American beauties

American beauties

Chicago Tribune: “One learns that the world, though made, is yet being made. That this is still the morning of creation. ... Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.”

— John Muir

So begins the latest PBS offering from film-maker Ken Burns. “The National Parks: American’s Best Idea.” It’s hard to imagine a more eloquent opening than the haunting voice-over of those words from John Muir, one of the early champions of preserving the majestic spaces of America.

What you get from Ken Burns is meticulous research, stunning visuals, interesting facts about long-forgotten folks, elegiac music and poetry to soothe the soul. As he did with his documentaries on the Civil War, baseball, jazz, race, feminism and World War II, Burns tells stories that illuminate topics everybody thinks they already know. They don’t. They don’t know these stories.

Overstatement

Burns subtitles this one “America’s Best Idea.” A bit of overstatement. We would reserve that claim for, oh, say, the Bill of Rights. But Burns is on firm ground when he says setting aside national park land for the public is as “uniquely American as the Declaration of Independence.” The palaces and many parks of Europe, he notes, are owned by royalty and the elites. America’s parks are owned by the people.

The ruination of Niagara Falls gave birth to the idea of “public” parks. By the 1860s, private owners controlled every single U.S. vantage point for viewing those magnificent falls.

Today there are nearly 400 parks and sites.