[Leica] National Park series - epiphany

[abridge at gmail.com (Adam Bridge)]

I guess I don't have the same political agenda that Lawrence Zeitlin
has. Clearly he watched the National Parks documentary with a vastly
different eye than I. Muir was a zealot - it's why he was effective.
He was also smart and communicated well. Roosevelt was an avid hunter
and Burns does a good job of demonstrating this: that even on Teddy's
visit to Yellowstone he had to be restrained from shooting a mountain
lion. And yet . . . in spite of this . . . or perhaps informed by it .
. . he was instrumental in the formation of our national park/national
monument system.

Burns' POINT was not that the rich cannot be trusted but that they
should not be relied upon to provide parks for everyone. The very park
Mr. Zeitlin cites is a case in point. Should we rely on the wealthy to
protect our natural heritage or should we rely on a system that just
as well could engulf and devour them? How many lessons about unbridled
capitalism do we have to learn?

I like this documentary - I'm much less in love with the photography
and with the juxtaposition of images from modern photographers with
images taken 100 years ago.

Adam Bridge

On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 2:35 PM, Lawrence Zeitlin <lrzeitlin at gmail.com> 
wrote:
> OK, I get it now. Ken Burns' TV series on the National Parks is not about
> the parks themselves. Rather it is a story about people who became so
> obsessed with a feature of the natural environment that they spent a
> lifetime trying to sway the public to accept their ideas. If you want to 
> see
> pretty pictures of the parks tune in the PBS Nature programs or the 
> National
> Geographic programs.The second episode of the series detailed the
> relationship between John Muir, a naturalistic zealot, and Theodore
> Roosevelt, an "outdoors" political dynamo who never saw an animal that he
> didn't want to kill. Somehow their interaction produced the legislation
> which resulted in the National Park system. Burns' barely hidden agenda was
> that the rich cannot be trusted to care for the environment, nor can the
> politicians. Experience in New York state indicates that this is probably
> not true. New York is replete with large state parks endowed by the
> affluent. The land comprising the Adirondack State Park, a forever wild
> region of mountains and forests, three times the size of Yosemite, was
> purchased and donated to the public by a consortium which included the
> Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Goulds, and the Roosevelts. The 
> Harrimans
> donated a big swath of land along the Hudson River for the Bear Mountain
> State Park. The Hudson Valley was cleaned up because the rich didn't want 
> an
> industrially polluted river spoiling the view from their shoreside estates.
> Of course other states might not be as environmentally enlightened.
> Larry Z
>
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