Ken Burns Talks About National Parks on PBS
October 1st, 2009Filmmaker 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.
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.
