Ken Burns' at his best again in 'The National Parks'

     The kids in elementary school who were ardent campers never seemed to be very pleasant. Early in life, we moved from a small suburb into a more heavily wooded area (now scarcely wooded at all, I understand) & we always had to travel by the deep waters of a reservoir. Decades later, "The Blair Witch Project" would capture my feeling about the woods of my home state, and about Nature (capital N) in general: I always feel like a stranger & intruder, not kindred at all, amazed & overwhelmed by beauty, but also sensing a huge antagonism from the life in these spaces.

    The new series by Ken Burns on PBS has built a bridge to the natural world for me, by showing me the activity of those who, a century & more ago, saw the threat unchecked exploitation of resources posed to the immense & rare natural landscape of the country, and out of a love for it & for future generations, set out to do what they could to preserve it from being ravaged even further. The words of John Muir, of John Burroughs, of Theodore Roosevelt supply something that isn't in my temperament. For me, the awe has always been accompanied by a terror; partly, probably, from my feeling that mountains & rivers & forests are things without human language, apart from the human story. Through the narrative, written by Clayton Duncan, linked to these images, Ken Burns supplies the story that I haven't wished to discover on my own.