The National Parks

They are a treasure trove of nature’s magnificence—84 million acres of some of the most stunning landscapes in the world, providing refuge both for animal species that otherwise would have vanished forever and for a human species in constant search of spiritual replenishment. Born of a uniquely American notion of man’s relationship to nature, they are, in the words of historian Wallace Stegner, “the best idea we’ve ever had.” They are America’s National Parks.

Now in this companion volume to Ken Burns' 12-hour Fall 2009 PBS series, The National Parks, Burns—director of Jazz, Baseball and the groundbreaking series The Civil War—and his longtime collaborator, writer Dayton Duncan, provide a sprawling, comprehensive history of the American national parks system. It’s a system that began from a radical notion: that our nation’s spectacular landscape and natural resources should be preserved for their own sake, set aside not just for kings or noblemen or the very rich, but for everyone. And so, only a few short years after Americans first laid eyes on the Yosemite Valley in 1851, the 1864 Yosemite Grant made it the first great natural park in history; soon thereafter America’s first National Park was established at Yellowstone in 1872.

The National Parks tells the story of those who worked to set aside these lands—often against relentless opposition—including President Theodore Roosevelt, who would do more in service of this cause than all other presidents combined, and the great Scottish-born naturalist John Muir, whose transcendental writings helped crystallize for Americans a notion of the journey into nature as a journey of self-discovery. And it tells how, as the number of national parks and monuments grew, the need for an agency to oversee them ultimately led to the creation in 1916 of the National Park Service under Woodrow Wilson.

Burns and Dayton tell the individual stories of how many of the parks were brought into the national parks system—which today encompasses nearly 400 sites—and they describe in their own words and through excerpts from contemporaneous sources the importance and splendor of individual parks from Haleakala in Hawaii to Acadia in Maine, from Denali in Alaska to the Everglades in Florida, and from Glacier in Montana to Big Bend in Texas. The National Parks also includes extended interviews with six people whose lives have been inextricably intertwined with the preservation of America’s natural grandeur, including naturalist Terry Tempest Williams.

The result is a majestic, beautifully illustrated volume that captures the history of how some radical, revolutionary, uniquely American ideals led to the preservation of some of the world’s most sublime wonderlands.