Part One
Ken Burns’ new series, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea premiered on Public Television stations nationwide during the last week of September. By the end of the first episode, I immediately recognized that this opus differed from past works––Burns was tackling a history involving scientists, their passions, and their activism. I spoke with Burns about the motivation for the series, which he began to formulate ten years ago.
In the interest of disclosure, I should say that Burns and I share the same alma mater––there are several years of overlap in the 1970s when we both attended Hampshire College. The environmental movement then was strong. Protests occurred over the Seabrook Nuclear power plant to our north in New Hampshire. We were also aware of the environmental impact on the Connecticut River valley back in the 1930s when residents of three towns were forced out of their homes and the towns submerged to create the Quabbin Reservoir in nearby Belchertown. In fact, three housing units on campus were named for those flooded towns—Endicot, Prescot, and Dana. And I had friends studying with animal behaviorist Ray Coppinger (who has since written books about his studies of wolves and dogs.)
So as I watched The National Parks and learned of scientists’ efforts to prevent the Hech Heche Valley from inundation, and the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park, I was reminded of many of the concerns of our college days. But that wasn’t all. Burns and collaborator Dayton Duncan begin their tale with the ecstatic John Muir, who saw protecting America’s “wildness” as synonymous with worshiping God’s creation. Moreover, Muir was one of the great science communicators of his day; he galvanized a preservationist following with his essays in Harper’s Weekly, Atlantic Monthly, and other widely-read magazines.
There were now many reasons for me, a science journalist, to interview an artist who has made so many seminal, historical documentary films about our culture.
Here’s what Burns had to say:
KAF: Congrats on your spectacular series.
KB: Thank you so much, we were so surprised at being able to translate our own powerful emotions about the parks into not just the history of them but reflecting and I think inspiring other peoples’ emotions about the parks and memories.
KAF: When did you decide to tackle this subject and what was your motivation?
KB: We started ten years ago. In many ways we make the same film over and over again. Each project addresses the same questions: Who are we? Who are the strange complicated people who like to call themselves Americans? What does investigation of the past tell us about where we are, where we’re going? You can never answer that question, of course, but we deepen it, we hope, with each successive project. This was an utterly, uniquely American thing—for the first time in American history land was set aside not for kings, or noblemen, or the very rich, but for everybody and for all time. We invented it. It’s the Declaration of Independence applied to the landscape. So we endeavored not to do the more familiar travelogue or nature film, but rather a history of ideas and individuals that made this uniquely American thing take place.
KAF: So much of the story revolved around science and scientists, ecology, glaciology and other areas of science. Did you expect so much to be about scientists and their activism?
KB: The impulse to preserve the parks came from many different quarters. The initial impulse was spiritual, indeed religious. The transcendentalist, who is the perfect religious manifestation of democracy, began to see the vanishing wildlife and wild places as something to be saved. And whereas Europe had dogmatic devotions and cathedrals built by men, the genius of America is that one could find God in nature, in cathedrals that exist already. And so you find in the spiritual writings of Muir, Emerson, and Thoreau, a kindred spirit. But at the same time, Muir is a scientist as well. So you have another great revolution based on this new idea of conservation championed in the political sphere by Theodore Roosevelt. But also by many others, in The Sierra Club, which Muir founded, by George Bird Grinnel, a colleague of Roosevelt and a great champion of wildlife—by many others who devoted their lives to studying the sciences.
There are many comments in the film that it was science that was redefining deity. It was science, a commentator said, who said we have to save these places because they hold the answers to questions we’ve not yet learned to ask. So we need to make these habitats and ecological areas available so that we will be able to ask questions later on that might bring us answers that could indeed, as we now know, save our planet.
We were thrilled at the way in which the story of the national parks is the story of spirituality, of science, patriotism, economics. It had all those involved in it.
KAF: In your portrayal of Muir, you show, by example, a scientist who was a very religious man and demonstrated how integrated it was for him to express his love of nature as a way to serve God and that there was no conflict. Were you making a statement through your portrayal of him that there is not necessarily a conflict between science and religion, as in this past decade, especially, people have felt there is?
