If you are a fan of Ken Burns documentaries, this is as fine as any of them. It is interesting and educational on so many levels: the environment, biology, economic development, politics, etc. It will also really open your eyes to just how influential one person or a small group of people can be in enacting huge changes and improvements in society. You will learn about people you have probably never heard of, who pursued their passions (sometimes quietly, sometimes making a lot of noise) and ended up having a huge impact we can still feel today when we visit these majestic national parks.
As with other of Ken’s work, you begin to feel that the people in the story are family friends or people you have known for years. You understand how personalities shape events and move American custom and law. You are left with an appreciation of American democracy and freedom and the unruly way Americans sometimes resolve internal conflict…how popularity and simply “the right thing” can win the day after a good fight.
The film is interspersed with glimpses of typical Americans and reveals their most delicate feelings in experiencing the National Parks. It is very effective at illustrating the transformative power of natural beauty, its healing and empowering effects on the soul, and our deep connections to nature and wildlife and our deep needs for it. The film is as much about why humans seek to preserve natural beauty as it is a history of it.
It all works. It is a masterful piece of art and you will enjoy and be moved by it. — IMDB.com review by metrodyne
Quotations
The Declaration of Independence began with this incredible statement that all men, all human beings are created equal. We’ve been chasing that ideal, those words, for the rest of our history, often too slowly, never quite reaching it even yet, but that’s the statement that we’re chasing. The national park idea, which is the best idea we had after we became a nation, didn’t start that way with a bold statement, grand ideals that we’re trying to chase. It began sort of experimentally, improvisationally, and it’s only as we’ve moved through time that we have added this notion of what a park is and what’s allowed in it and what’s not allowed in it, what we should be drawing from it, but like the notion of freedom, we’ve always been arguing over it, we’ve always been trying to grapple with its meaning, and always trying to on the one hand remain true to the ideal but leaving it up to each succeeding generation to either push it a little bit farther or broaden it a little bit more. — Dayton Duncan
The parks, they’re the greatest spots on earth, wonderful natural places but the story of national parks really isn’t a story about the place. It’s the story of people who fell in love with those places, people who became so devoted to them that they wanted to do anything they could to save them. — Dayton Duncan
Patriotism is the religion of the soil. And national parks are our richest patrimony. — Steven Mather (elsewhere attributed to John Wesley Hill)
By virtue of being an American, whether your ancestors came over on the Mayflower or they just arrived, whether you’re from a big city or from a rural state, whether your daddy owns the factory or your mother is a maid, you—you—are the owner of some of the best seafront property the nation’s got. You own magnificent waterfalls, you own stunning views of mountains and canyons. They belong to you. They’re yours. And all that’s asked of you is to put it in your will, for your children, so that they can have it too…Hopefully, you’ll provide for proper maintenance of this property that is yours. But that’s all you’ve got to do. Now, that’s quite a bargain. — Dayton Duncan
Our parks are not only showplaces and vacation lands, but also vast schoolrooms of Americanism, where people are studying, enjoying, and learning to love more deeply this land in which they live. — Steven Mather
I think the paradox of local resistance to the creation of national parks is a deep, deep paradox in American ideas of democracy. Because on the one hand, one of our visions is that people in a local place are the ones who best understand that place—are the ones who have its interests most at heart. And who really, ideally, ought to be the ones who vote about what should happen to that land, just as on a local school board.
And yet it is also true that these national parks are not in the local place that they are in. They are in the nation. They stand for the nation. And so, by that understanding, the democratic institutions that should defend them are not at the local level, but at the level of the nation. And this tension between federal control of our democracy, and local control of our democracy, is hard-wired into what we think democracy is. — William Cronon
If we destroy nature blindly, it is a boomerang which will be our undoing. Consecration to the task of adjusting ourselves to [the] natural environment so that we secure the best values from nature without destroying it is not useless idealism; it is good hygiene for civilization. — George Melendez Wright
Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it. — Theodore Roosevelt
History always vindicates what they did. There’s not a single person in Arizona today who would say the Grand Canyon was a mistake. — Stewart Udall
Over the course of the Depression, more than 3 million men would find work at one time or another with the Civilian Conservation Corps. They would build more than 97,000 miles of fire roads in national forests, combat soil erosion on 84 million acres of farmland, and plant 3 billion trees – more than one half the total reforestation accomplished in the nation‘s history. During that time, some $218 million would be pumped into projects solely within the national parks, including trails and buildings that remain to this day. — Narrator
Dealing with Wyoming is like dealing with the Russians. You never get anywhere by trying to cooperate. — Horace Albright
It is a better world with some buffalo left in it, a richer world with some gorgeous canyons unmarred by sign boards, hot-dog stands, super highways, or high-tension lines, undrowned by power or irrigation reservoirs. If we preserved as parks only those places that have no economic possibilities, we would have no parks. And in the decades to come, it will not be only the buffalo and the trumpeter swan that need sanctuaries. Our own species is going to need them, too. It needs them now. — Wallace Stegner
It’s hard to imagine these places existing without those tensions. They are precisely the right tensions that a democratic nation should have as it tries to figure out how to protect lands that are there for all the people. — William Cronon
I’m not quite sure why it works this way, but we seem to put our highest ideals in our national parks. They’re like homes for our finest dreams, and therefore they function like consciences. — Paul Schullery
With so many friends, it is difficult to understand why parks are so bedeviled by threats and seem always to be fighting for their very existence. The story is an old one. There are frequent occasions when people see nothing wrong with harming, hurting, marring, or spoiling when there are valuable resources of water, power, timber, oil, or minerals to be exploited within park boundaries. Greatest of all threats to the parks today is the pressure to build dams. — Alfred A. Knopf
Sometimes we have withheld our power to destroy and have left a threatened species like the buffalo, a threatened beauty spot like Yosemite or Yellowstone or Dinosaur scrupulously alone. We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy. — Wallace Stegner
The national park idea, the best idea we ever had, was inevitable as soon as Americans learned to confront the wild continent not with fear and cupidity, but with delight, wonder, and awe. Once started, it grew like the backfire it truly was, burning backup wind against the current of claim and grab and raid […] proving that our rapacious society could hold its hand, at least in the presence of stupendous scenery, and learn to respect the earth for something besides its economic value. — Wallace Stegner
By the 1970s, the park idea had spread from Yellowstone all the way around the world, ultimately becoming, like the idea of freedom itself, one of America’s greatest exports — more than 4,000 parks in nearly 200 nations. — Narrator
Source: PBS (September2009)
Subjects: America, Environment | Sustainability, History, Travel
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