Original subtitles

[Wolf howls]

[Wind blowing]

[Bird cawing]

MAN: I think wolves are probably the perfect symbol

of that earlier time before we human beings set out to

conquer nature.

[Howling]

They're sort of the resistance movement to everything that

we represent.

The brothers and sisters of the wolves' ancestors are

the ones who came over to the campfire to join our ancestors

and become our most loyal pets.

The wolves' ancestors are the ones who refused to come into

the campfire, and we've never really forgiven them for that.

[Howling]

They remained free, wild, undomesticated, dangerous.

And long after they no longer posed a real threat to us

and our survival, I think we still held it against them

that they were out there, free and wild and dangerous,

and went out to do as good a job as we could of getting

rid of them.

MAN: It is a better world with some buffalo left in it.

A richer world with some gorgeous canyons unmarred by

sign boards or superhighways, undrowned by power or

irrigation reservoirs.

If we preserved as parks only those places that have no

economic possibilities, we would have no parks.

And in the decades to come, it will not be only

the buffalo and the trumpeter swan who need sanctuaries.

Our own species is going to need them, too.

It needs them now.

Wallace Stegner.

PETER COYOTE: Since its beginnings in the mid-19th

century, the national park idea had embraced two equally

important, yet apparently contradictory thoughts... that

the park should preserve America's special places

in their natural conditions forever and that they should

be open and accessible for the enjoyment of all Americans.

Early park leaders had glossed over any paradox, arguing that

the best way to protect the parks was to build public

support for them by encouraging more

and more visitors.

But with the end of World War ll, as the parks neared their

100th birthday and an increasingly affluent

and mobile nation placed demands on them as never

before, the balancing act between preservation and use

would be severely tested.

MAN: It's hard to imagine these places existing without

those tensions.

They are precisely the right tensions that a democratic

nation should have as it tries to figure out how to protect

lands that are there for all the people.

COYOTE: The very definition of what constituted a national

park would be challenged and then broadened, and just when

it seemed as if there were no pristine places left to set

aside as national parks, a new one would be created

in the backyard of one of the nation's

fastest growing cities.

While far to the north, in the nation's last frontier,

the basic principles of the park idea would be

reinvigorated for a new generation.

MAN: I'm not quite sure why it works this way, but we seem to

put our highest ideals in our national parks.

They're like, um, homes for our finest dreams,

and therefore they function like consciences.

MAN: When you're standing there silently in the presence

of the giant sequoias, you can't help but recognize

that you're a part of something that is way beyond

whatever it is that you envision this world might be.

You can't stand there all alone without understanding

that there's a power in the world that is far greater than

anything that you've ever experienced and that you're

connected to that power just as that sequoia is connected

to that power.

It permeates all of us.

And when you understand that, it improves your relationship

with your fellow man because you realize that he has

the same capacity.

He has the same access.

He is your brother.

[Big band music playing]

COYOTE: In 1946, with the war finally over and gasoline

rationing and travel restrictions lifted,

attendance at Yellowstone National Park quadrupled from

189,000 to 807,000.

Two years later, it would cross the one million mark

for the first time and never turn back.

MAN: All of a sudden, everybody in the world wanted

to come to Yellowstone.

Everyone was tired of the war.

Everyone wanted recreation.

Everybody flocked to Yellowstone in their own cars.

There weren't enough campgrounds.

There weren't enough hotels.

There weren't enough souvenirs.

There weren't enough anything, and the buildings had had 4 or

5 years to deteriorate, so the park facilities were

in bad shape.

COYOTE: All across the United States, the same thing was

happening in other parks, straining the entire system.

Nationwide, annual attendance would climb from a wartime low

of 6.8 million visitors in 1943 to nearly

32 million by 1950.

CRONON: One of the things that happened in the 1950s with the

explosion of families in cars taking their kids on the road

to visit the national parks was that more and more

American children grew up with the national parks as

a formative part of their childhood, and I think we

often forget that in fact one of the aspects of the national

parks that is most important to our American-mess, to our

patriotism, is the fact that they are landscapes of origin

and of childhood for so many Americans.

They are the places where we grew up.

They are the places where we experienced our families

in some of their most intimate locations and where our

families and our childhoods connected to what it meant to

be an American.

MAN: It was just like being in heaven, being in there.

In those days, there was no road.

The park was all a blessed wilderness, and I have often

thought since, what a wonderful people we would have

been if we had wanted to keep it that way.

[Thunder]

Adolph Murie.

COYOTE: Back in the summer of 1922, a college student from

Moorhead, Minnesota, named Adolph Murie arrived in

Mt. McKinley National Park in Alaska.

The park had been established 5 years earlier, but Congress

had only recently appropriated any money for its protection

and development... $8,000 used to hire a superintendent

and one assistant, who were instructed to patrol 2,200

square miles, an area half the size of Connecticut.

They were also expected to keep poachers away from the

wildlife and prepare the park for the tourists promoters

hoped would soon be coming to see the highest mountain

in North America.

That year, a total of 7 showed up.

