Filmmaker Ken Burns has shaped some of the most celebrated documentaries ever made, according to this interview on PBS.

His credits include Baseball, Jazz, Unforgivable Blackness, the 15-hour miniseries The War and the landmark The Civil War, which earned two Emmys and was the highest-rated miniseries in the history of public television.

At age 22, the Brooklyn native formed Florentine Films after earning his B.A. at Hampshire College. His latest project is the six-part documentary, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, which premiers this month on PBS.

See the interview online

Excerpts

Burns: It’s not a travelogue; it’s not a nature film, though there’s great stuff of nature. It’s about ideas and individuals. It’s about stories. And I think that’s what makes it different from other things about the national parks. It’s not even a recommendation of which lodge or inn to stay at.

Tavis: Well, you are one of the great storytellers, as I said a moment ago, so I know that Americans and folk around the world are going to appreciate seeing the kind of stories that you bring to life.

Let me start with the obvious beginning, at least for me, which is this title – “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.” I know there’s going to be some conversation kicking up just around that subtitle – America’s best idea, Mr. Burns?

Burns: Yeah, well, we kick it up in our film in the first few minutes. We steal this from the historian and writer Wallace Stegner, who said it’s the best idea we’ve ever had, and immediately someone comes on and says, “It’s not the best idea. The best idea comes from Thomas Jefferson when all men are created equal.” And that’s, of course, right.

But once you set a country in motion with those ideals, at least, ahead of you, because we know Mr. Jefferson meant all White men of property, free of debt, when he wrote that, and didn’t see the contradictions and didn’t see the hypocrisy in the fact that as he wrote those words he owned 100 human beings, but if you set in motion a country dedicated to that you’d be hard-pressed to find a better idea, or at least an expression.

We like to think that the national parks are the expression of the Declaration of Independence applied to the landscape, because for the first time in human history land was set aside not for kings or noblemen or the very rich, but for everybody and for all time. It’s an utterly democratic impulse and it comes out of opportunities, fresh opportunities here on this at least apparently virgin continent that we’ve inherited, this Garden of Eden that Thomas Jefferson himself thought would take hundreds of generations to fill up.

But very quickly, four or five, we’ve filled it up and we’re in danger of not only losing everyplace but losing the animals occupying those places. So somebody goes against the acquisitive and extractive and some would say rapacious interests of progress and says, wait, let’s save these places. It’s not enough to look at every river and think dam, it’s not enough to look at every beautiful stand of trees and thing board feet, to look at every beautiful canyon and wonder what minerals can be extracted from it.

Tavis: I can hear somebody – somebodies, in fact – saying right now, “Here goes Ken Burns again; he wants to spin this conversation about conservation, he wants to spin a conversation about the environment, and next he’ll be talking about global warming and the trees. He wants to spin this conversation when it’s really about – it’s not about spiritualism, it’s about conservation and you ought to just come out and say that.

Burns: Well you know what? Part of it is, but the impulse to save it comes out of spiritualism. It then moves to conservation in the old Teddy Roosevelt version. It moves to patriotism when we sing “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” someone wrote in the first decades of the 20th century.

We’re not talking about trade statistics or even the shadows cast by lofty metropolitan skyscrapers. We’re talking about this land that we’ve saved in these national parks. Later on it becomes economic. These places are the permanent pipeline when the resources that we may have extracted have long disappeared, and then more recently – and that’s not our providence, because we’re history – it’s evolved into complex ecological and environmental issues.

Nope, we want to tell you stories, we want to introduce you to 50 or so human beings, most of whom you’ve never heard of. Of course you’ve heard of Teddy Roosevelt and you might have heard of John Muir, the great wilderness prophet, and John D. Rockefeller Jr., the man who sort of reversed his father’s acquisitive energies and devoted it to philanthropy, of which the national parks were great beneficiaries.

But this is a story that is black and brown and red and yellow and female and unknown as much as it is a story of well-known White guys….

But I think what happens for those people who are aware of that just very powerful sense of co-ownership, that it doesn’t matter whether you’re a billionaire or whether you’re changing the beds at the hotel just outside the park – you own that park, you’re a co-owner, and all you’ve got to do there as a co-owner is going in and make sure somebody’s taking care of it, and we could use some more money.

That is to say, we need people who are arguing against those extractive and acquisitive interests and say, “Let’s keep up the maintenance.” But man, it’s ours, and when you look around at the rim of the Grand Canyon or at the geysers in Yellowstone or even at a historical site – remember, we’ve had the presence of mind as a great country to evolve this idea. Just as Thomas Jefferson’s “All men are created equal” just meant all White men of property, we now mean all people of color and women and we protect our children and our elderly and the handicapped and we debate the unborn and those of different sexual preference – you could say all of American history is the expansion of that.

