruction.

Parks & Recreation Managing Editor Jennifer Barnett sat down with Burns to discuss the series.

P&R: How did your series on National Parks come about?

Burns: I've been curious all my life on how my country works, and I've made the same film over and over again. Each film asks one deceptively simple question - who are we? That is to say, who are those strange and complicated people who call themselves Americans? So each time I do a project, I'm looking for some subject that can be a vast mirror that can reflect back at us who we are, and nothing is more American than the national parks. We invented it. This is the first time in human history that land was set aside for everybody- not for kings or nobleman, or for the very rich, but for all of us. It's an utterly democratic sort of inspiration. I think that's why we were drawn inexorably to tell the story of the parks.

P&R: Your approach to'the series emphasizes the special democratic nature of national parks. Treasures created by the many for the many. Would you discuss that?

Burns: If you examine how each park came into being, what you find is an individual or a group of individuals or even an organization that fell in love with this place and realized that before too long, if we had allowed the normal momentum and progress of our country that is so inquisitive and so extractive, that none of these places would survive. They'd be, at best, the private preserves of the very rich. But we didn't.

At the end of the 19th century, as we realized that this Garden of Eden, our continent, that we inherited, was in danger of being used up and over developed, we began to save these special places, and now our landscape is dotted with national parks and other units of the park service whose mission is to preserve the natural geological and historic legacy of the United States, and we are a better country for that. It's an impulse that comes from the bottom up, not from the top down. It doesn't have to do with benevolence, it has to do with ordinary citizens loving a place and wanting to save it for people they would never meet, meaning you and me. This is the great gift, almost of love, that the national parks represent.

P&R: What do you see as being the best way to get younger generations interested in parks so that they care enough to advocate for them?

Burns: We're at a critical moment in our history right now- it's almost an existential moment, and if existentialism is a tension between being and doing, the virtual world that so many of us (specifically, our kids) occupy with Facebook, video games, texting, and the internet- is not an experience of life. It behooves us to remind them that all of those systems will be around, but that they do need to take a break for the sake of their souls. We are human beings, not just human doings.

What the parks permit is that reinvigoration ofthat sense of us as who we are as part of life on this planet. The parks remind you, paradoxically, of how small you are in the scheme of things, but that makes you bigger. That enlarges you and makes you connected to everything else and everyone else, and that's a kinship we all need. So, for me, it's just trying to speak, cajole, and say, 'Set aside that thing for a second. It will all be there when you get back, but come and have a real, authentic experience in a national park, and just imagine what your conversations will be on the internet once you have real experiences'.

P&R: Was there something specific that propelled you to do this series? Memories from your childhood, perhaps?

Burns: I wish I could say there was something in my childhood that propelled me to do the series. What happened was the opposite. The series helped me rediscover an event in my childhood that I had lost.

When we first began shooting for this project, we went into Yosemite, and I explained to everyone there that I thought it was the first natural national park I had been to. I had been to plenty of battlefields working on our series on the Civil War, but I thought this was the first full-fledged national park, and for three days in Yosemite - one of the most beautiful places on earth- I worked.

On the last night there I couldn't sleep, and I should have been exhausted. Suddenly it came back to me that this wasn't the first park I'd been to. In 1959, when I was six years old, my father had taken me to Shenandoah National Park. My mom was dying of cancer and our household was a terribly demoralized place. My dad didn't play catch with me in the back yard, didn't go to any games, but one day we took our first and our last road trip together, and I remember now, courtesy of Yosemite, every single moment ofthat trip. I remembered him taking me to Baltimore, where he had grown up, and sleeping in his old bed under his old chenille comforter, waking up at four in the morning, leaving the house at dark- I'd never left that early, and driving through Front Royal, Virginia, and down the Skyline Drive, checking into a little cabin and taking an impossibly long hike of like, half a mile, on my little legs.

I can still to this day courtesy of Yosemite, which brought the memory back, remember what my father's hand felt like in mine. That's a great gift. I'll always have that, and I've now taken my middle daughter down the Skyline Drive to sort of recreate that early trip that I had taken as a young boy.