One of them was Adolph Murie, who was there to help his

older brother Olaus, a biologist, conduct a study

of caribou migrations.

Murie was 22 years old.

It was his first time away from Minnesota.

MAN: Ade Murie was not an imposing

or intimidating-looking kind of a man.

He kind of had a Minnesota farmer's look about him,

and I don't mean that as an insult, but he was not

an overwhelming person by looks.

He was, however, in terms of character

and intelligence and durability and stick-to-it-iveness,

a man to be reckoned with.

COYOTE: For 5 weeks, Murie and his brother tramped for miles

across the tundra, following game trails and the braided

gravel beds of glacial rivers, exulting in the notion that

they seemingly had the park entirely to themselves.

One day he came across the lone footprint of

a grizzly bear.

MAN AS ADOLPH MURIE: In innocent wonder, I gazed

at the imprint.

It was a symbol more poetic than seeing the bear himself,

a delicate and profound approach to the spirit

of the Alaska wilderness.

We come here to catch a glimpse of the primeval.

We come close to the tundra flowers, the lichens,

and the animal life.

Each of us will take some inspiration home.

A touch of tundra will enter our lives and deep inside make

of us all poets and kindred spirits.

COYOTE: Adolph Murie's trip to Alaska inspired him to get

a doctoral degree in biology, and George Melendez Wright

recruited him for the Park Service's newly formed

Wildlife Division.

By the late 1940s, Murie had made a name for himself as

a top-rate field biologist and as an iconoclast whose views

on the direction of park policies often got him

in trouble with his superiors.

At Olympic National Park, where wolves had been hunted

to extinction years earlier, he called for

their reintroduction.

No one listened.

At Isle Royale in Lake Superior, the moose population

had grown so plentiful because of a lack of natural

predators, he wrote, that the park looked "like"

"a prosperous barnyard."

And at Yellowstone, Murie objected to plans to build

a golf course and opposed a proposal to drain a wetlands

around the Old Faithful Lodge in order to reduce the number

of mosquitoes bothering the tourists there.

MAN AS ADOLPH MURIE: Let us leave a few wilderness shrines.

Let there be a few outstanding scenes which can be viewed

without the attendant chatter of the idly curious.

MAN: The heart of the legislation that established

Yellowstone and the other parks is to preserve

the environment.

It's as simple as that, and if you're going to preserve

the environment, you have to preserve the creatures,

the critters, that live there.

COYOTE: Like his mentor George Melendez Wright, Murie

believed many long-held assumptions about predators

needed to be scientifically tested, and he spent two years

studying what to do about Yellowstone's coyotes.

The answer, he concluded, was not killing the hated

predators but changing park policies.

SCHULLERY: When he produced his study of the coyotes

in Yellowstone and demonstrated that they weren't

this... this scourge on the landscape and how they

actually functioned compared to how people thought they

functioned, that they weren't turning Yellowstone into

a reservoir of evil that produced countless coyotes

that went out and killed off ranchers' livestock, it took

a long time for that lesson to soak in.

COYOTE: Yellowstone's superintendent was so upset,

he shelved the report and nearly got Murie fired.

Now one of only 3 biologists left in the Wildlife Division,

Murie was dispatched to the nation's most remote and least

visited national park... Mt. McKinley in Alaska, the park

that had made such a profound impression on him years

earlier, and once again he would find himself

on the unpopular side of a raging controversy when he

embarked on the first in-depth study ever undertaken of wolves.

MAN: The wolf is the master killer of all wildlife,

the villain in Alaska's pageant of wildlife,

and the worst natural enemy of sheep, moose, and caribou.

Alaska Game Commission.

BROWN: Wolves represented death and destruction.

That bloodthirsty, ravening wolf was viewed as a kind

of an interloper.

I mean, you had the nice animals.

You had caribou and deer and sheep, and here were these

wolves who would tear them apart and eat them in full

view of visitors, and that was anathema.

I mean, extinction was the word.

COYOTE: Americans had been killing wolves for centuries.

Despite a Park Service policy against the extermination

of any animal species, they had been systematically

eliminated at Grand Canyon, Crater Lake, Death Valley,

Grand Tetons, Mt. Rainier, Olympic, Rocky Mountain,

and after the death of two wolf pups in 1926, Yellowstone

National Park.

Alaska was now virtually the only place left in the United

States where wolves still existed.

WOMAN: At one time, the Park Service was ordered to shoot

every wolf they saw.

They figured that anything a wolf gets, the hunter

doesn't get.

But just to shoot wolves to say they shot a wolf... let's...

Let's shoot Democrats.

Let's shoot Republicans.

I mean, it made that much sense.

COYOTE: During his first season back in Alaska,

Murie walked more than 1,700 miles, crisscrossing

the park, gathering data and whenever possible taking

photographs and home movies to augment his extensive

field notes.

He analyzed more than 1,000 samples of wolf droppings

to determine their eating habits, collected 829 skulls

of Dall's sheep to study their teeth and understand the age

and health of the animals when they died.

