The National Parks: America’s Best Idea
Your summer visit to Yellowstone or Yosemite—or even to San Antonio Missions or Ellis Island—may not feel like the culmination of a historic struggle, or exercising your democratic rights. But The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, a 12-hour documentary by filmmaker Ken Burns, might change all that.
“We think it’s the Declaration of Independence applied to the landscape,” says Burns, whose 30- year filmmaking career has produced some of America’s most powerful historical documentaries to date, including The Civil War and Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery “For the very first time in human history, land was set aside not for kings or noblemen or the very rich, but for everybody and for all time,” says Burns.
On Film:
Bison grazing, molten lava boiling at the edges of the Pacific, and clouds swirling below Denali’s summit: These images of The National Parks: America’s Best Idea are a microcosm of the national parks—so too are the documentary’s stories. In the six-part series debuting on PBS September 27, Burns and writer Dayton Duncan delve into the origin of America’s national parks by piecing together large and small tales, up-close and big-picture perspectives, and their own personal experiences intertwined with our nation’s collective memory.
The story begins in 1851 and includes familiar national-park heroes, such as Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir. But Burns adds names you’ve likely never heard to the roster: Marjory Stoneman Douglas, a Florida reporter who helped save the Everglades; George Melendez Wright, one of the National Park Service’s first biologists, who financed a comprehensive wildlife study of the parks; and dozens of other individuals who break the traditional mold of historical American heroes.
Harpers Ferry Center, Historic Photo Collection
Burns and Duncan propose that the creation of the national parks was a truly revolutionary idea; they offer a complicated retrospective of issues that continue to affect environmental policy today. Though the film maintains a historical perspective, Burns suggests that the cycle of park threats is, in fact, a cycle—and that understanding previous challenges and ecosystem integrity can help inform present-day conservation debates.
With the help of photographer Tuan Luong—whose personal story is featured in the series—the films include breathtaking images from all 58 of the natural national parks and several of the 333 monuments and historic sites administered by the National Park Service. The images and narrative also illustrate the changing roles of the Park Service since its founding in 1916.
Burns’ extensive research, complicated historical analysis, archival footage, and signature narrative style, combined with compelling interviews with wellspoken park staff and writers, make The National Parks: America’s Best Idea yet another must-see documentary from this Oscar-winning filmmaker. While watching the series won’t solve the logistics of your next national-park vacation, it will enhance your appreciation of the people who’ve created what Burns calls the best bargain he’s ever seen: a system of public lands for all to enjoy.
In Print:
At a hefty 432 pages, the tome of the same name that accompanies the film series expands on the stories of each national park and includes full interviews pulled from the film—including one with writer Terry Tempest Williams and activist. Available September 8, the book is stocked with striking photographs, both contemporary and archival, and includes a removable full-color map of the national park system. (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009; $50)
After the world premiere of The National Parks: America’s Best Idea at May’s Mountainfilm in Telluride festival, WAM associate editor Kristy Holland spoke with Burns about the series, the future of our national parks, and the role of women in park history.
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Women’s Adventure associate editor, Kristy Holland, and acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns sat down at Telluride’s annual Mountainfilm Festival, where National Parks: America’s Best Idea débuted in April.
We’re here with Ken Burns who has just finished a major undertaking with his film titled National Parks: America’s Best Idea. Ken is going to talk to us about how he came to the films and about some of the characters he introduced during the 6-part, 12-hour series airing on PBS in September.
WAM: How did you begin working on this project? What was interesting about for you about national parks and what compelled you to spend 10 years working on this film?
KB: I’ve been making documentary films in American history for more than 30 years and each one of them is asking a deceptively simple question: Who are we? Who are these strange and complicated people who like to call themselves Americans? What does an investigation of the past tell us about not only where we’ve been, but where we are and where we may be going? In films like The Civil War and The War [about the Second World War] we’ve taken on tragic moments in our history. We’ve done a series of biographies; we’ve done American institutions like Baseball and Jazz. But we’ve also been drawn to the landscape and so it was very logical and obvious to turn to the national parks after doing a history of the American west. We retraced Lewis & Clark’s tour, we did a humorous look at the first cross-country automobile trip so it became really important to tackle the national parks: this great American institution.
