TONIGHT

• Home
• Video
• Podcasts/RSS 
• Local Showtimes
• Past Shows
• Blogs
• About the Show
• Tell Tavis
• Features
• Mobile

RELATED LINKS

• "Meet Ranger Johnson, Ken Burns' new documentary star"
• "Ken Burns, the Voice of the Wilderness"
• The National Parks
• Mr. Burns bio

E-mail a friend

Filmmaker talks about the only African American park ranger in the Sierra Nevada. (2:23)
 

Full interview (23:48)
 

Tavis: Always pleased to welcome Ken Burns to this program. Through the course of his brilliant career, he's become one of the great storytellers in film history. Seminal projects like "JAZZ," "Baseball," and "Unforgivable Blackness," his latest is called "The National Parks: America's Best Idea." The 12-hour documentary kicks off here on PBS September 27th. Here now, a sneak preview of "The National Parks."

[Clip]

Tavis: Ken Burns joins us tonight from New York. Ken, nice to have you back on this program.

Ken Burns: Thank you so much, Tavis. Great to be with you.

Tavis: Let me start by saying congratulations. I've had a chance to see some of this and it is absolutely phenomenal, and once again, you have done it, my friend, so congrats at the outset.

Burns: It's not a travelogue; it's not a nature film, though there's great stuff of nature. It's about ideas and individuals. It's about stories. And I think that's what makes it different from other things about the national parks. It's not even a recommendation of which lodge or inn to stay at. (Laughter)

Tavis: Well, you are one of the great storytellers, as I said a moment ago, so I know that Americans and folk around the world are going to appreciate seeing the kind of stories that you bring to life.

Let me start with the obvious beginning, at least for me, which is this title - "The National Parks: America's Best Idea." I know there's going to be some conversation kicking up just around that subtitle - America's best idea, Mr. Burns?

Burns: Yeah, well, we kick it up in our film in the first few minutes. (Laughter) We steal this from the historian and writer Wallace Stegner, who said it's the best idea we've ever had, and immediately someone comes on and says, "It's not the best idea. The best idea comes from Thomas Jefferson when all men are created equal." And that's, of course, right.

But once you set a country in motion with those ideals, at least, ahead of you, because we know Mr. Jefferson meant all White men of property, free of debt, when he wrote that, and didn't see the contradictions and didn't see the hypocrisy in the fact that as he wrote those words he owned 100 human beings, but if you set in motion a country dedicated to that you'd be hard-pressed to find a better idea, or at least an expression.

We like to think that the national parks are the expression of the Declaration of Independence applied to the landscape, because for the first time in human history land was set aside not for kings or noblemen or the very rich, but for everybody and for all time. It's an utterly democratic impulse and it comes out of opportunities, fresh opportunities here on this at least apparently virgin continent that we've inherited, this Garden of Eden that Thomas Jefferson himself thought would take hundreds of generations to fill up.

But very quickly, four or five, we've filled it up and we're in danger of not only losing everyplace but losing the animals occupying those places. So somebody goes against the acquisitive and extractive and some would say rapacious interests of progress and says, wait, let's save these places. It's not enough to look at every river and think dam, it's not enough to look at every beautiful stand of trees and thing board feet, to look at every beautiful canyon and wonder what minerals can be extracted from it.

What could we save? What kind of residue of this Garden of Eden could we have? So the original impulse of the national parks is in some ways spiritual. It is easier to worship God in cathedrals in nature than those made by the hand of man, which was the European tradition that we were trying to escape the specific gravity of.

Tavis: I can hear somebody - somebodies, in fact - saying right now, "Here goes Ken Burns again; he wants to spin this conversation about conservation, he wants to spin a conversation about the environment, and next he'll be talking about global warming and the trees. He wants to spin this conversation when it's really about - it's not about spiritualism, it's about conservation and you ought to just come out and say that.

Burns: Well you know what? Part of it is, but the impulse to save it comes out of spiritualism. It then moves to conservation in the old Teddy Roosevelt version. It moves to patriotism when we sing "My Country, 'Tis of Thee," someone wrote in the first decades of the 20th century.

We're not talking about trade statistics or even the shadows cast by lofty metropolitan skyscrapers. We're talking about this land that we've saved in these national parks. Later on it becomes economic. These places are the permanent pipeline when the resources that we may have extracted have long disappeared, and then more recently - and that's not our providence, because we're history - it's evolved into complex ecological and environmental issues.

Nope, we want to tell you stories, we want to introduce you to 50 or so human beings, most of whom you've never heard of. Of course you've heard of Teddy Roosevelt and you might have heard of John Muir, the great wilderness prophet, and John D. Rockefeller Jr., the man who sort of reversed his father's acquisitive energies and devoted it to philanthropy, of which the national parks were great beneficiaries.