His second year, he discovered a wolf den.

MAN AS ADOLPH MURIE: On a ridge across the river

from the den, about a half mile or less

away, there were excellent locations for watching

the wolves without disturbing them.

I spent about 195 hours observing them.

The longest continuous vigil was 33 hours, and twice I

observed all night.

MARTIN MURIE: Well, you've got to have patience. Oh, yeah.

You have to be devoted.

If you have to climb a tree in 30 below and sit there

for an hour shivering, you do it.

Every day you're out there.

Doesn't matter what the weather.

He was that type.

COYOTE: He would be at it for nearly a decade, even moved

his wife and children to a remote cabin in the park

and temporarily adopted a wolf pup he named Wags so he could

study its development as it grew from a nursling to full size.

Over time, Murie would get to know wolves better than any

scientist ever had, and the report he produced would

become a landmark in understanding the species.

WOMAN: I often think if we were to send

for a representative of our species to meet with the

animals, we would send Ade because he's a man who knows

how to listen.

He was a man who understood stillness.

And more than anything, his curiosity and his

extraordinary sense of science opened up the landscape

in a new way for all of us.

He saw the land as a set of relationships, nothing

in isolation, everything connected.

COYOTE: Murie's conclusions that wolves actually

strengthened the sheep and caribou herds by culling out

the sick and the weak were denounced by hunting groups

across the country as a piece of pro-wolf propaganda from

start to finish.

As private bounty hunters and federal Fish and Wildlife

Service officers initiated a campaign of poisoning

and shooting wolves throughout the rest of Alaska, pressure

mounted for the park to eradicate its wolves, too.

In response, the Park Service agreed to a limited wolf

control program, but the person they selected to

oversee it was none other than Adolph Murie, who kept the

number of kills to the barest minimum, thinning out only

elderly wolves near the end of their natural lives.

And when the sheep herd grew, just as Murie had predicted,

the Park Service quietly instituted a permanent ban

on all wolf killings.

It was the first time in history that the species

nearly everyone seemed to hate found protection from any

government agency.

McKinley's wolves had survived.

MAN AS ADOLPH MURIE: Our generosity to all creatures

in the national parks, this reverence for life,

is a basic tradition and is fundamental to the survival

of park idealism.

The goal is to have the minimum of manipulation

in our parks.

Let us be guardians rather than gardeners.

Adolph Murie.

MAN: With so many friends, it is difficult to understand

why parks are so bedeviled by threats and seem always to be

fighting for their very existence.

The story is an old one.

There are frequent occasions when people see nothing wrong

with harming, hurting, marring, or spoiling when

there are valuable resources of water, power, timber, oil,

or minerals to be exploited within park boundaries.

Greatest of all threats to the parks today is the pressure to

build dams.

Alfred A. Knopf.

COYOTE: By 1950, Americans who needed dams for irrigation,

city water supplies, and hydropower had been

in conflict for half a century with other Americans who

wanted national parks kept off limits from any development.

John Muir had fought and lost the first battle when the city

of San Francisco used its political muscle to win

federal approval for building a darn in the beautiful Hetch

Hetchy Valley within the boundaries

of Yosemite National Park.

The defeat had galvanized the nascent conservation movement

into pushing for creation of the National Park Service

in 1916 to make sure nothing like Hetch Hetchy would ever

happen again.

Now in the aftermath of World War ll,

as the populations of states in the arid west began to

skyrocket, pressure for more dams only intensified.

With the enthusiastic backing of virtually every elected

official in the region, plans were drawn up for

9 billion dollars' worth of dam projects, including two

in a remote corner of Utah and Colorado where the Green

and Yampa Rivers converge in the midst of winding sandstone

canyons, a place known as Echo Park.

But Echo Park was also the site of Dinosaur National

Monument, first set aside in 1915 to safeguard an important

discovery of prehistoric bones and then expanded in the 1930s

to include the dramatic canyonlands upstream.

Few people had ever visited the monument or paddled

through its network of canyons, but the handful who

had considered it almost sacred.

MAN AS WALLACE STEGNER: This is a country as grand

and beautiful as any America can boast.

A 325-square-mile preserve that is part schoolroom

and part playground and part... The best part... sanctuary from

a world paved with concrete, a world mass-produced

with interchangeable parts, and with every natural,

beautiful thing endangered by the raw engineering power

of the 20th century.

Wallace Stegner.

COYOTE: Even though the Park Service opposed the dams,

President Harry Truman and his Secretary of the Interior

supported them.

It was Hetch Hetchy all over again.

It was exactly the same battle, but the world had changed.

There were now many more people prepared to say that,

wait a second.

The national parks are not supposed to be breached

in this way.

We are not meant to do this kind of work.

COYOTE: In 1952, with 2 of his 7 sons and their families,

a 73-year-old retired chemistry professor named

Harold Bradley made a week- long trip down the Yampa

River, snapping photographs and taking home movies as

they traveled.

They had imagined that a desert region named Dinosaur

would be little more than an arid, desolate boneyard,

one son remembered.