For the very first time in human history land was set aside not for kings or noblemen or the very rich, but for everybody and for all time. What we discovered when we began working was that it wasn’t just the top down story of famous individuals like Teddy Roosevelt, but ordinary folks who were not just male and white, but brown and black and red and yellow and female and unknown who are the real heroes of the parks. This sense of democratic ownership of a place in common is utterly new.
We take it for granted. We assume that the parks have always been there: they haven’t. We assume that the National Park Service has always been there: they haven’t. They don’t show up until halfway through the third of six episodes. But more important, I think, is that we don’t realize the amount of dramatic story that went into saving each one of these individual places. It’s the main arc of those stories we try to tell in this series. It’s not a travelogue, it’s not a nature film, it’s not a recommendation for which inn or lodge to stay at when you visit a national park. But it’s the story of ideas and individuals beginning in 1851 and coming up to the near present that remind us of the best of ourselves. A kind of kinship that we wish we had, and too often, don’t have.
WAM: In the scope of your career, you’ve tackled these larger stories. The Civil War, for example, has become iconic in education programs around the country and you’re starting another project on Vietnam. How does the story of the national parks compare in the importance of the history of America?
KB: We think quite simply: it’s at the center of our American story. But, we tend to take it for granted and don’t see how that’s true. We think it’s the Declaration of Independence applied to the landscape. The Declaration of Independence’s most important sentence is the second one. It begins: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.” But you have to stop mid sentence and realize that the man who wrote that owned more than 100 human beings when he wrote that sentence. He never saw fit in his lifetime to free them, never saw the contradiction, never saw the hypocrisy and so set in motion an American narrative that’s been sort of bedeviled but also ennobled by a question of race. Today when we say “All men are created equal,” we don’t mean white men of property free of debt, which is what, if we’d asked Thomas Jefferson to be more specific, he would have said. We now know it means all men, of all color and background. It means women. We protect our young and our elderly, the handicapped. We debate the unborn and people of different sexual orientation. The history of the United States has been continually expanding what that narrow definition of Thomas Jefferson’s meant.
So too, that national park idea that began with the idea of setting aside spectacular national scenery has changed and evolved to taking more complex ecosystems, of being involved in habitat of taking historical sites, battlefields, and places of shame. So, I think we can come to understand as the writer and historian Wallace Stegner said, that this is best idea we’ve ever had. Once we established this country under the idea of liberty, although it wasn’t extended to everybody, you’d be hard pressed to find an idea that was better than the national parks. So, it’s central to understanding who we are, of trying to answer that deceptively simple question of mine: Who are we?
WAM: How do you think the film will play into the future of the National Park System? We’ve heard people talk about how we’re at an important crux in history with the economic crisis and a new president. In that context is this film going to change the course of history?
KB: I don’t know what the film is going to do. I’m a historian and historians make usually lousy prognosticators. But I can tell you what I want it to do. I want every superintendant of the national parks to be upset with us because they got more people than they know what to do with. Because those are problems we can handle.
We got distracted in the 60s and 70s and 80s by this notion that they were being loved to death. We understood this paradox that too many people were coming and maybe we should limit them. Well, right now we’re not in that position. The attendance which used to be skyrocketing is now leveled off and in some cases gone down. We need to find new ways to reinvigorate a new generation in a sense of ownership. To walk out to every American no matter what their background and say: “You own some of the most spectacular scenery on earth and all you have to do as a co-owner is go and visit your property every once and a while. Make sure it’s being taken care of and put it in your will for posterity.”
Now, it’s a pretty good bargain, but we know there are too many communities that do not yet feel an ownership for our national parks, often African American, Hispanic American, Asian American. We are out there to show them that there are heroes of the national parks that look and sound like them and that they should be able to feel the same ownership that so many of us do. At the same time, we’re in this terribly difficult moment where everyone is distracted by their virtual toys, by their Blackberries and their Facebook, by surfing the net and their video games. We don’t spend as much time outside and we begin to talk about a Nature Deficit Disorder. We all have that and we will all suffer from that disease if we don’t encourage our fellow citizens to sort of accept the very modest responsibilities of ownership which pay off in dividends beyond scope, beyond importance for the survival of the human race.
WAM: In that conversation you sound like an activist as well. You describe your self as a historian, which do you identify with more?