John Muir
KB: We live in such a dialectically preoccupied age. Everything is black or white, young or old, male or female, North or South, East or West, science or religion. We divide ourselves when in fact we live in an organic, whole system, whether we’re aware of it or not. I find in John Muir—and there was no attempt to proselytize—we just found a fascinating character who we wanted to share. It so happens that that fascinating character was a man of God, passionate and ecstatic, able to free himself from the oppressive Christianity of his father, a Presbyterian minister who beat him. By age 11 he had been forced to memorize the entire New Testament and most of the Old Testament, who could now shed that dogmatic faith for some exhilarating faith out in nature, who nonetheless brought with him equal parts of the scientist, who was able to prove theories of glaciations that even the California state geologist, Josiah Whitney, hadn’t yet arrived at.
We too often ignore faith. Right now, Francis Collins (the new director of the NIH has taken an important role in our government and he is a man who believes in God. And this has been ridiculed. If one reads Albert Einstein, one realizes that towards the end of his life, his physics was reaching a kind of metaphysics and these are not inconsistent. They’re not incompatible. We do ourselves a disservice if we don’t permit ourselves to have lives that feed all aspects of us.
KAF: You also delve into science and public policy. You explain the constant struggle the champions of the parks waged against commercial interests.
KB: Yes, they’re still with us. Human beings and particularly Americans are acquisitive and extractive, some might even say rapacious. They look at a beautiful river and think, “Dam,” they look at a beautiful stand of trees and say board feed, they look at a canyon and wonder what minerals can be extracted without regard to whether it has any other scientific, aesthetic, or even spiritual value to commend itself.
The story of the national parks is an incredible drama of a handful of people going against the momentum, the tide of human development, to say that very special word in the English language, “No.” We need to save these places. And we were stunned at the drama that our film has. Once we said we’re not doing a travelogue or nature film, what we had was a really fascinating story of how an handful of people were able to work in each park’s instance in very unique ways, but also against a common tide of development.
A Hispanic biologist, Melendez Wright, the first biologist of the Park Service, got the parks to at least beginning to think about parks not as resorts, but as ecosystems. That when you’re considering a park it isn’t just the scenery and appealing to the needs of the tourists, but you had to understand that complex systems of the flora and fauna, which needed to be taken into account but needed to be left. So he was the first to suggest that predators should not be routinely shot, as they were, and to stop feeding the bears at garbage stops along the side of the road. To reduce the element of spectacle and return to the notion that science might be the governing policy for how the parks should be run. And this was revolutionary.
George Melendez Wright
He died prematurely, but his work was carried on by other biologists, including Adolph Murie. One begins to see the glory, these crown jewels of the American experience, owe their salvation, and, therefore we owe our salvation in large respect, to these pioneering scientists.
KAF: I noticed that the narrative about Melendez Wright’s untimely death was very mournful and you emphasize that by the end of the 1930s only 9 of the 27 scientists under him were left.
KB: When someone like that leaves the scene you often have a vacuum and the interests of the Parks Service went elsewhere. But he had planted a seed and he had promoted a hypothesis that gained ground as the decades went on. It was exhilarating for us as storytellers to see that here was someone who died at 30 years old and 50 years later his ideas are being put into place.
KAF: Just this September it was announced that for the first time, a scientist––Jon Jarvis––will be Director of the National Park Service.
KB: It’s always terrific when you turn over the reigns of a government agency that can be susceptible not just to bureaucratic impulses, but also the whims of the political climate to someone who takes a longer view.
When you’re standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon, you’re seeing Precambrian rock, vishnu schist that is 1.7 billion years old. That’s nearly half the age of the planet. So when you think of the lifetime of an administration or a political objection or some such transient thing, it’s good to have scientists reminding us of the longer haul that all of this represents.
KAF: The third scientist you discuss, Murie, struggles to reintroduce wolves in to Yellowstone––a very unpopular idea. We attended Hampshire College at the same time and I wondered if you knew of Professor Ray Coppinger’s work with dogs and wolves and if that influenced how you told that Murie story.
KB: Not really. I didn’t have the privilege of having Coppinger as a professor, but of course his work suffused our campus. My colleague Dayton Duncan says in the film that wolves didn’t come across the campfire to our side like dogs did and become our best friends. So they became the symbol of the rejection of us so we did what human beings do. We set out to exterminate them wherever we could. The wolves’ reintroduction into Yellowstone symbolizes a more balanced relationship, a more harmonic relationship with nature. And that’s what we’re celebrating in the film. The notion that Yellowstone now is as it was. And we suggest, as Murie suggests, as Melendez Wright suggests, as John Muir the holy man and scientist would suggest, that is the right way to go.
In Part Two, hear Burns describe his own ecstatic experience learning from a parks ranger how lodgepines seed .