Instead, they found a world of stunning beauty.

MAN: My dad knew that there were plans on the drawing

board for dams in Grand Canyon and dams that would affect

Glacier Park and other parks, too.

If Echo Park Dam could be built, I think a dam could

have been built anywhere in the national park system,

and they'd say, "Well, you let us do it at Echo Park."

"Why not do it here in Grand Canyon?"

COYOTE: Back home in California, Bradley embarked

on what he called "a one-man crusade to save Echo Park" by

showing his home movie to anyone who would watch it.

Among those who saw it was David Brower, the new

Executive Director of the Sierra Club... young and brash

with a flair for public relations.

MAN: When I was 8 years old and when my brother was 6,

we went down the Yampa and Green Rivers, and it was part

of my father's campaign to stop dams in Dinosaur National

Monument, and it... you know, I look back on it now and I

realize what a piece of history it was.

Many people see it as the beginning of the modern

environmental movement.

My father used film, used books, used trips like

this down the river.

He was building a constituency of people to appreciate

this landscape.

COYOTE: Brower organized Sierra Club outings through

Dinosaur's canyons and invited influential Easterners to

join them.

Alfred A. Knopf, the New York publisher, emerged from one

trip so impressed that he commissioned a handsome book

of photographs and essays, edited by the novelist

and historian Wallace Stegner.

Knopf himself wrote one of the book's essays and made

sure every member of Congress received a copy.

Other organizations sprang into action, hoping to

mobilize public opinion and kill the project in Congress,

where approval of the darn seemed almost certain.

Harold Bradley helped persuade the Garden Club of America to

oppose the darn and mail leaflets to its members

encouraging them to write their Congressmen about it.

The General Federation of Women's Clubs did

the same thing.

My brother Steve was the one that got Pop interested,

and Pop was the one who got Dave Brower interested,

and Dave Brower, once he was interested, kind of galvanized

the entire conservation community, and Echo Park

really kind of put conservation on the front page

for the first time instead of something back

with the obituaries.

COYOTE: When mail began pouring into Congress

at a ratio of 80:1 against the Echo Park dam, the Speaker

of the House reluctantly delayed consideration

of its approval.

Authorization for the larger string of dams and reclamation

projects would eventually pass, but without the ones

in Dinosaur National Monument.

Public opinion had been felt.

A new national environmental movement had been born

and immediately began battling against any other attempts to

despoil the parks and America's wild places.

DUNCAN: You can save a place, but it's never really safe.

It always takes people caring.

It always takes vigilance.

It always takes effort to keep those forces at bay that want

to crowd in, want to change it, want to

over-commercialize it.

Once it's ruined, it's ruined, but once it's saved,

each generation has its duty to keep it saved.

MAN AS WALLACE STEGNER: Sometimes we have withheld our

power to destroy and have left a threatened species like

the buffalo, a threatened beauty spot like Yosemite or

Yellowstone or Dinosaur scrupulously alone.

We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet,

and every other species, even the earth itself,

has cause to fear our power to exterminate.

But we are also the only species which, when it chooses

to do so, will go to great effort to save what it

might destroy.

Wallace Stegner.

MAN: Charles Stevenson, "Reader's Digest."

Drive to Yellowstone, as my wife and I did late last

summer, and the moment you enter, you are in a big city

traffic jam.

Pause to look at sights you've come thousands of miles to

see, and cars pile up bumper to bumper a quarter of a mile

behind you.

COYOTE: The 32 million Americans who had crowded into

their national parks each year as the fifties began had

suddenly become nearly 62 million before the decade was

even halfway through.

98% arrived by car.

The parks weren't ready for them.

MAN AS CHARLES STEVENSON: Yosemite Valley proper has

become a city festering with commercialism and ugliness.

This spot, which Theodore Roosevelt once called the most

beautiful in the world, now boasts 3 acres

of burning dump.

Lovely meadows have been paved to provide parking space.

Warehouses and stores obstruct famous views.

The campgrounds pack in about 97 persons to the acre.

Campers line up 15 deep for the toilets.

[Car horn honking]

COYOTE: "The people," a park official said, "are wearing out

"the scenery."

The situation was the same in every park.

To make matters worse, staff levels and budgets were

no bigger, and sometimes smaller, than they had

been during the Depression.

Meanwhile President Dwight D. Eisenhower was pushing through

Congress the biggest public works program in history... an

interstate highway system.

Conrad Wirth, the new Park Service director, proposed

a similar 10-year plan for the parks, timing its completion

with the agency's upcoming 50th anniversary in 1966.

He named the ambitious project Mission 66.

"The national parks," Wirth said, "are in danger of being

"loved to death," and he called for spending $787 million,

more than half for new construction, and the rest

for repairs, better maintenance, and more staff.

The president enthusiastically agreed.

Work began almost immediately... Fixing roads, modernizing

water and sewer systems, improving campgrounds

and adding new ones, doubling the park's lodging capacity.

Museums, rest rooms, and information offices were

consolidated into a single modern structure strategically

located to intercept large numbers of people arriving by

car, prepare them for their park experience through

a series of displays and presentations, and send them

on their way.

