PBS: Ken Burns Tackles the National Parks
Ken Burns, maker of lengthy, well-funded, at times boring, but nonetheless valuable documentaries about creations uniquely American (jazz, baseball), has chosen to train his camera on the National Parks, maintained by the National Park Service, a bureaucratic, underfunded, but nonetheless vital guardian of nearly 400 natural, cultural, and recreational sites located in just about every U.S. state.
The result is “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” a 12-hour, six-part film debuting Sept. 27.
It’s entirely unclear how many viewers the film will attract, but the website already has an array of video clips, materials for educators, interactive widgets, and more information designed to engage communities to learn more about sites that many Americans may take for granted. In fact, if the film does anything, it will hopefully disabuse anyone of the notion that it’s easy to preserve these sites and keep them open to visitors for almost no charge.
Watch a preview of the series below.
[video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F87BLyb_Rq8&eurl=http://pressroom.pbs.org/programs/the_national_parks_americas_best_idea&feature=player_embedded]The National Parks Traveler is a blog — not linked to the film — about life in America’s parks.