Series available on DVD and Blu-ray October 6, 2009 from PBS Home Video and Paramount Home Entertainment

Perhaps it’s no surprise that Ken Burns would be the one to do it—create a documentary series that really does explain why America’s national parks were, as the writer and historian Wallace Stegner said, “the best idea we ever had.” Stegner’s quote (in turn quoted from an admiring Brit) is used in some documentaries as a throwaway line, dutifully followed by pictures of scenic splendors. In this series, the idea itself receives the attention it deserves. Not that splendors are absent from the film—they’re there, in spades. But splendid scenery is found in many nations; the difference is that it was in America that the natural landscape was first determined to be a national birthright and set aside for the many rather than the privileged. That is a very big deal; and this is a very big series.

The key point brought home at the outset of Burns’s film, and reinforced with each episode, is that conflict lies at the core of the “best idea.” Competing elements of the American spirit rubbed sparks throughout the heated growth of the national park system. The film reminds us that besides being the land of the free, America was also the land of Manifest Destiny, with an endless frontier available for the taking by simply heading west and displacing any aboriginal species, including humans, that got in the way. Endless resources were available for target practice from the train, and the same American ethos that permitted the near destruction of the bison and the complete eradication of the passenger pigeon somehow accommodated what became the most enlightened approach to conservation ever conceived.

Happily, that acknowledgement of gritty reality isn’t presented as a self-flagellating morality tale: the series seems willing to confront the ugly, but also to rejoice that ultimately, with all its conflicting urges, the nation set aside millions of acres for the common weal. That, after all, is how sausage is really made. The conflict between faith in the ultimate beneficence of the free market and belief in the value of government control takes root early in the story, and as the episodes go by we see those hands played over and over. Western politicians operating nearest to the parks had the greatest stake in seeing the federal government’s protective mantle removed. That the parks should come to be seen as national properties owned by all Americans, rather than as resources to be exploited by those living in closest proximity, was—and still is—of critical importance.

Although the film acknowledges the role of current events in setting the sociopolitical stage at each juncture, it relies on the “great man” theory as the mechanism for historical change. John Muir is developed as the prophet of wilderness preservation and Theodore Roosevelt as the “big engine that could.” With the establishment of the National Park Service, the series considers how the nation reconciled the need for strict conservation (the mission of the parks) with the concept of “multiple use,” in which resources are managed, extracted, and consumed to accrue the greatest good for the greatest number (the mission of the Forest Service).

A common sociopolitical view—one that the film seems to ascribe to the Forest Service—is that natural resources were all put here by God for man’s “wise use.” Accordingly, it can be argued that the value of a mist-shrouded mountain or virgin forest comes not from any inherent magnificence but from their utility. On what basis is there a need for absolutely sacrosanct landscapes? In episode 2, this conflict is artfully illustrated by showing how the San Francisco quake and firestorm became an insurmountable justification for desanctifying part of Yosemite. The stunning Hetch Hetchy Valley so beloved by John Muir was flooded to construct a reservoir, supposedly to provide adequate water to save the city from any such future catastrophe. Later episodes show how that tough lesson hardened the later strategies of conservationists.