Wirth called them visitor centers.

Before Mission 66 was through, 110 of them would be built.

But as the work continued, many of the park's oldest

allies became Mission 66's harshest critics.

They hated the increased development

and the architectural choices being made.

They thought the new buildings were ugly.

The loudest complaints came from David Brower

and the Sierra Club and focused on highway

construction, particularly a plan to bulldoze and pave the

Old Tioga Road across a long granite escarpment, skirting

the shores of beautiful Tenaya Lake in the high country

of Yosemite.

KENNETH BROWER: We went as kids with my father because he

was photographing it, and we were outraged because we had

the religion, and while my father was photographing,

my brother and I said, "Well, let's get to it," and we

started taking the survey stakes out.

And we had gotten quite a few of them out before my

father noticed.

It wasn't my father's style, and he said no, we'd better

put them back.

COYOTE: In the end, the road got built.

Some Sierra Club members now questioned the entire premise

of helping more people visit the parks.

MAN: I think the battle about that road was the first moment

when the Sierra Club began to realize that Muir's notion

that you had to bring people to the parks to make them

value them and save them was a two-edged sword... that if you

brought too many people to the parks, you could ruin them,

even if the people who came loved them.

COYOTE: The controversy would forever tarnish some

of the real accomplishments of Mission 66.

But the American people, mostly unaware of the debate,

continued to flock to their national parks.

Going to the parks was becoming an American rite

of passage-journeys creating memories that would last

a lifetime.

MAN: In 1959, my mother took my brother and me from

Binghamton, New York, across the west.

My father had died in 1958, and we did the grand circuit

of the national parks.

My mother made us navigate.

She gave us the road maps, and we picked the routes.

We chose the camp sites.

We had been to Yellowstone for 3 days,

seen all the wonders, and then dropped down into the Tetons

and Jackson Hole, and I was hooked.

I was a lover and defender of the national parks

for the rest of my life.

MAN: 1955 in the summer, my wife and I and my little

boy spent the night in Yosemite National Park.

My little boy had heard about what you could see in national

parks, and he was particularly interested in the bears.

He'd never seen a bear in the wild.

At night, after we'd turn out the lights, we heard the

garbage pails outside being handled by some force, and he

said, "Dad, is that the bears?"

I said, "I think so."

He said, "Let's go out and see."

I said, "No. You can't go out and see the bears."

"Just hope that they will not bother us."

And I know that when I took my son to a national park

for the first time that I was planting in him the seed that

would cause him to want to take his family to

a national park.

CRONON: I think for me, the moment that the national

parks really changed my life was when I was in fifth grade.

My parents put my brother and me into the back of a Ford

station wagon, and we left Madison, Wisconsin, and spent

6 weeks circumnavigating the entire American west, but what

we were really doing was going from national park to national

park to national park to national park, and it was

so overwhelming, it moved me so deeply, that it

changed my life.

I would not now do what I do in my life were it not

for that experience.

Part of it was the vistas, but what I most remember was

opening the door of that car and getting out and walking to

some site with my parents, and my father in particular,

who's a wonderful storyteller and, like me, is a historian,

always having some story to tell about the place that we

were in that carried me back into layers of the past that

were also in the place that we were in in the present.

And in that reconnection of past and present, discovering

that there was far more to see in the place I was in than I

ever would have imagined without the stories that he

shared with me in that place.

DUNCAN: I grew up in a little town in Iowa.

Both of my parents worked, so we didn't take very

many vacations.

My dad would paint the house during his vacation, or maybe

we'd go fishing in a lake in Minnesota, but we never went

on real trips.

And when I was just about to turn 10,

we decided, this year we're going to do it.

We packed up borrowed camping equipment from people we knew,

borrowed my grandmother's car, and headed west.

Urn, it was a great experience.

We went to the Badlands.

I had never seen something like that.

Playing and running around on that denuded,

bizarre landscape.

We went to Custer Battlefield, as it was called then... the

Little Big Horn.

I found an arrowhead that I was pretty sure probably was

Crazy Horse's.

It wasn't until I was a father myself that my dad revealed

that he had bought that arrowhead in the gift shop

and dropped it right underneath me.

And then we came to Yellowstone.

We arrived two days after the great earthquake of 1959.

We lived through 3 or 4 tremors.

The earth was shaking underneath me.

The forces that had created Yellowstone were reawakening.

Half of the park was closed.

When we went to the geysers, the rangers talking would say,

"Well, this geyser used to go off about every two months."

"Whoop! There it is now."

Or "this one," you know, "hasn't gone off since the earthquake."

The earth was in motion there.

We went to the bottom of the waterfalls, and I thought,

"Boy, I am not in Iowa anymore."

MAN: I'm probably the last Secretary of Interior... this

was 42 years ago... who will be flying along in a plane

and look off and say, "Goodness, that ought to be"

"a national park" and seeing it become a national park.

So it was a wonderful period of expansion and of new ideas

in terms of what the Park Service should be doing.

