What Did Documentary Filmmaker Ken Burns Do on His Summer Vacation?
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 09.18.08 | 11:43 AM ET
Photo by “A six-part, 12-hour series, of course,” writes Christopher Reynolds in the Los Angeles Times. Actually, I don’t think Burns finished the project. But when Reynolds caught up with him at Glacier National Park, he was at work on one of his trademark PBS series—this one, scheduled to air in fall 2009, about America’s national parks. “For the first time in human history,” Burns remarked, “land was set aside not for the pleasure of kings and noblemen and the very, very rich, but for everybody, for all time.”
Among other things, Reynolds writes, the series will examine the “tensions that have long preoccupied park-watchers—the constant jostling among recreation proponents, preservationists and commercial interests, for instance, and the big businesses that shaped the system in its early decades, especially the railroad moguls and road-builders.”
It sounds great.
Hopefully Burns will cover Edward Abbey, whose book, Desert Solitaire, memorably includes passages about his attempts, while working as a ranger at Arches National Park, to derail plans to build roads in the park. Abbey seems to personify so many of those tensions.
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
