Reflections on Ken Burns' : The National Parks

I've been watching the DVDs of Ken Burn's latest documentary: The National Parks; America's Best Idea.  Burns and collaborator Dayton Duncan have brought their cinematic eye and art to the American wilderness,  illuminating places such as the Grand Canyon - about which Teddy Roosevelt observed; "The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it." -  and ideas about conservation and public benefit that the filmmakers present as emblematic of American democracy. 

It is a powerful story, carried forward by stunning visuals and Burn's signature treatment of historic images and personalities.  Like many viewers I find it inspiring and it makes me want to visit and revisit many of these places (which will likely be welcomed by the Park Service in the face of a marked trend of decreasing visitation and connection between Americans and our Great Outdoors. 

It is also a story that embodies great complexity, with larger than life figures like John Muir who somehow outshines even Teddy Roosevelt in the first part of the series.  Some of the "talking heads" help to weave together what for the sake of the story is tempting to cast as opposing conservation viewpoints rather than two sides of the same coin. The nation's first Forest Service Director, Gifford Pinchot, still gets less than his due, in my opinion, particularly after having just read Timothy Egan's brilliant new history of The Big Burn; Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America.  Pinchot was certainly more significant as a conservationist than just as the pragmatic proponent of sustainable use of forestland that he becomes when juxtaposed to the wilderness prophet Muir.

Those talking heads without whom a modern documentary would be unthinkable are a narrative device pioneered and perfected by Burns.  I am always intrigued to see which emerges as the charismatic authoritative voice in the film, as Shelby Foote did in Burn's treatment of The Civil War.  Two episodes into the series, there are two voices that stand out for me, but for very different reasons. 

One belongs to William Cronon, the Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and author of the excellent Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England.  His is the voice of gentle intelligence and sensitivity, seeing the study of history and ecology as mutually sustaining (a perspective with which I am fully in accord). 

The other is Shelton Johnston, a charismatic veteran park ranger, a marvelous story teller whose love of the parks is palpable.  Johnston is an African American with considerable Native American ancestry who was raised in Detroit.  More than this, his background makes him a distinct minority both as a Park Ranger and among visitors to our national parks.  Not even 1% of those who visit Yosemite, for example, are African American.  As Johnston said in a recent interview:

"It's bigger than just African Americans not visiting national parks. It's a disassociation from the natural world," said Johnson, who has worked in Yosemite for the past 15 of his 22 years in the Park Service. "I think it is, in part, a memory of the horrible things that were done to us in rural America."

The rejection of the natural world by the black community, he said, is a scar left over from slavery.

"All Snoop Dogg has to do is go camping in Yosemite and it would change the world," said Johnson, 51. "If Oprah Winfrey went on a road trip to the national parks, it would do more than I have done in my whole career."

The conservation movement in America has a long way to go before this disconnect is resolved.

Burns' film emphasizes that the creation of National Parks was a reaction to the wholesale exploitation of natural resources during the final decades of the 19th century.  Yet the very idea of setting aside land for non consumptive public benefit would not even have been considered for the American wilderness if we had not already chosen to do so within our own developed habitat.  The rural cemetery movement, the development of public parks within the urban landscape by Frederick Law Olmstead and those he inspired, and even the setting aside of some of the great killing fields of our nation's Civil War as monuments to its memory, all preceded the establishment of the first National Park.

This was not the case in the 18th century, when the Common was a place for the community's livestock and there were better uses for old battlefields than places of quiet reflection.   We do not set aside land until we believe what it contains is both essential and irreplaceable.  Nor do we invest in the survival of what we do not see as having value.  Whether that value is intrinsic, as Muir would have it, or essential to our own health and well being, or both of these things, has long been part of the national conservation debate, and especially so regarding the conservation purposes, use and management of public lands. 

One thing, at least, has changed since Roosevelt's Day.  Nature does not take its course, at least during the span of human lives, completely free of our influence.  Our hands may mar without our even being aware, but they can only mend if we are deliberately conscious in our choices and pay close attention to the results of our interventions.  Having a national conversation along these lines would be a wonderful outcome of Burn's storytelling.