SINGERS: All the leaves are brown

All the leaves are brown

And the sky is gray

And the sky is gray

I've been for a walk

On a winter's day

On a winter's day...

COYOTE: Throughout the 1960s, Stewart Udall would serve as

Secretary of the Interior to presidents John Kennedy

and Lyndon Johnson, overseeing the most ambitious program

of creating new parks since the time

of Franklin Roosevelt.

The pace of population growth and development in the west

gave Udall, a former Arizona Congressman, a sense

of urgency.

"What we save now," he said, "may be all we save."

He joined forces with the Sierra Club to push

for creation of Redwood National Park along the

northern coast of California, home to the tallest trees

in the world, which over a lifetime spanning two

millennia, can grow 300 feet high, requiring an environment

of rainfall, fog, and soil found only in a narrow band

of land a few hundred miles long.

By the 1960s, logging had cleared 85% of the original

redwood forest.

The national park saved half of what remained.

In west Texas, Guadalupe Mountains National Park,

the ancient remains of an ocean reef rising out

of the desert, had once been the home of grizzly bears,

wolves, and buffalo, as well as the Mescalero Apaches,

who used the mountain oasis as a refuge until they, too,

were driven out.

"My Lord," Udall said when he first saw it, "what a paradise

"that place is."

He also supported North Cascades National Park,

a road-less wilderness on the border of Washington

and Canada, containing 318 glaciers in its jumble

of mountains, nearly 1/3 of all the remaining glaciers

in the lower 48 states.

And in the stark desert of eastern Utah, where the Green

River meets the Colorado amidst a seemingly endless

maze of meandering canyons, is a place John Wesley Powell

had first described in 1869 as a "wilderness of rocks"

"and a world of grandeur."

Powell had given the features he saw names like Cataract

Canyon, the Dirty Devil, the Labyrinth.

A hundred years later, Udall helped give it all

another name... Canyonlands National Park.

UDALL: I remember a night when I woke up.

We were camping up on the high cliffs, and I looked off into

what is the Doll's House and the Maze, and the moon

came through.

It was like I was transported into anther world.

There was a few minutes where I just felt that I was having

an experience that I would never have again.

COYOTE: Udall also helped persuade Congress to set aside

other parts of the American landscape and place them under

Park Service protection.

National seashores from Cape Cod in Massachusetts to Padre

Island in Texas to Point Reyes in California.

National lake shores like Indiana Dunes and Picture

Rocks in the Great Lakes.

The Ozark National Scenic Riverway in Southwestern

Missouri, the first in a string of rivers that would

have portions kept in their free-flowing,

natural conditions.

National trails like the Appalachian Trail, extending

2,100 miles from Georgia to Maine.

And national recreation areas, often reservoirs behind

the dams being built all over the west.

To help him, Udall named George Hartzog the new Park

Service director, who brought to the job the same energy

and back-slapping political skills Stephen Mather had used

so successfully 50 years earlier.

Hartzog would push the Park Service to have a greater

presence in urban areas, to serve minority populations

that did not yet have a relationship with the parks,

and to increase the number of historic and cultural sites.

To him, the park system's role

in preserving and interpreting American history was just as

crucial as protecting the large natural parks.

HARTZOG: My father, from South Carolina, only made

one trip out of that state during his lifetime, and that

was to visit our family here in Washington.

And he said, "I want to see the Lincoln Memorial."

Abraham Lincoln was not a favorite historical personage

in the low country of South Carolina when I was a boy

growing up, and neither was he in my family and in our home,

and I was surprised that the only thing he wanted to see

in Washington D.C. was the Lincoln Memorial.

I started to get out of the car, and he said, "No, I want"

"to go alone," and I sat there and watched him walk those

steps, and he got there and stopped and faced Lincoln

and turned to the right and went around that memorial

and read every saying of Lincoln's and came back

and got in the car.

Tears were welling in his eyes, although they were not

running, and he said to me, "I'm now ready to go home."

That's what they mean.

CROWD SINGING: We shall overcome...

COYOTE: On August 28, 1963, Hartzog witnessed a much

larger crowd at the Lincoln Memorial when a quarter

of a million people converged on the National Mall as part

of the March on Washington to protest the Jim Crow laws that

still discriminated against African Americans in the south

and to call on Congress to pass a civil rights bill to

bring them to an end.

There, a young minister named Martin Luther King Jr.,

who had recently been jailed in Birmingham, Alabama,

who the director of the FBI considered a Communist

sympathizer and whose life was in constant danger from people

who hated the color of his skin and everything he stood

for, gave a speech that would be considered a turning point

in American history.

KING: I have a dream that my 4 little children will one day

live in a nation where they will not be judged by the

color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

[Cheering and applause]

This will be the day when all of God's children will be able

to sing with new meaning "My country 'tis of thee, sweet"

"land of liberty, of thee I sing."

"Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrims' pride,"

"from every mountainside, let freedom ring."

And if America is to be a great nation, this must

become true.

