Review of Burns's National Parks

I posted an overview of Ken Burns's documentary National Parks: America's Best Idea. Now here's a compendium of reviews:

'The National Parks':  Ken Burns’ best

By Aaron Barnhart[O]ne thing is clear: “The National Parks” is a more ambitious and difficult work than his others, and it’s one that, I think, can lay claim to being his finest achievement to date.

To be sure, there is a great story here, and even better illustrations. Burns gets all the great shots you’d expect him to bring back from multiple trips to Yosemite, Yellowstone, Alaska and other national treasures.

And while we’re going down the checklist: that voice from the past, the one whose diaries are read by a lush-voiced actor and are full of the picayune details that make the past come alive? Check. The incredibly articulate academic explainer? Check. And, last but not least, the unheralded Everyman poet that Burns always seems to find to give the whole composition its requisite grace notes? Check that, too.

The series begins—after a 10-minute travelogue reel, accompanied by some sweeping narration read by Peter Coyote—with the first big idea: When most of the North American continent was a vast wilderness, you didn’t need national parks. It wouldn’t be until 1864, when Abraham Lincoln was called upon to sign an act of Congress setting aside the eye-catching wonders of the Yosemite Valley in California (which Lincoln had never seen), that the idea of preservation took hold in Washington for the first time.

It wasn’t entirely driven by a desire to preserve some portions of the West from the ravages of industry. One of the earliest motivations for the national parks, notes William Cronon, one of the country’s leading environmental historians, was to show Europe that America had splendor as great as the Parthenon or the Roman ruins.

And the railroads were more than happy to take the Europeans’ money, or anyone else’s, to ship them out West and put them up in luxury hotels to experience the last vestiges of American wilderness. Even as early as 1876, when Congress got around to designating Yellowstone its first national park, business motives and ecological motives were deeply intertwined in the preservation movement.

“Most of all, the story of our national parks is a story about people,” we hear Coyote say in this film, and it’s true—just not entirely true.

People have notions, and they have interests, and Burns makes the case that the rise of national parks is as much a history of the marketplace of American ideas as just about any branch of government. It is about the shifting relationship between urban and rural, humans and creatures, government and the public good.The taming of the national park

By Frank CliffordThe best parts of the film deal with the muscular era of park building, from 1870 to 1940, when most of the famous parks and monuments—including New Mexico's only national park, Carlsbad Caverns—were established. It was the period when the evangelists of a budding environmental movement clashed with frontier titans over the fate of Yosemite and the Grand Canyon; when an old Indian fighter and buffalo slayer, Gen. Philip Sheridan, dispatched the cavalry to Yellowstone to secure the park from poachers and vandals.

Those were the days when a president toured a national park on horseback and didn't just drop by Old Faithful for a photo op. It was a time when conservation and conservatism were not mutually exclusive terms, when Republicans did not consider it an act of socialist treachery if the government pre-empted private ownership to protect a fragile landscape or a vanishing species.

In 1900, one of the most conservative members of Congress, John F. Lacey of Iowa, won passage of one of the toughest wildlife-protection laws ever enacted. Six years later, with the help of archaeologist Edgar Lee Hewett, Lacey sponsored the Antiquities Act, giving the president sweeping authority to create national monuments. Among the first were New Mexico's El Morro and Chaco Canyon. "Mankind must conserve the resources of nature, or the world will become as barren as a sucked orange," Lacey said.

In Burns' films, viewers look forward to the small treasures he digs up from picked-over mines. Here he unearths the story of Theodore Roosevelt escaping his presidential entourage to go camping with John Muir in Yosemite National Park in 1903. Muir was already America's most famous environmentalist, and Roosevelt was well on his way to becoming conservation's greatest friend in the White House.

The two, meeting for the first time, marveled at the scenery and reportedly quarreled like cronies. Roosevelt noted that Muir showed "little care for birds and birdsong." Muir took the president to task for his love of hunting. "Mr. Roosevelt, when are you going to get beyond the boyishness of killing things?"Ken Burns Goes Camping, and Has Photos

By Mike HaleAs with “The Civil War,” the readings in “The National Parks”—recited by a voice cast that includes Tom Hanks, John Lithgow, Sam Waterston and Eli Wallach—tap into the beauties of the 19th-century rhetorical tradition. The first two episodes, covering 1851 to 1915, are worth watching just to hear the words of John Muir, the documentary’s presiding spirit, read aloud.

Those episodes also contain Mr. Burns’s best material: the story of how the park system was born out of the pantheistic response of people like Muir to the newly discovered wonders of Yosemite and Yellowstone and of the men and women who nurtured the system and protected it against the forces of logging, mining, grazing and unbridled tourism.

After those early years, though, the story loses some of its urgency and focus. The battles become more bureaucratic than philosophical, and the parks joining the system are less familiar. Mr. Burns has to resort to some unsatisfying devices to give the episodes a narrative thrust. One is framed by the journeys of a Nebraska couple who seem to have been chosen primarily because they kept detailed photo albums and journals of their trips to national parks.

Without a strong story, we’re left with the repetitive flow of lofty, often misty verbiage—from historical figures as well as current historians and writers—about the value of the parks and with those pretty pictures of canyons and mountains. They’re nice to look at, but they aren’t really Mr. Burns’s specialty; there is more spectacular nature cinematography available most nights on the Discovery, National Geographic or Travel channels.

