By Tim Redmond
I have two kids (with piano, gymnastics, tae kwon do, PTA and assorted play dates and sleepovers), a busy job, a dog to walk, dirty dishes to wash … you know the drill. So I haven’t been able to watch every minute of every episode of Ken Burns magnum opus on the national park system. I don’t think I know anyone who has that kind of time these days.
But I tuned in for a while last night, to Episode Two, which tracks John Muir, Teddy Roosevelt, the Antiquities Act etc., and I walked away with a very clear message:
This is a series about what government does right.
In the segment I saw, the feds were the good guys — Congress was saving wild areas, and when the western ranchers and developers tried to commercialize the Grand Canyon (in the name of private enterprise), Roosevelt used his authority to block them, infuriating the states-rights and anti-government Westerners but (of course) preserving what everyone know agrees is a national treasure.
There was a fabulous quote from environmental journalist Juanita Green.
“In other parts of the world,” she says, “there are places that are wild because some nobleman decreed it. In the United States, we don’t need a nobleman. … that’s democracy.”
At a time when the mayor of San Francisco is lauding the death of a billionaire who believed just the opposite — that the private sector should decide what gets saved and that private philanthropy (from fortunes built on tax cuts) is a better solution than public spending (fueled by taxes on the wealthy), we all ought to think about that a little.
If the national parks are “America’s best idea,” as Burns dubs his documentary, then the best thing this nation has ever done is exerted government supremacy over the private sector when it comes to the use of land. It’s sad to think how radical that sounds today.