Well, so too the national parks set aside obvious natural scenery and then it evolved to complex archaeological sites that recorded the ancient history of the Native Americans before us, then it got into historic sites like battlefields, habitats like the Everglades. Nothing spectacular about a swamp. Well, it turns out to be one of the most diverse environments on Earth.

And then we saved slave cabins. Then we saved Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas – still a working inner-city high school today, it’s a unit of the National Park Service. Manzanar, where Japanese American citizens were interred during the Second World War, shamefully.

Sand Creek in Washita in the Great Plains, where Indians were massacred by United States soldiers. We’ve saved Martin Luther King’s boyhood home in Atlanta. We’ve got the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore.

But we’ve been a big enough country to inhale a complex geological history – that was the obvious first thing – but also a complex cultural and historic and now ethnographic past that says we’re a complicated country and by understanding all of that we make ourselves better.

So Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where United 93 went down, is a site of the National Park Service. So is Oklahoma City, the site of the greatest domestic terrorism event. It’s a great system. I’ll argue on that great idea….

Tavis: It’s still the case that we have a generation of kids who, to be blunt about it, think that parks are boring…

Burns: Yeah. Yeah, no, it’s true, and it’s so sad because once you get them out you have total converts. The local PBS station in Miami sent an African American family into the Everglades.

Now, the Everglades were traditionally a place where African Americans didn’t go because it was a lawless area, the mythology of animals and threats. The family had a wonderful time. They did sort of PBS version of a reality show, and I met the mother and she said, “I can’t wait to go back.”

So I think that there’s always just that resistance to something new, particularly when we’ve got all these distractions in front of us. But I’ve never had somebody not be transformed by time out in the national parks. It’s not like ho-hum. Somebody once said that people who are bored by the view from the Grand Canyon will be disappointed on the day of judgment. (Laughter)

Tavis: I read a quote from you somewhere relative to this wonderful series where you said that parks are good places for epiphanies. What’d you mean by that?

Burns: Well, I think it goes back to what we’re talking about. You stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon, you look down. That Colorado River has been carving rock, exposed pre-Cambrian Vishnu schist that is 1.7 billion years old – nearly half the age of the planet. And if I’m lucky, if I’m fortunate, I get fourscore – 80 years.

Who am I? I’m nothing in comparison to that. And yet in that moment of humility, something is opened up and I am able to participate in a kinship with all people and all things that John Muir spoke passionately about.

That is so liberating, and I think that every single one of the 50 people that we introduce you to had a moment like that. If you lift up the rock of any national park, there’s some one person or a couple people or an association that got together and devoted their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to saving it.

But at the heart of it was that personal transformation. Everyone we interviewed for the series over the last 10 years had their own experiences like that, and each one of us, or most of us who worked on the series, I know had that moment where you just feel like you’re opened up. You have this transformation – whatever you want to call it. You can call it religion, you can call it science, you can call it art.

Whatever it was, something was transformed. My molecules were rearranged and I feel – I pinch myself. I’m getting paid to stand out here? I got up at 3:00 a.m. and I carried this heavy equipment out to this point, I waited for the sun to come up in Acadia National Park, where the first light hits the United States of America every day, or Hawaii volcanoes where they’re making new land – that lava comes out and makes that island just a little bit bigger every day. There’s very few places where new land is being created.

From the beautiful majesty of Alaska to the sensitivity of the Everglades and the Dry Tortugas, this is, just in the natural aspect of the national parks, unbelievable legacy….

It takes a lot of generalship to film at the gates of the Arctic in northern Alaska and at the Dry Tortugas off the Florida Keys, from Acadia in Maine to those Hawaii volcanoes, and everywhere in between. But what we were looking for was not – you can go shoot that, anybody can do that and get beautiful pictures in these places.

They look exactly the way John Muir saw them and they look the way the ancestors of the Native Americans who once called them home saw them 10,000 years ago. But then you have to figure out how to tell a story. No amount of rare and never-before-seen archives amounts to anything unless you collect those stories.

And I think most of the time, most of the effort, most of the love and energy that went into this was trying to weave together, like a Russian novel. It’s not set against the backdrop of war, catastrophic war, but of these beautiful places, Tavis, that are just – they just knock your socks off. You stand there and you can’t imagine that the next place was going to be any better than the one before, and all of a sudden you see a new view and sometimes it’s something specific, like lichen on a rock, or it might be a glacier in July or an animal walks by.

We saw grizzly bears, and we’ve had the experiences of our lifetime, and still able to engage those themes that we’ve been doing. The diversity in this film is not politically correct, it is naturally occurring.

If you miss it on a PBS station near you, you can watch National Parks online here. Tell everyone you know. The people who need to see this the most are the one’s who won’t be watching.

Tags: America's Best Idea, Ken Burns, National Parks

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