The documentarian best known for covering subjects like jazz, baseball, and the Civil War, Ken Burns, has produced another in-depth documentary, entitled: “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.” The twelve hour series will be broken into six, two hour installments shown in September on the Public Broadcasting System. While as a documentarian Burns tries to let the material on film speak for itself and avoids injecting his opinions, when pressed to cite his favorites of the national parks, he couldn’t help but enthusiastically suggest Yosemite National Park and its many sightseeing attractions in northern California, and Denali National Park in Alaska.
Burns believes that the documentary is his best to date and working on it inspired him to share his enthusiasm for the national parks by promoting outdoor activities and the enjoyment of the national parks. To help spread the word, Burns is working with outdoor retailers and providing materials which will encourage family camping trips, sponsor essay and photo contests, promote local nature clubs and a park lecture series and sponsor park-of-the-month nights during the month of September to coincide with the release of the film. Burns suggests that it is the difficult economic times that our national parks have fared the best, and that observation is corroborated by the outdoor tourism industry which suggests that the industry is quite healthy, believing that families seek out the national parks in difficult economic times as an affordable means of entertainment and family togetherness.
One of the major themes in the film pertains to the paradox of how to encourage enjoyment of the national parks while protecting them from abuses. But debate brings the topics to the attention of the public and is healthy as it drives solution finding. Debate the issues of the national parks is certainly not new, debating back 150 years. In the early nineteen hundreds when the automobile gained its prominence, John Muir used to passionately argue against their allowance into Yosemite National Park. That debate is echoed in today’s ongoing snowmobiles discussion surrounding Yellowstone National Park.