KB: They’re not necessarily incongruous. Most of history is the history of activists so that’s what we do. But, I think we should change the word. I am passionate about the subjects I’m involved in and the national parks has really galvanized a lot of passion. While our film is not trying to go over or come down on this side or that side of current environmental issues, it’s very clear that almost every issue that we’re dealing with today is replicated in the history of the national parks. So by learning the history, you can find the language and the tools and the understanding of how previous generations addressed certain problems. And you can use history as great ammunition, and get a great sense of empowerment about how to deal with contemporary and future problems.
WAM: I attended the world première of episode one at Telluride’s Mountainfilm festival in May and there you talked about transformation, that during the course of the 6-part, 12-hour series a lot of the characters you introduce experience a sort of transformation and that you’ve also experienced that yourself during the 10 years it took to make this film. Can you talk a little about that?
KB: It’s not transformation in the usual word as in: I am a republican and I’ve now become a democrat. We’re talking about these very personal moments of awakening. Some people ascribe spiritual or religious context to it. Others are happy to deal with it in terms of nature, or describe science as the thing that excites them. But, for everyone we got involved in the film, there was some moment where they just were inspirited, they felt something different. They had, perhaps not transformational, but transcendental moments—a moment where they felt more fully alive and more fully connected with everyone and everything around them.
Those are experiences we all have in relative degrees of duration. Sometimes they’re fleeting, sometimes they last for a long time, sometimes they change your life, and sometimes they’re just these wonderful memories or beacons within life that you can return to in difficult times. But, I think the national parks are alone among the environments we live in capable of delivering us these moments of silence, of introspection of possibility. John Muir said it better, he said “In order to go in, I have to go out.” What he means is that in order to know myself in whatever context—if it’s religion, fine, if it’s Socratic fine, whatever it is—in order to know myself I have to go out into nature and experience myself free of the distractions of a modern civilization. I need to get back to a more primitive, authentic sense.
At the heart of all of this is the word authentic. Something feels fraudulent in what we do. Something feels like a lie and I think we need to be more mindful of where we are. The authenticity that the parks represent can be replicated within ourselves. Some eastern religions say: “As above, so below. Like Heaven, like Earth.” I think the parks in some way aid in that transformation.
WAM: You’ve talked a little bit about attendance at national parks. Everyone anticipates that there will be a resurgence of interest in the national parks after these films debut, you’ve said that yourself. But, there still a lot of Americans that won’t ever make it to these marquee natural parks: Glacier Bay or Yosemite. Do you hope, or is it the intention of the film, to replace that experience for people? Or to inspire it?
KB: We just want to galvanize people to think about it and talk about it. We understand that not everyone will be able to get there. When I began film school back in the early 70s, there was a big cynical argument about whether films could actually make people do anything. The general cynical idea was that no, they couldn’t. That they could only preach to the choir, preach to the converted. Well, the first film I made was on the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and when the bridge turned 100 a couple of years later the New York Times features a couple on the front page from Idaho walking over the bridge with their children. The captions said there was as story on page D24 and I went there and I read this long article. Well, they decided to take the trip because they’d seen this program on public television about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. And they decided, they had never been to New York, to go to New York and the first thing they would do was take their kids to the Brooklyn Bridge and tell them that story.
That told me that we didn’t have to take that cynical posture, that films could actually get people to do things. And so what I hope is that it’ll get people to say: You know what. I haven’t been to the Grand Canyon and I’d like to see it before I die. I haven’t been to Yosemite and it looks like it might be the most beautiful place on earth.
Even if you don’t make it, knowing that your country has set aside this stuff, knowing that it’s there can be helpful. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was a paraplegic, helped create Kings Canyon in California. A place he would never get to visit. You know? It’s a road-less wilderness and he would have to suffice with pictures form Ansel Adams. That’s OK.
WAM: Can you tell us a little about the initiative you’ve taken to help inspire children and minority communities to engage in the national park system?
KB: This is a naturally occurring diverse story, this is nothing politically correct. We just told the story of the national parks and it just happens to be as diverse as our country is. One of the things we’ve done now that the film is finished is reduce our 12-hour version and make a separate, little film that focuses on the diversity aspect—the individuals that are less well known that the Theodore Roosevelt and John Muirs—and we’ve gone out to schools. We’ve also made five contemporary films of Shelton Johnson, an African American park ranger in Yosemite who interprets the African American story of the Buffalo Soldiers, the first protectors of Yosemite and Sequoia National parks. We did one on the amazing story of saving the San Antonio Missions and Adina De Zavala who is one of these great angels who devoted her life to help saving these missions. We focus on Gerard Baker a Mandan-Hidasta Indian who is now the first Native American superintendant of Mount Rushmore National Monument and his journey and his story as a Native American.
