I’m with you on that! I wish they’d double his music budget and cut the running time in half!
One thing that may well have made the series worthwhile to me was confirmation of my longstanding belief of why most of the parks exist - because the land is useless for exploitation in most other economic respects. The Rep proposing the Bill for Yosemite said as much not just once, but twice!
My only quarrel with Burns is that he searches high and low, discarding the most eloquent speakers available, and picks someone who can put you to sleep in 30 seconds. This one is no exception, and I missed the second hour. But I’ve seen both the parks and a whole lot more (Denali, Katmai, Craters of the Moon, Crater Lake, Glacier, Death Valley, Devil’s Tower, Badlands, Grand Canyon and others) and am happy to see that he’s done this series to encourage arm-chair tourists to actually go see these wonders.
Yeah, I noticed that and thought it funny. I think it says something about the 1864 mindset as compared to a more modern one. You can launch a proposal today with no more rationale than “this is a national resource we need to preserve”. In 1864 that preservation concept was new and bizarre, so he had to do a cost-benefit analysis first.
Yeah, but if the “national resource” exists today, it pretty much attests to the fact that in the past no one was able to figure out how to exploit it. Perhaps a better slogan might be “National Parks, beautiful, but useless!” 
But the show indicated that people were exploiting the park and the land. Note in the second hour, when they expanded Yosemite, they did it because people were finding ways to make money – grazing sheep, for instance.
The land was certainly useful for exploitation – the show indicated the people were doing it. It was “useless” in the sense that there was nothing to mine.
But those lands were outside Yosemite Valley. The original park was just the Valley, which is a small (but spectacular) piece of land. Muir feared that the overgrazing by sheep would deteriorate the land which would cause erosion and flooding in the Valley.
nature as worship was a big, big thing in the late 1800’s. it seemed to be a nature as cathedral vs nature as something to be tamed thing going on. you had people building like crazy all around niagara falls, making factorys and plants. then you had those trying to keep the places in the west, wild and natural.
fun times.
Also all that sheepshit in the watershed.
The whole “magnificent natural beauty as cathedral” has always seemed backwards to me. (e.g. “Walking in the redwoods is like being in a cathedral”)
If you believe that places like Yosemite are God’s work, even the most impressive church suffers in comparison. Of course, houses of worship usually have the advantage of having some form of climate control…
Tonight’s installment was fantastic.
It was basically another two freaking hours on Yellowstone, Yosemite, Roosevelt and Muir, with a few minutes about a couple of other parks thrown in as afterthoughts.
For me, it is siimply another couple of hours crowded onto our recorder.
Well, yes. Because they were the only parks during most of the period. They also were important due to the various political battles surrounding them, which helped shape the National Park concept. It allowed for more than just “Oooh, look at the pretty park!”
Odd that I can watch these on PBS’ broadcast but not their website. How inconvenient.
I wonder if Ed Abbey will get a mention when/if they get around to talking about Arches.
That would be nice. I didn’t see him on the list, though. I’ll be surprised if even Arches gets more than a mention, despite iconic Delicate Arch. After all, “the desert is for movies and God-intoxicated mystics, not for family recreation”.
I’m surprised. I always thought of them as “a way to keep out loggers.” Of course it’s only this year that I’ve found out there was a difference between National Parks and National Forests - so, I should probably just watch the documentary.
Folks out here seem to be frequently intoxicated on things other than God. 
First 2 episodes are now on PBS:
Oh, and I can say that John Muir **was **an Ent!