  

Comments

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I completely agreed with you. You said right "It's bigger than just African Americans not visiting national parks. It's a disassociation from the natural world"

[Tim Abbott]

Ah, Nikky. What reverberations from our flight!

And you also loved Cousteau, my childhood hero. I have a friend, a fellow conservationist who shares that love of ours, and as a boy he wanted to be "Black Cousteau". So there are others, odd children who love when there is reason enough for fear. Not with the heedless love of adrenaline that comes from seeking danger and mastery, but the deeper love of something bigger than ourselves and yet very much a part of us. The way you felt when you saw that first whale, or how I felt among elephants.

I say to myself that what we both experienced in the air should not be as rare as it seems. Like love, these moments of profound connection tend to elude us when we try too hard. I feared nothing about you because I was wide open and, it seems to me now, all at once at ease with you. And so those connections could cascade without having to dodge and feint to overcome our solitude in that close space.

[Nikky Finney]

Tim, I am the poet on the plane that you referenced two or three posts before this one. I came here tonight, to this most recent post of yours, to find you, my flying-friend and here you are giving great lift and wing to a moment that changed me forever. I am a poet who has just finished her fourth book. Poetry is my first voice. I always wonder will the last book be my last book. So much emotion goes in to each of their making. This next one will leap into the air in September of 2010, Northwestern Press, Chicago. One of our (many) fears as poets is -- what's next? Is there anything left to say to the world. I found the answer to this old question as we flew to Detroit -- strangers who took the chance to peel back skin and safety -- and then to Lexington. I hate the middle seat on a plane. I am the middle child in real life, so, I am always dealing with mediation and peace conferences in my own family. I never want to fly and do the same work in the air as I do on the ground. You probably didn't notice that the man to my left -- aisle -- hardly wanted to sit by me -- but when you and I started to talk like old friends -- he leaned into me as if he had to hear what we were sharing. What a lesson! You feared nothing about me. Not my long knotty ocean of hair. Not my skin color. Not the poetry books in my lap. Your wonder for the world and for simple human conversation has brought you to the world of this blog. It is your curiosity and your diligence and your profound sense of responsibility to simple be present and to participate -- that has brought your words into the galaxy of my words. I have been so fearful these last many days of what is happening to the polar bears, to the penguins, to the wildflower, to the spring water well that no longer runs through my grandmothers 100 acres in Newberry, South Carolina. I have wanted to write something about it. I didn't exactly know how -- and there you -- in MY window seat -- talking about blue whales and how their "pole to pole " conversations had been taken away by the age of propellers." When we disembarked from the plane I started scribbling in the car like a mad woman. I realized in that moment that my newest book had been born. I want to write about the land we are losing. I want to write about how I would not be a poet had it not been for the one hundred acres that I walked through as a girl and found my wonder about the world. This new book project -- which does not yet have a name -- has been born out of our surprise conversation on the plane and out of the conversation that I also heard from the park ranger, Shelton, that you you mentioned here in your blog. I was always the odd child in my community. I was a Black girl from the South who cherished the land -- the rural music of where my ancestors had made a way. I wasn't supposed to love the trees and the rich red soil. But I did. I carried around a guide to dinosaurs in my back pocket for years and years. Before I was a poet I wanted to be a Paleontologist. I knew every dinosaur by name and brain size. Nobody in my community understood why I wanted to study plants from the Mississippian period. Before watching the Ken Burns' series on the National Parks I hadn't thought about why my grandmother, a farming woman, who could plant anything and grow anything -- anywhere -- might be shy about talking about the land she loved. She had seen the hangings. She had witnessed the brutality firsthand. She had been warned all her life not to go out by herself. There was always a personal terror connected to the land -- for Black people -- who had come here in such a violent way. In the middle of the Ken Burns' series I leaned forward like a snail. I broke into a thousand pieces. I got it. Finally -- I understood. I, me personally, could come into the world and love and fight for the beauty of the land and be of people -- who had once been the violent human bloom in so many southern pine trees -- because times do change -- because it is up to us to remember -- and to not accept the fear -- to turn to the stranger on the plane and smile -- and then go home and begin the newest book of poems -- scribbling with all our heart.