But this is a story that is black and brown and red and yellow and female and unknown as much as it is a story of well-known White guys.

Tavis: To your point now, Ken, let me throw one person at you as an example of the kinds of stories that you tell wrapped around everyday people. Tell me about Shelton Johnson.

Burns: Well, we met Shelton Johnson while we were leading up to filming this film. He's a park ranger right now stationed at Yosemite. And he is an African American; he is the only African American ranger in the Sierra Nevada. He interprets the little-known story of the African American Buffalo Soldiers, the celebrated cavalrymen who were in the first decade of the 20th century the parks' protectors in Sequoia and Yosemite national parks - two of the earliest national parks.

Now, it's already an interesting, little-known phenomenon, but if you go back and remember that of course more African Americans are lynched in the first decades of the 20th century than in any other time in our history, you begin to understand what a kind of challenging and interesting story it therefore becomes if the people that are telling you how to behave in a national park - and most of those people, those cavalrymen, are, how shall we say, overseeing, are White - it makes, as Sheldon Johnson said, for a very interesting day.

And he not only brings alive the story of the Buffalo Soldiers, which is wonderful, but of course like Shelby Foote in "The Civil War," like Buck O'Neil in "Baseball," like Wynton Marsalis in "JAZZ," like others - Stanley Crouch in "Jack Johnson" - he hits it out of the park when we go off the questions that are specific to that, and that's, of course, the great glory of American history.

As long as you pigeonhole people, segregate them into their areas, you're not doing anybody any favors. So Sheldon Johnson knows how to talk about the Buffalo Soldiers, but more important, he knows how to talk about the national parks. And as we know, there are too many communities in our country that do not yet feel an ownership of these parks and it's quite often inner city African American, and Sheldon comes from inner city Detroit or Hispanic Americans.

And I can now go in those neighborhoods - in fact, thanks to a grant from the Haas Junior Fund, our educational outreach has sent me there to many, many cities and I can show these kids in these schools, these folks in these community places, heroes that look and sound like them, heroes of the national parks that are as important as anybody else, and that's the great bottom-up, democratic story that the bigger arc of the national parks entail.

Tavis: There are a number of great parks here in California; of course, a number of great parks in L.A. where I live and work every day. I work out - two or three days a week I work outdoors, and I work outside - get my workout on at a park called Kenny Hahn. And I feel there's other parks around the city that I've worked out in and run through, but in this one particular park I noticed one day that the persons who are now taking advantage of what the parks offer - the water and the hills and the place for picnicking, et cetera, et cetera, tend not to be White but oftentimes Hispanic and African American.

And one of the senses I got from just walking around - I did my own little informal research preparing for my conversation with you, and it's one of the last vestiges in our country where you don't have to spend a whole lot of money to get in, where you're next to God, where there's nature, where the kids can run around, where there are rangers that protect you and you know your kids aren't going to get harmed, et cetera, et cetera.

Anyway, that's just what I witnessed the other day. Contextualize that for me with regard to this series you've done.

Burns: Well, you've said it better than anyone could. I was just in Yosemite and we went to Bridal Veil Falls, and there was a little three, four-year-old Hispanic gal. She didn't know where she was, she was just racing up to the spray of this place.

And I was brought to tears. She's probably from the Central Valley. It's cheap now. The national parks thrived during our Great Depression not just because they got the first shovel-ready stimulus dollars of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal in the form of a Civilian Conservation Core - the CCC - that set up 1,000 camps within three months, employing 300,000 young men, sending money back to millions of Americans - we couldn't get a trailer to Katrina victims in three months, let's remember - a federal government that actually worked even in the depths of the Depression.

But it's about - it's this individual experience. Forget about the spiritualism; forget about conservation, ecology, patriotism. When we go to a national park, and you felt this too, you are closer to something bigger than yourself. This is the paradox. And that doesn't - as you perceive, as you know, as you submit yourself, you perceive yourself, your insignificance, that makes you bigger, just as the egotist among us is diminished by his or her self-regard.

That's what the parks do at a visceral level, and that's for everybody. When you perceive your co-ownership of these parks, man, we own - you and I own the grandest canyon on Earth - how lucky are we?

Tavis: And yet, our conversation notwithstanding, when we think of the parks, at least heretofore, we have not thought of them as being owned by every one of us, including people of color. We tend to think of them as they're preserved, a wholly owned subsidiary of White America, if you will.

Burns: Well, that has been the case for most of it. In the very beginning of the parks, the first people who could come were the very rich from the east. They traveled by rail. The railroads were the first sort of promoters of the park. It cost a lot of money for that cross-country ticket and then the hotels in there. And what happened is the automobile came along and it got democratized.

