[Leica] National Park series - epiphany

[richard.lists at gmail.com (Richard Man)]

I have not have the chance to watch any yet, but I have always known
that this is the intention. There are lots of pretty pics of the
National Parks, but most people don't know about the history, except
perhaps some of us in California. John Muir was on one of the proposed
CA quarter designs, so the Adams and Muir legacies run deeper here.

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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