Muir and Roosevelt/LOC.

After long days at our respective jobs, the gym, fishing, and errands, my husband and I met on our long, brown couch. Balancing dinner on our laps, we fired up the laptop and made a (metaphorical) bee-line to Amazon Prime to watch our month’s long obsession. No, not Game of Thrones, nor catching up on the Avenger’s movies. Instead, we tuned in to Ken Burns’ documentary series “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.”

Broadcast in the fall of 2009, the series is now nearing its tenth anniversary. In a bit of an understatement, I remarked to my husband, “A lot can happen in a decade.” How does the series hold up in 2019?

A Bit of Luck

The series covers the inception of national parks in the 19th century and continues until about the 1980’s. As a lover of the national park system as a whole, I was vaguely aware that Yosemite and Yellowstone were the first sites, though the system wasn’t officially incorporated as a U.S. government department until 1916. And yet, what stands out to me after watching the entire series is how accidental it all seems.

Yosemite became a national park because John Muir randomly stumbled upon it and became its great and everlasting advocate. What if he had gone to South America, as he originally planned? What if he had fallen so in love with Florida during his travels there that he remained forever? What if he had gone to a different valley in the Sierra Nevada mountain range, or focused his considerable energy solely on Alaska? Similarly, Acadia National Park came into being because one wealthy man with no children made it his life work to buy up property to protect as a park forever, using both his connections and his own considerable fortune. What if George B. Dorr, forever advocate and first superintendent there, had initially vacationed somewhere else and never set eyes on Maine’s rocky coastline?

Throughout the series, luck remains a constant undercurrent. The right people came along at the right time (ex. Teddy Roosevelt) to champion the idea of national parks as a whole or certain sites in particular. I was left with the realization that national parks - which encapsulate the American experience, native wildlife, and stunning landscapes of our country - could have never materialized at all. Perhaps a different form of public conservation would have taken the place of national parks, or they could have been developed and/or privatized. It’s a sad thought.

Money Talks

The wealthy are both the protagonists and antagonists throughout the park story. On the one hand, business interests lead to the drowning of the Hetch Hetchy Valley for a dam project, they fight to keep land out of the hands of the federal government, they use national parks as their own personal piggy bank (looking at you Ralph Cameron of Grand Canyon). On the other, they donate vast sums of money and energy to protect giant swathes of land and encourage acceptance and support of the system as a whole. The Rockefeller family donated millions of dollars to create and expand parks in Maine, Wyoming, and more. Stephen Mather, first director of the National Park Service, could devote his considerable time, money, and experience to the government because he had already made his fortune. Of course, there were exceptions: John Muir was not wealthy, and yet obviously contributed greatly to conservation. Still, most of those with an early, outsized impact had outsized wallets to match.

Missing People

Burns tends to combine historic photos and actor-readings of letters and newspaper articles (those narrated by Tom Hanks definitely stand out) with current interviews and videos. While he did touch on African American and immigrant experiences within the national parks, Native American history related to the creation of the national park system was largely left out.

Yes, he did include an interview where a tribe-member points out the foolishness of European-descendent settlers claiming to have “discovered” areas the local people had known of for thousands of years, but I wanted to see a wider discussion of how these sacred places were turned into national parks, and how that changed the populations that had once lived inside park borders. For example, people lived in Yosemite before being driven away - where did they go? Have their descendants been allowed special access to the site? Do we know who their descendants are?

I was especially surprised at the general omission given how much time Burns devoted to the subject during his 1996 series entitled “The West.” While discussion was lacking in the national parks pieces, watching the two together did provide a rich background (and an additional 12 hours of runtime).

Moving Forward

The series ends its coverage in the 1980’s, when park visitation swelled to millions of people, modern visitor centers and infrastructure were built to manage the crowds, and grassroots organization was first utilized for great effectiveness to conserve large swathes of Alaska, Dinosaur National Monument, and other important sites. As the final credits rolled, I sat back, arms crossed, mulling over everything I had seen.

First, my thoughts strayed to what an updated episode might look like. Burns has too many projects on his plate to go back and create new segments of his national park series, but if he did, I believe the challenge of climate change and the urgent conversation within the environmental community about making parks truly accessible to all would be critical topics.

The 21st century will witness a critical shift in both plant and animal communities across parks if we cannot slow the pace of climate change, and in some areas entire landscapes could be flooded by sea level rise. Additionally, people of color still do not feel welcome in many of the country’s most beautiful spaces, while those without means see rising entrance fees as impediments to what could have been important family explorations. A modern discussion of these issues would include not just adults, but children and teenagers, as they will someday shoulder the legacy of protecting these spaces.

Second, I looked inward. Burns highlighted so many people who worked tirelessly to protect places they loved, often in the face of long odds and those in power set against them. They wrote letters, organized community members, met with elected officials, and sought unique partnerships to create just the right assemblage of stakeholders to conserve areas not just for themselves, but for all Americans. I have the privilege of an education, of at least a few hours in my day that does not have to go to work or childcare - why can’t I be one of those people?

I started small. A week or so after finishing the final episode in the national park series, I wrote an email to my county commissioner asking him to consider purchasing the 95 acres along a nearby river and boat ramp before it is developed into a cookie-cutter neighborhood with a high risk of flooding. Adjacent to both the shoreline and the Florida National Scenic Trail, the 95 acres is home to beautiful trees, wetland plants, and a host of bird, reptile, and mammal species; wouldn’t we all be served better if the land were protected for visitors and locals alike as a county park?

The good news: he responded. The bad news? I know what a brush off looks like. Still, I also know from my own experience, as well as the docuseries, that a mere email would not protect an important parcel of property, and so I continue to reach out to surrounding environmental groups, to the local paper, to concerned neighbors and churches. My actions may have been simmering in the back of my mind, but it was the national parks documentary that converted my thoughts to outreach.

In Conclusion

And so, ten years after the episodes appeared on PBS, the Ken Burns national park series does resonate with our 2019 challenges and opportunities. If you haven’t seen “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” I recommend checking it out. Did you watch during its original airing? The series may be worth a second look!