He’s more interested in the words, truth be told, in the intricately woven blanket of narration (by Peter Coyote), commentary and quotation that he and his writers lay over the images like a shroud. It’s a brilliantly assembled and rigidly controlled artifact, voice after voice ringing small variations on a few themes (democratic ideals, American rootlessness, the rapaciousness of the white man). Along with the folksy music, it can have the effect, over 12 hours at a steady, unmodulated pace, of sucking the juice out of history, of embalming it rather than bringing it to life.Ken Burns' 'National Parks' pays tribute to the men behind the idea

Politicians and philanthropists pushed to set aside breathtaking, unspoiled land.

By Mary McNamaraEnlivened by astonishing camera work and a few dramatic adventures--an early Yellowstone explorer becomes lost for more than a month, a tourist is later shot there during an Indian war, a young honeymoon couple vanishes from the Grand Canyon--"The National Parks" is a slow and careful walk through a very specific branch of American history.

As much as one admires Burns' refusal to acknowledge the conventional wisdom that the American attention span has shrunk to a hair's breadth, there is no denying he could have picked up the pace a bit here. (Also, fiddle and banjo music should be banned from documentary usage for the next five years.)

The title is the first red flag. Yes, the "best idea" part comes from novelist and historian Wallace Stegner and one hates to argue with Stegner, but as historian Clay Jenkinson says within minutes of the film's opening, America's best idea is equal rights for every citizen. But "America's Second-Best Idea" doesn't have the same ring, does it?

So Burns and Duncan content themselves with hammering home the idea that the parks are living symbols of democracy. And if you don't believe them, well, here's a bunch more people who think so too.

Although descriptive chronicles of early visitors to Yosemite and Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon are fascinating to hear (and if you are an American actor who was not asked to give voice to one, consider yourself snubbed), the ongoing testimony to the beauty and importance of nature becomes more than a little repetitive and unnecessary. In this case, a picture really is worth a thousand words, and possibly two whole hours.

The history of the national park crisscrosses the history of America and is therefore a bittersweet narrative. America comes into being at the expense of its natives, from the Indian tribes forced out of their homelands, including Yosemite Valley, to the passenger pigeon hunted into extinction.

The real value of "National Parks" is not its reminder of how beautiful the Grand Canyon is but Burns' and Duncan's endless curiosity about how the parks shaped Americans as Americans shaped the parks.Ken Burns' New National Parks Documentary Starts Slowly, But Gets Better

By Levi NoveyCriticisms of the Series as a Whole

Before watching the documentary, I wrote on the Huffington Post that I wondered if the series would adequately discuss the unpleasant aspects of national parks, such as the forced removal of tribes and settlers from their lands. I am pleased to report that it does address this history adequately.

On the other hand, I also wrote that the documentary "might also suffer from having too many inarticulate or vague exaltations as to why national parks are important." This is in fact, the main problem as I see it with the documentary.

It seems that about every 5 or 10 minutes, Burns has one of his interviewed guests pontificating about the meaning of national parks. While this is certainly important, if you watch the whole series it becomes a grating annoyance. What I think is most likely is that Burns and Duncan realized that few people would watch the entirety of the documentary, and thus felt obliged to provide these repetitive segments. The problem is that sometimes these attempts to explain the meaning of national parks are not well articulated, or seem to appear out of context.Rob's review

I'd say these comments are mostly accurate. Overall this is a fine series.

National Parks is a series about ideas, or wants to be. You can tell that from its title. So I don't mind that it occasionally pushes ideas. I don't think it's as heavy-handed as some critics seem to think. The ideas lift the series beyond a mere chronology and give viewers something to think about.

But as the series goes on, it becomes more of a travelogue and less of a conversation about beliefs and values. And that makes it less interesting. So the ideas are kind of a mixed bag: they don't quit fit with the pretty pictures, but they add a level of complexity that the later episodes lack.

The critics are right that the first two episodes are the best. There's real drama in seeing whether Muir and Roosevelt will save the land and create the parks. Later episodes are necessarily more circumscribed. Battles over establishing individual parks...staffing and managing the parks...the lives of various park advocates. The stories get smaller to the series' detriment.

The critics are also right that National Parks is slow and stately. In the first two episodes, that isn't a problem. John Muir's powerful vision deserves a grand canvas and the series provides on.

It starts becoming a problem later on, when Burns seems to run out of big ideas. He begins interviewing people who are old enough to have visited the parks in their early years. We get their snapshots, home movies, and diary entries. But they aren't as eloquent as John Muir--who is?--and we could've lived without their nostalgic reminiscences.

The Native aspects

Unlike some of Burns's past efforts, National Parks does a good job of being inclusive. Mt. Rushmore superintendent Gerard Baker (Hidatsa-Mandan) and Yosemite park ranger Shelton Johnson (black) get a fair amount of screen time, as do several women. They provide a little balance to the parade of white males.

I was afraid National Parks would downplay the role of Indians, but I think Indians have gotten their fair share of exposure. The series doesn't take an Indian point of view or dwell on their problems, but it mentions them fairly frequently--more than two dozen times in the first two episodes. These references remind viewers that Indians were there first.

Later episodes mention Indians less since they're mostly gone from the parks. Since Indians aren't the focus of National Parks, that isn't a huge problem. The series gives an overview of Indian issues like it gives an overview of everything else, which is about all we can hope for. I give it a passing grade on its coverage of Indians.

Anyway, if you're interested in American history, culture, and the environment, I think you'll enjoy National Parks. Watch the first two episodes at least to learn how the parks and our whole conservation ethic came about. And to hear Muir rhapsodize about nature like a Native American.

Rob's ratings for the National Parks episodes:

The Scripture of Nature:  8.5
The Last Refuge:  9.0
The Empire of Grandeur:  8.0
Going Home:  7.5

For more on the subject, see Review of American Indians and National Parks and Native Documentaries and News.

Below:  "James Mason Hutchings and tourists, Yosemite National Park, circa 1885."