Our National Parks: America's Best Idea

Our National Parks: America's Best Idea

Watching Ken Burn's documentary, "The National Parks: America's Best Idea".

I expected it to be a travelogue, showing sights of our beautiful land. It is so much more.

The history of our National Parks threads deeply and strikingly through all the major social and political issues our country has experienced since the late 1800's: war, exploration, racial prejudice, grazing rights, state's rights, the depression, the New Deal, executive branch versus legislative, beauty, Native Americans, Japanese internment, the arts, welfare...

These issues didn't simply exist while National Parks and National Monuments were being established...the issues were central to the creation of parks, and the parks were central to the issues. In some cases, the parks changed social and political thought and work.

Many of the same outcries we hear today accompanied the battles to establish our most dearly loved National Parks: grazing rights, state's rights, species extinction, Native American treaty rights.

Can you imagine Olympia or King's Canyon or Sequoia being completely logged, farmed, and ranched? Paved roads, dirt roads, private roads, fences, convenience marts, resorts, golf courses?

I have to be honest and realize that I don't make my living directly from farming or ranching or building, so I'm undoubtedly biased.

But I can't help hearing the same echoes of outcry against wilderness areas and wildlife refuge areas, and imagining what it would be like if those cries had prevailed in Wyoming and we'd lost the opportunity to preserve precious, fragile parts of our country that should belong to all people in our country.

The establishment of our National Parks was not a smooth, clean, orderly social and political exercise of noble ideals...most of the parks were established through long, bitter, discordant disagreements, compromises, and political battles.

I especially appreciated the focus on Harold LeClaire Ickes, the Secretary of the Interior under Franklin D. Roosevelt.

I'd never heard of Harold Ickes...high school and college classes made no mention of him. Yet his work in establishing National Parks included fighting vicious racial prejudice and selfish, commercial interests of big business and state's rights. He was a white, male Republican politician, but he fought for what was right, no matter the skin color or the bank account or the political party.

Good film.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Apple Seeds and Cyanide

Image
Apple Seeds and Cyanide I offhandedly posted a comment that I eat apples...cores, seeds, and all . I chew on the stem until it tastes and feels like a used toothpick, and then I spit it out. Several responses to my post have given me cause to examine closely my preferred method of eating apples. I'd heard that apple seeds contain a small amount of cyanide , but I'd also heard that it's harmless unless one were to eat an immoderate amount of apples, much more than a person could stomach in one sitting. But I didn't really have any research to support either position: Are apple seeds poisonous or healthy? . So I went searching. One hour's worth of time spent searching the internet has given some interesting, semi-scientific, good-enough-for-me evidence that eating an apple's worth of seeds a day, or even three or four apple's worth, is not harmful . At worst, it may introduce a tiny amount of cyanide into my body, at a level which my body can eas
Read more

How to Connect Trailer Wiring: 2003 Chevy S-10 Pickup

Image
How to Connect Trailer Wiring: 2003 Chevy S-10 Pickup The Plan: Borrow a tent-trailer and go camping The Problem: No hitch and no electrical connection on my pickup The Process: Install a hitch and an electrical connection compatible with the trailer Step One - the easy part: install a hitch. The 2003 Chevy S-10 bumper is completely adequate for hauling a tent-trailer, at least the one I borrowed from a friend. The bumper is labeled with two weight limits: 3500 LBS TRAILER LOAD MAXIMUM 350 LBS TONGUE LOAD MAXIMUM The single-axle Coleman tent-trailer does not exceed these limits. The trailer required a two-inch diameter ball hitch. My bumper was pre-drilled with a half-inch hole. I purchased a ball hitch rated at 3500 pounds, with a half-inch threaded stem. It fit perfectly in the bumper. Step Two - the harder part: install wiring harness. The Chevy S-10 pickup uses a snap connector to join the rear lights wiring with the electrical system. This location is
Read more

Google Chrome Browser: Remember Window Size & Position

Image
Google Chrome Browser: Remember Window Size & Position Google Chrome would not remember the window size and position , running under Windows 7. Searching the internet offered many solutions, some weird, some confusing, none effective. Not even Google's own help site offered a solution. It must be me. I cannot believe that Google would be so unhelpful. Taking a portion of one user's advice, and adding a bit extra from another user's suggestion, brought relief. Now I can resize my browser window and place it anywhere on the desktop, close the browser, restart, and it reappears where I last had it, correctly sized. Here's what I did: 1. My version of Chrome: 22.0.1229.79 m 2. Click on the settings icon ( a button with three, short horizontal bars, or perhaps yours is an image of a wrench. 3. Click on About Google Chrome (this is where you can also find what version of Chrome you're running) 4. Chrome will quickly check to see if your version i
Read more