Depression came along and Harold Ickes and Franklin Roosevelt desegregated a lot of those Jim Crow facilities in the national parks and began to sort of subtly erode it. Changes, as you know, we've been waiting a long time for.

But I think what happens for those people who are aware of that just very powerful sense of co-ownership, that it doesn't matter whether you're a billionaire or whether you're changing the beds at the hotel just outside the park - you own that park, you're a co-owner, and all you've got to do there as a co-owner is going in and make sure somebody's taking care of it, and we could use some more money.

That is to say, we need people who are arguing against those extractive and acquisitive interests and say, "Let's keep up the maintenance." But man, it's ours, and when you look around at the rim of the Grand Canyon or at the geysers in Yellowstone or even at a historical site - remember, we've had the presence of mind as a great country to evolve this idea. Just as Thomas Jefferson's "All men are created equal" just meant all White men of property, we now mean all people of color and women and we protect our children and our elderly and the handicapped and we debate the unborn and those of different sexual preference - you could say all of American history is the expansion of that.

Well, so too the national parks set aside obvious natural scenery and then it evolved to complex archaeological sites that recorded the ancient history of the Native Americans before us, then it got into historic sites like battlefields, habitats like the Everglades. Nothing spectacular about a swamp. Well, it turns out to be one of the most diverse environments on Earth.

And then we saved slave cabins. Then we saved Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas - still a working inner-city high school today, it's a unit of the National Park Service. Manzanar, where Japanese American citizens were interred during the Second World War, shamefully.

Sand Creek in Washita in the Great Plains, where Indians were massacred by United States soldiers. We've saved Martin Luther King's boyhood home in Atlanta. We've got the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore.

But we've been a big enough country to inhale a complex geological history - that was the obvious first thing - but also a complex cultural and historic and now ethnographic past that says we're a complicated country and by understanding all of that we make ourselves better.

So Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where United 93 went down, is a site of the National Park Service. So is Oklahoma City, the site of the greatest domestic terrorism event. It's a great system. I'll argue on that great idea. (Laughter)

Tavis: And so you have. The timing could not have been more propitious, so I want to know how much you paid Barack Obama to go to two parks this summer with his kids.

Burns: I bumped into him before he went and he said, "We're going to the national parks," (laughter) and I said, "I heard, and we're so very pleased." And he had Malia and Sasha look at the films and now they've become junior rangers. We're at an existential moment, my friend, in this United States, and if existentialism for the purposes of a brief conversation is the tension between being and doing, the virtual world so many of us, and particularly our children, live in is neither.

And we know about nature deficit disorder. I lived in a subdivision growing up and I would just pile out of the house at 8:00 a.m., come back for lunch, and then come back when the dinner call came. Now, everybody sits in their room all day and they text and they do video games and they can't stay off the Facebook account, whatever, and we are starved for that relationship to something bigger.

And I hope that by the president going as he did, by those girls getting involved as they did, that the rest of us can be reminded that all of those toys will be there when we get back, but we will make lasting memories. My grandfather took my daddy and my daddy took me, and I've taken my three girls to the national parks and that's where we'll remember each other.

Not in the quotidian moments of getting up and going to school and going to the work, but in these special times that we had together, out in nature where we are reminded of our atomic insignificance and are, in that great way that the parks work, made better because of that.

Tavis: It's still the case that we have a generation of kids who, to be blunt about it, think that parks are boring, Ken Burns.

Burns: Yeah. Yeah, no, it's true, and it's so sad because once you get them out you have total converts. The local PBS station in Miami sent an African American family into the Everglades.

Now, the Everglades were traditionally a place where African Americans didn't go because it was a lawless area, the mythology of animals and threats. The family had a wonderful time. They did sort of PBS version of a reality show, and I met the mother and she said, "I can't wait to go back."

So I think that there's always just that resistance to something new, particularly when we've got all these distractions in front of us. But I've never had somebody not be transformed by time out in the national parks. It's not like ho-hum. Somebody once said that people who are bored by the view from the Grand Canyon will be disappointed on the day of judgment. (Laughter)

Tavis: I read a quote from you somewhere relative to this wonderful series where you said that parks are good places for epiphanies. What'd you mean by that?

Burns: Well, I think it goes back to what we're talking about. You stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon, you look down. That Colorado River has been carving rock, exposed pre-Cambrian Vishnu schist that is 1.7 billion years old - nearly half the age of the planet. And if I'm lucky, if I'm fortunate, I get fourscore - 80 years.

Who am I? I'm nothing in comparison to that. And yet in that moment of humility, something is opened up and I am able to participate in a kinship with all people and all things that John Muir spoke passionately about.

That is so liberating, and I think that every single one of the 50 people that we introduce you to had a moment like that. If you lift up the rock of any national park, there's some one person or a couple people or an association that got together and devoted their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to saving it.

