All summer I've waited for this week, Ken Burn's The National Parks: America's Best Idea week. I wasn't disappointed. For a National Parks geek and history of the American West buff, it was heaven. Watching Burns' camera glide lovingly over some of the places that have become dear to my own heart, and hearing so many voices echo my own experience of these places was a bit of a healing experience. It reinforced for me personally that I am an American, and that I share not just the places and not just their history, with all of America, but the experience of the Parks.
Turns out, that's exactly what Burns was going for, he told one reviewer:
"I just want to tell good stories," Burns told me when he unveiled the documentaries at the Telluride Mountain Film festival earlier this year, "but I understand that history is a way in which people can come together. There is so much fractionalization in our world today that its important to find places that we can converse together. History is one of those places."
The Parks, Burns demonstrates, are woven into the fabric of post-Civil War America. Who knew that General Sheridan, responsible for the massacre of so many Native Americans, is primarily responsible for the preservation of the bison? That without John D. Rockefeller, Jr., we might not have Acadia, Great Smoky Mountains, Grand Teton, Yosemite and Shenandoah National Parks. That one of the nation's first park superintendants, Captain Charles Young, was born into slavery, and that the Buffalo Soldiers under his command "kept the park free from poachers, and from the ranchers whose grazing sheep destroyed the parks' natural habitats. The soldiers also completed the first wagon road into the Giant Forest of Sequoia, a feat no superintendent before Young had been able to accomplish."
The documentary also lends a bit of perspective to current events, to the "fractionalization" as Burns calls it in America today. At the height of World War II, when America was arguably the most united it had ever been as a nation, the good people of Wyoming and the corporate interests there were fighting tooth and nail against a proposed expansion of Grand Teton National Park and made it personal by attacking FDR. They called him a Nazi. Remember, we're in the middle of WWII, and they are calling FDR a Nazi for his efforts to expand the Park. That was possibly the most egregious example of extremism, but not the only one. Jimmy Carter was hung in effigy in Seward, Alaska, after he signed executive orders expanding protection throughout huge swathes of Alaska.
What's perhaps most remarkable in the history of the Parks is that this best idea won out over the forces of corporatism and greed, time and again, even in the Gilded Age, even when--in history--the nation's robber barons were at their most rapacious. It's a good thing, too. Without the protection these places received in previous century and a half, and without their having become sacred spaces to the American people, the Bush/Cheney regime would have stolen it all.
The Parks, and the people, won just about every time, with one notable exception: Hetch Hetchy. In true Shock Doctrine fashion, the City of San Francisco and powerful interests there capitalized on the Great Earthquake and fire that destroyed the city in 1906 and by 1913 had succeeded in getting approval to build a dam in the Hetch Hetchy valley in Yosemite National Park. They argued, spuriously, that had San Francisco had Hetch Hetchy as a water source in 1906, they could have saved the city.
The specter of Hetch Hetchy remains to this day, and has been the primary reason that it remains the only dam in a National Park. Hetch Hetchy has been a rallying cry among environmental and citizen activist groups. The modern environmental movement was largely born in the fight for Echo Park, to keep dams out the Green and Yampa rivers of Echo Park. Any major development or resource extraction scheme in or around the Parks has been thwarted by the example of Hetch Hetchy.
It has, of course, required unceasing vigilance on the part of the people, which is where the other major theme of Burns' lies. There is a fundamental paradox in the Park idea, embedded in the proclamation for the founding of the first National Park, Yellowstone. It was established created "for the benefit and enjoyment of the people" but shall be "unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations." There is a natural tension their--the benefit and enjoyment of the people today necessarily has to be curtailed to keep the Parks unimpaired for future generations. All of the current battles in and around the Parks today--snowmobiles in Yellowstone, uranium mining at Grand Canyon, loaded guns in all Parks--reflect that tension. With history as a guide, we know that these are battles informed by what has happened in previous fights, and that with each one, government has evolved a bit to face the next one. That can always be undermined, as the Bush administration demonstrated, but each fight has incrementally led to greater protections for these places.