That's the real magic of the parks, it's generational. I later learned that my grandfather had taken my father when he was a boy, my father took me, and I've now taken my three daughters to national parks. You feel that there is, as John Muir would say, a practical kind of immortality in this. We pass on the love of country and the love of place that's not only at the heart of national parks, but I believe in the United States. You can't be, as Thomas Jefferson suggested, a good citizen, unless you have a relationship to nature.

P&R: Your series also focuses on Teddy Roosevelt. Do you think most Americans know much about his role in the National Parks?

Burns: It's interesting, when we tell people we're making a history of the national parks they always say, 'Oh, Teddy Roosevelt,' because he's the first one who comes to mind. And he's an important figure. He's a dynamic President who did more for conservation than any other President. He certainly turned the attention of the country to the possibilities of our natural resources that the parks represented. More importantly, he understood the fundamental democratic impulse behind the creation of the national parks, and celebrated that in word and deed.

But he is just one part of our second of six episodes, so what you have is an ongoing pageant of individuals and ideas that are at the heart of this, and it isn't just top down. It isn't just the benevolence of the President; it is ordinary people who are black and brown and red and yellow and female as well as white and male, and unknown as well as known. That's the important story- that Teddy Roosevelt, as critically important as he is, is just one piece in this wonderful puzzle of discovery that the national parks still represent for all of us.

P&R: What are the greatest challenges you see facing national parks today?

Burns: The writer, Terry Tempest Williams, suggests in our film that the greatest challenge now is restoration. What she's saying is that for a long time we collected these parks, and yet we haven't always been able to take care of them due to politics and other exigencies that we can't control. There's now a backlog of nine billion dollars worth of projects- fixing roads, buildings, and trails- to bring the national parks* physical plan up to snuff. That's a lot of money.

Obviously, our challenge will be to always look for new places to protect, or in the case of places that have already been protected, such as national forests or national monuments, looking to elevate them to national park status, which would give them complete and utter protection.

We will continue to debate all the issues that swirl around the national parks including everything from global warming to more modest ideas. Our job right now will be to get people to remember our birth right of ownership -that we all own these places, and that we need to take care of them. We need to get people out and into the parks.

The more people coming to the parks, the more constituents they will have, and then they don't get overlooked when it comes time to assign the scarcer and scarcer dollars.

Paradoxically, during the depression, the parks thrived as never before. They received the first stimulus money of FDR's New Deal, so many of the trails we hike on today were first blazed by the Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC), back during the Great Depression.

P&R: Did filming this series make you think about parks beyond the national level, and do you think local parks have the same value as national parks?

Burns: Any time you interrupt the momentum of our fives in a physical way, and create a park in the middle of the city; you've done a great service. We all know what it's like to pile into a park on a hot day and just have a different relationship to the world. It rearranges our molecules, and it doesn't really matter whether one's a spectacular national park with the highest freefalling waterfall in North America, or just a simple little patch of ground in a city.

Parks do important things. It's not so much an issue of local parks being lesser or more, it's just that we need these places to remind us that we once had a day-to-day relationship with nature. Our paved-over modern existence denies us the access to the beauty and power of nature- its ability to heal and restore us, as well as makes us better citizens. There's value in parks on many levels. Your experience in a park can be spiritual, intensely personal, and transformative. It's obviously about family and the way we create and savor memories. It's great for patriotism, and in a larger sense, it makes us good stewards and citizens of the world if we have a healthy respect for nature and the wild things- the plants and the animals that are an integral part ofthat nature.

P&R: What was your favorite park that you visited during this series?

Burns: It's hard to pick a favorite park - it's sort of like asking which of your three daughters do you like the best, and anybody who can answer that isn't a very good parent. There's something that commends each park to us. There's something that you realize when you're working in each of these parks, as I have been, or visiting, as I still continue to do with my family, that is so powerful and inspiring. In terms of favorites it comes down to your own personal experiences. Yosemite delivered the memory of the first time I went to Shenandoah National Park with my father, so for me Yosemite and Shenandoah are my favorites.

Parks create their own separate set of associations and memories for everyone who visits them. A kind of the gift you can take back into ordinary life to save, and it's an account that makes you rich beyond belief. Everyone within the sound of my voice owns the most spectacular ocean front property, the most amazing mountain ranges, the greatest canyon on earth, the greatest collection of geothermal features - we all own them. They're ours, and we have great responsibility in that ownership, but man, what a bottom line. We measure our riches in the best sense of the word.

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