But at the heart of it was that personal transformation. Everyone we interviewed for the series over the last 10 years had their own experiences like that, and each one of us, or most of us who worked on the series, I know had that moment where you just feel like you're opened up. You have this transformation - whatever you want to call it. You can call it religion, you can call it science, you can call it art.

Whatever it was, something was transformed. My molecules were rearranged and I feel - I pinch myself. I'm getting paid to stand out here? I got up at 3:00 a.m. and I carried this heavy equipment out to this point, I waited for the sun to come up in Acadia National Park, where the first light hits the United States of America every day, or Hawaii volcanoes where they're making new land - that lava comes out and makes that island just a little bit bigger every day. There's very few places where new land is being created.

From the beautiful majesty of Alaska to the sensitivity of the Everglades and the Dry Tortugas, this is, just in the natural aspect of the national parks, unbelievable legacy.

Tavis: Tell me about production logistics - how you shot this, over what period. And I know that you lost - we read about it, of course, in the papers, you lost one of your major funders and still you got this thing done. Tell me about how you did this.

Burns: Yeah, well, General Motors, which had been funding us since 1987, we signed a 10-year deal in 1999 so we knew, regardless of a financial crisis, that in 2009 that would be over and we'd already replaced them, in this case with Bank of America, and we've got lots of other funders including the Haas Junior Fund that I just mentioned to you and many others - the National Park Foundation, the Park Foundation itself, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Pugh Charitable Trust, Arthur Vining Davis. Not easy, but over a 10-year period we accumulated their support.

But you're right; it takes a lot of generalship to film at the gates of the Arctic in northern Alaska and at the Dry Tortugas off the Florida Keys, from Acadia in Maine to those Hawaii volcanoes, and everywhere in between. But what we were looking for was not - you can go shoot that, anybody can do that and get beautiful pictures in these places.

They look exactly the way John Muir saw them and they look the way the ancestors of the Native Americans who once called them home saw them 10,000 years ago. But then you have to figure out how to tell a story. No amount of rare and never-before-seen archives amounts to anything unless you collect those stories.

And I think most of the time, most of the effort, most of the love and energy that went into this was trying to weave together, like a Russian novel. It's not set against the backdrop of war, catastrophic war, but of these beautiful places, Tavis, that are just - they just knock your socks off. You stand there and you can't imagine that the next place was going to be any better than the one before, and all of a sudden you see a new view and sometimes it's something specific, like lichen on a rock, or it might be a glacier in July or an animal walks by.

We saw grizzly bears, and we've had the experiences of our lifetime, and still able to engage those themes that we've been doing. The diversity in this film is not politically correct, it is naturally occurring.

Tavis: Your passion, I can feel it here in L.A., 3,000 miles away from you in that studio in New York. I know the viewer at home can feel your passion as well. I want to close by saying that I've always believed that all you know is what you're giving, you never know what people are receiving, and furthermore, you never know who's receiving it.

I don't know if you heard about this or saw this, but not long ago on this program we had a great iconic artist named Prince, a guy you may have heard of, who was on this program for two nights and made all kind of international news because of some revelations that he shared with us for the first time publicly about his childhood.

But over that two-night period I was blown away by the fact that his entire narrative for two nights was built around "Unforgivable Blackness." I don't know if you heard about this or saw this, but he kept coming back to that and I was like, "This is Prince talking about Ken Burns' documentary," and it was amazing.

So your stuff just impacts people in so many myriad ways, and I want to just say thank you for doing this piece in advance of it coming out.

Burns: Oh, that's so, so kind, Tavis. I bumped into a guy in an airport who was headed for an MBA 20 years ago. When "The Civil War" came out, changed it to history. He now teaches middle school. He said to me, "I probably could make more money if I'd stayed an MBA, but I feel so rich having made the decision I made, and I just looked forward to the time when I'd be able to thank you."

So he thanked me and I just thought, oh my God, why are we here on PBS if not for a moment like that, where somebody, whether it's Prince or a guy who's carrying all that extra load for the rest of us, teaching our middle schoolers about American history, which is for most kids castor oil. This is great, this is why we get up in the morning, and that's the kind of thing that I think the parks are speaking to, that you're speaking to, that I'm trying to do in all the different subjects that we tackle.

I thank you, brother, for that kind comment.

Tavis: "The National Parks: America's Best Idea." Now that I'm at the end of this conversation, Burns might be right about that. (Laughter) Given the way this conversation has gone. The good news is we'll all be able to judge for ourselves, as you'll be able to see it on PBS. "The National Parks: America's Best Idea," produced by the one and only Ken Burns. Ken, congrats again. Nice to have you on, we look forward to seeing the piece.

Burns: Thank you.

Tavis: That's our show for tonight.