Hacker Cinema
The National Parks: America's Best Idea
2009 · TV series · documentary · 120 min episodes · 1 season
Filmed over the course of more than six years at some of nature's most spectacular locales – from Acadia to Yosemite, Yellowstone to the Grand Canyon, the Everglades of Florida to the Gates of the Arctic in Alaska - “The National Parks: America's Best Idea” is nonetheless a story of people: people from every conceivable background – rich and poor; famous and unknown; soldiers and scientists; natives and newcomers; idealists, artists and entrepreneurs; people who were willing to devote themselves to saving some precious portion of the land they loved, and in doing so reminded their fellow citizens of the full meaning of democracy.
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Many histories of American national parks have stressed the tension between parks as preserves and parks as places for enjoyment. This is so even for park histories that might be expected to follow an orthodox view, such as the Ken Burns PBS miniseries "National Parks: America's Best Idea."
Among those discussions, what's interesting to me is that Stephen Mather [1], the first director of the National Park Service and before that a de facto lobbyist within the Wilson administration for national parks, saw little tension between promoting park tourism and better preserving parks from abuse. In fact, his consistent position was that making parks more fun and accessible for ordinary people would in fact lead to more parks and better-protected parks, because awed park visitors would themselves become lobbyists for parks. He actually broke with his friend and former employee Robert Sterling Yard (the ex-PR man for parks mentioned in this piece) precisely on this point - Yard didn't believe that more park visitors were the unalloyed good that Mather was sure they were.
On balance, I do think that Mather was more right than Yard. But for at least about 50 years there has been a realization that the downsides of park tourism are far bigger than Mather would have envisioned.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Mather