[Cheering and applause]

And when this happens, we will be able to speed up that day

when all of God's children... Black men and white men,

Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics... will be able to

join hands and sing in the words of the old negro

spiritual, "Free at last, free at least, thank God"

"Almighty, we're free at last!"

[Cheering and applause]

HARTZOG: What higher purpose can a national park

serve than to be responsive to the crisis in our society,

to the voice of the underprivileged, to the voice

of the protester who's objecting to the institutional

status quo, who is seeing a need beyond where we are?

It was of the same dimension as the first time I stood

on the south rim of the Grand Canyon and looked at that

magnificent canyon in front of me.

These are everlasting moments that stay with you

and influence your life all your life.

FRANKLIN: The idea of the national parks certainly was

appreciated by Abraham Lincoln in the 1860s.

A century later, here is Martin Luther King giving his

great speech "I Have a Dream" before a vast audience, before

Abraham Lincoln, and with a park ranger standing by him.

You have this sweep of history.

You have these dramatic turns.

You have these marvelous coincidences and ramifications

that extend from Lincoln to King, from the idea

of the national park to the Park Service officer standing

by King when he gives his "I Have a Dream" speech.

The parallels of history are infinite and limitless.

COYOTE: 5 years later, Dr. King would

be assassinated.

12 years after that, his birthplace in Atlanta,

Georgia, would be dedicated as a historic site, part

of the national park system.

[Wolf howls]

MAN AS ADOLPH MURIE: We were approaching our cabin one

stormy night.

It was snowing and getting dark, and out of the storm

came music, the long, drawn, mournful call of a wolf.

It started low, moved slowly up the scale

with increased volume.

At the high point, a slight break in the voice, then

a deepening of the tone as it became a little more throaty

and gradually descended the scale, and the soft voice

trailed off to blend with the storm.

We waited to hear again the voice of wilderness,

but the performer, with artistic restraint,

was silent.

Adolph Murie.

I think we all pick up certain sounds or sights that are sort

of symbolic, and I think that for Adolph, the sound

of the wolf meant wild, nature, untamed but also

a part of the planet, a part that we just can't do without.

[Wolf howls]

He felt very much like Thoreau felt, I think, about wildness.

We got to have it.

COYOTE: When the Mission 66 plans had been unveiled

for Mt. McKinley National Park, they called for widening

and paving the 90-mile rough and narrow gravel road that

provided the only access into the park's interior.

The road would permit a showcase hotel near beautiful

and quiet Wonder Lake, expanded campgrounds,

gas stations, and a visitor center.

No one was surprised when Adolph Murie came out against

it and submitted a detailed analysis to the park

superintendent outlining his concerns.

MARTIN MURIE: Adolph was just passionately determined to

stop that road, and he was a very stubborn person for what

he believed in, and we need stubborn people.

He became more accepting, more diplomatic as

time went on.

He became more forgiving, but he knew how to draw a line

in the sand, and when it come to things like that, Wonder

Park Road, he'd say no.

No.

BROWN: He was the conscience of the park.

He stood like a rock on these matters of principle.

He was not unduly cantankerous or aggressive.

He just lasted.

He just wore away at them like water on a granite boulder.

COYOTE: "My efforts were not appreciated," Murie said,

and for the next two years, he was reassigned to Grand

Teton National Park in Wyoming.

When he was finally allowed to return to Alaska to continue

his research, Murie was dismayed at what he found.

The first 13 miles of park road had been excavated

and paved, and at mile 65, a visitor center was being

constructed that looked, he said,

"like a Dairy Queen."

To stop further construction, he turned to his brother

Olaus, now the director of the Wilderness Society, for help.

MARTIN MURIE: He kept telling Olaus, "Now, you got to write"

"about this road."

He'd feed Olaus the data about the road and say,

"Write about it. You write beautifully."

"I can't do it. You can do it."

COYOTE: Olaus Murie was the perfect person to help.

He was accustomed to waging public campaigns

and in a position to openly challenge the Park Service.

This time, the Park Service director listened.

That was the last frontier.

This is your last opportunity to save virgin America is

Alaska, and it's enormous.

COYOTE: Hartzog stopped the roadwork where it was... 13

miles widened and paved, another 17 widened

but unpaved, and the remaining 60 miles to be kept in more or

less the condition Adolph Murie had suggested... a narrow

gravel pathway where, he said, "the feeling one gets is that"

"the road passes through a wilderness that comes up to"

"the road."

It is still that way today.

MAN AS ADOLPH MURIE: Freedom prevails.

Even the bad wolf seeks an honest living as of yore.

He is a respected citizen, morally on a par

with everyone else.

In our thinking of McKinley, let us not have puny thoughts.

Let us think on a greater scale.

Let us not have those of the future decry our smallness

of concept and lack of foresight.

Adolph Murie.

RUNTE: By the 1960s, if you stood on Glacier Point

and looked down at Yosemite Valley, you saw lights.

You saw fires. You saw cars everywhere.

You looked down at that valley and you said to yourself,

"This looks more like a city than it does a national park."

