National Parks: America’s best idea.

We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.

--Wallace Stegner
“The National Parks,” Episode 6

Ken Burns’ comprehensive story of our national parks, just concluded on PBS, is a largely positive picture of how activists interested in preserving the best of American beauty and history have mostly succeeded. The photography is beautiful, the message uplifting, the cause important. In the end, we are encouraged to help keep our parks going.

Burns’ concluding focus on preserving and bringing back the wolf from near extinction, on stopping a paved road into Denali (Mt. McKinley) National Park [picture], and on the vast new parkland set aside in unpopulated Alaska suggest an agenda of 1) greater attention to preserving endangered species, and 2) growing concern about humans over-running unspoiled nature. Earlier shows covered the historical problem of unfettered automobile access to Yellowstone and Yosemite.

One gets the impression the Park Service has pushed back on campers filling the parkland. The series, however, doesn’t cover the Park Service's actual strategy, including its apparent severe restrictions on how many people can stay in parks overnight, actions that have led to creation of small cities just outside some park entrances, but have saved the parks themselves.

John Muir and especially Stephen Mather, the marketing genius who first headed the National Park Service, understood the importance of building a constituency of park supporters by making it easier for people to visit. Needless to say, the idea was an overwhelming success: 270 million now visit park facilities annually. The parks do belong to the people, and the people do love their parks.

We may have a good balance between people and nature in the parks, a parallel system of wilderness areas for those who want fewer humans around, and Burns may be pleased with the balance. But maybe not. Anyway, ambiguity about how to deal with the human power to preserve, or to destroy, may be just the right way to conclude Burns’ excellent series.