We focus on kids from Las Vegas and Miami who get taken out of their inner city schools to Death Valley and Biscayne Bay. They’re told the story in Biscayne Bay of Lancelot Jones, the son of a slave, who refused to sell his land to a developer who wanted to turn it into another Key Biscayne or Miami Beach of just high rise luxury condominiums for the very rich. But who saved it for a national monument and later a national park. We look at these kids’ experiences all over.
We’ve been able to make smaller contemporary films so our education outreach is that much more effective. We’ve added many, many more stops on our promotional tour—it’s not even a promotional tour, it’s more of a national conversation—visiting communities and particularly inner city schools showing kids of all ages from high school to a group of 5th graders, all Hispanic, 80 of them in Hialeah, Florida just outside Miami and showing them people who sounded and look like them who were heroes of the park: George Melendez Wright, the great first biologist of the national park service.
So, you know, it’s not an attempt at political correctness, it’s just that if you scratch the surface and tell an authentic story of America it’s not the usual stuff we’re told. It’s not a top-down story of great men—capitol “G” capitol “M”—but a bottom-up story of individuals from every walk of life who help create and contribute to this complicated thing called the United States of America.
WAM: For our audience at Women’s Adventure, then women are an important part of that story. Do you agree?
From the very beginning, women are a huge part of this story. There’s Louie Strentzel, the wife of John Muir, who releases him to go out into the mountains to do his work. There’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas who started off as a society reporter for the Miami Herald but who was more interested in civil rights and saving the Everglades. She didn’t quite really even like the Everglades: it was too buggy and inhospitable for her. But, she fought tenaciously for the Everglades to be set aside.
There are women at every juncture of the national parks that are helpful in their creation. From Virginia McClurg and Lucy Peabody at Mesa Verde. We just screened an episode about that complicated story of saving it. Everywhere you go there’s another interesting story that doesn’t look like the usual history we’re presented with.
WAM: How do you focus specifically on the women that come up in the film?
KB: A lot of it is just research. Our fourth episode is really framed by the story of a Lincoln, Nebraska housewife, Margaret Gehrke, that we discovered. No one’s really done much with her, but we discovered that the Nebraska State Historical Society had the pictures her husband took and somewhere some dusty old diaries she made. This was a childless couple and every summer—she was a schoolteacher and he was a successful plumber—they’d get in their revolving parade of Buicks and travel the country mainly going to national parks. She kept a diary that puts her in full relationship with John Muir. She’s a so-called “ordinary person,” just a regular housewife. By the end of that episode if you’re not in tears at her leaving Rocky Mountain National Park for the last time, you don’t have a heart beating in your breast. It belies the notion that you have to be some sort of famous celebrity.
The great tyranny of the United States is that we think, in our media culture, that the people with bold-faced names have some power over the rest of us. The whole idea of the United States is that we’re supposed to be a classless society and we threw over a royalty that didn’t understand that. But we’ve now replaced that with a new more insidious and invidious royalty of bold-faced names who go through the same things we do. What happens? They become famous, they grow up, they fall in love, they get married, they get divorced and they die. But we treat this as if it’s this new thing that happened.
What happens is that you tend, if you talk about the national parks in a superficial way, only to talk about John Muir. Thank God he’s the real thing, but why can’t you also talk about Margaret Gehrke from Lincoln, Nebraska. She’s equally important to this story, so we do. Our entire fourth episode, though dealing with huge important dynamics of the national parks and the creation of some very important ones, nonetheless is framed by the experiences of Margaret and Edward Gehrke and particularly the words of Margaret, which are as beautiful as any written about the national parks.
WAM: Who would you say is the most important woman in the history of the national parks?
KB: I don’t know if there’s just one. I suppose that Marjory Stoneman Douglas because the Everglades is so, so important to everything. But why isn’t Juanita Green listed, who helped to save Biscayne Bay. We do a whole scene on her and Lloyd Miller who along with Lancelot Jones helped to save—first as a monument later as a national park—these pristine islands off one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the country, Miami. Marjory Stoneman Douglas a generation earlier with the Everglades. But what you begin to find is that when we