The biggest fight, however, looms. And it dwarfs everything gone before it, including Hetch Hetchy.
Burns documentary was the only National Parks report released this week. On Thursday, the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization and the National Resources Defense Council released National Parks In Peril: The Threats of Climate Disruption [pdf]. It is a sobering assessment of what climate change has already done in our Parks, and what it threatens to do if action is not taken immediately.
From the press release [pdf] announcing the report:
Among the particular impacts of human-caused climate change identified in the report are:
- Everglades, Biscayne, and Dry Tortugas national parks and Ellis Island National Monument, all mostly less than three feet above sea level, are in danger to being lost entirely to rising seas, which could be three to four feet higher by century’s end under a higher-emissions future. The coastal barrier islands of Assateague Island and Cape Hatteras national seashores are very likely to be broken apart by rising seas, stronger storms, and flooding.
- The original Jamestown fort in Colonial National Historical Park, where Europeans first settled in America in 1607, is in danger of being lost to erosion of the riverbank of the James River, as a result of rising seas and stronger storms.
- Grizzly bears in Yellowstone National Park are threatened by a loss of whitebark pine nuts, as higher temperatures have enabled a widespread of mountain pine beetle infestations among the high-elevation whitebark pines. Their nuts are the most important pre-hibernation food for grizzly bears, which have lower birth rates when the nuts are in short supply. Last month, a federal judge blocked the Bush Administration’s removal of Yellowstone-area grizzly bears from Endangered Species Act protections, citing climate change’s effects on whitebark pines.
- In Rocky Mountain National Park, a beetle infestation, spreading higher and faster because of hotter temperatures, is killing virtually all mature lodgepole pines in the park. In Bandelier National Monument and Mesa Verde National Park, higher temperatures have enabled other bark beetles to kill nearly all piñon pines.
- In Yosemite National Park and other western sites, researchers have documented an increase in tree death rates among trees of all types and ages. In Yosemite, because of warmer winters, conifer forests are retreating upslope and being replaced by oaks and scrub.
- Glaciers are melting in all parks that have them, and could be gone entirely from Glacier National Park within 12 or 13 years.
- As a result of temperature changes and related impacts, saguaros could be eliminated from Saguaro National Park and Joshua trees from Joshua Tree National Park.
No glaciers in Glacier National Park. No saguaros in Saguaro National Park. No Joshua trees in Joshua?
Will this best idea always prevail? We've already reached a point where there's very little left to save. Legendary former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall expressed it most poignantly in the documentary--he knew he was going to be the last Secretary to be able to fly over some remote corner of America and say "that has to be saved. It should be a National Park."
These places have and will continue to be for America our great cathedrals. Our sacred spaces. They have a unique ability to unite us. Because, surely, if anything exists that can quell the cynical voice in one's soul, that can make one feel an essential American, a deep patriot rooted into the soil of this singular land, it is experiencing one of these places. The steps of the Lincoln memorial, where Marian Anderson and Martin Luther King, Jr. changed history. Yosemite, where John Muir and Ansel Adams were inspired to legendary artistic heights. Yellowstone, where buffalo do indeed still roam.
There's a permanence to the Parks that we have been able to take it for granted for the last half century. These are the places where there's still some of the wildness that shaped who we are as a people. We can still experience it, just for a little while, and it has always been there. Unfortunately, with climate change, we might have reached the end of that experience. This is our last chance to do it right. Even Hetch Hetchy could be restored at this point.
Because once the glaciers, saguaros, and grizzlies are gone, they're gone forever.
Here are a few of my personal Park experiences.
Yellowstone National Park
Yellowstone Falls from Artist Point at sunrise
Elk in the Yellowstone River
Glacier National Park
Mountain goats in Glacier
Glacier National Park in wildfire season
Grand Teton National Park
As close an encounter as one would wish with a Teton moose.
Grand Canyon National Park
These are wholly unequal to the task at hand. No photograph can possible capture the Grand Canyon. Even Ken Burns didn't really do it, and my amateur skills and little digital point and shoot are pathetic in comparison. But I was there, and I took the pictures to prove it.