COYOTE: For nearly a hundred years, one of the biggest

attractions in Yosemite Valley had been

the dramatic firefall.

Every evening in the summer season, as throngs gathered to

watch, a huge bonfire would be built on Glacier Point,

then pushed over the edge to cascade down toward

the valley floor.

In 1968, Hartzog said no

and ordered a stop to it.

HARTZOG: The firefall in that magnificent valley was

about as appropriate as horns on a rabbit, and it should

not be there.

It was an absolutely spectacular sight, but it was

inappropriate for the silent tranquility and beauty of that

great valley.

COYOTE: At Yellowstone, Hartzog also enforced what

George Melendez Wright, Adolph Murie, and many other

biologists had advocated years earlier... not just a paper

policy against feeding the bears, which tourists and park

officials had routinely ignored, but a concerted

effort at weaning the bears from human food along the

roadside or at garbage dumps.

SCHULLERY: They saw it as beneath the dignity

of a national park...

That these bears should in some sense have a right to

a more natural life and that people should be experiencing

them in a more natural way.

COYOTE: New park policies now recommended placing scientific

research as the basis for management decisions,

emphasizing that the complex ecology of each park be

restored to what it had once been and stating that

a national park should represent a vignette

of primitive America.

Slowly, in the tension between preservation and use, parks as

nature's sanctuaries and parks as tourist resorts, things had

begun to shift a little, back in nature's direction.

George Melendez Wright's old vision was finally being

taken seriously.

MAN: I like the quiet out here.

I'm not pestered or bothered by a lot of people.

I am alone, but I am not lonely.

When you have plenty of interests, like the water

and the woods, the birds and the fish, you don't

get lonely.

Lancelot Jones.

COYOTE: By the 1960s, no one knew Biscayne Bay, off the

southeastern tip of Florida, better than Lancelot Jones.

He had been born in the bottom of a small boat there in 1898

while his father was frantically sailing his

pregnant mother toward a hospital in Miami.

From that time on, the bay had been his home.

His father, Israel Lafayette Jones, had risen up from

slavery in North Carolina, migrated to Florida after

the Civil War, and steadily improved life for himself

and his Bahamian wife.

Eventually, he had managed to buy 3 of the small,

uninhabited islands that separate Biscayne Bay from the

Atlantic Ocean and began a profitable business growing

key limes.

In honor of his favorite story, "The Knights"

"of the Round Table," he had proudly named his two sons

King Arthur Jones and Sir Lancelot Jones, hoping,

perhaps, Lancelot said later, that by giving us great names,

we would become great men.

But 3 years after his father's death, the Hurricane of 1935

had laid waste to the family's lime crops and forced Lancelot

into a new line of work as a fishing guide for wealthy

visitors to Biscayne Bay.

By the 1960s, there were plenty to go around.

Just across a small channel from Jones' modest home

on Porgy Key was the Cocolobo Club, an exclusive retreat

for some of the multimillionaires who wintered

at Miami Beach, men with names like Firestone, Maytag,

Honeywell, and Hertz.

They had this exclusive club down there, and it was

nice for them.

COYOTE: Lancelot Jones became the favorite fishing guide

for them and for their politically

well-connected friends.

GREENE: He was a tall, lanky kind of guy and very

hospitable, and he seemed like a perfectly happy guy living

out there by himself.

He knew a lot of people.

A lot of important people would stop by and visit him

when they went down there, including all these big shots

that belonged to that private club.

He knew where all the fish were and where everything else

was, too, down there.

COYOTE: But other millionaires had other plans for the bay

and its chain of more than 3 dozen pristine islands.

In 1961, a shipping tycoon announced he intended to

construct a deep-water port, an oil refinery, and

an industrial complex once he dredged a deeper channel

through the shallow bay 8 miles out to the ocean.

At the same time, a group of developers proposed a bridge

linking the mainland to the islands to do with them what

had already happened at Miami Beach and Key Biscayne... a

series of high-rise hotels, retail shopping centers,

and private beachfront properties.

The organizers convinced authorities to create the city

of Islandia and ferried a voting machine to Elliott Key,

where they staged an election attended by 14 of the 18

registered voters, all of them absentee landowners hoping to

cash in on the anticipated real estate boom.

Lancelot Jones, one of only two full-time residents

of the new Islandia, was not among them.

He was against their plans and had also turned down offers

from the refinery developer to buy Porgy Key.

MAN AS LANCELOT JONES: I never thought commercialization

of this land was right.

I always felt this land was not right for development,

that it should stay as it is.

COYOTE: Meanwhile, a small group had formed to fight

both proposals.

Lloyd Miller, an avid fisherman, believed the

refinery and seaport would turn one of Florida's most

fertile fish-breeding grounds into a stagnant pool

of oily water.

Juanita Greene, an enterprising young writer

for the "Miami Herald," worried that

the considerable financial interests behind both

developments were steamrolling the plans toward

hasty approval.

Her own newspaper supported the refinery.

She thought the public was not only being shut out

of the decision but would also be denied access to precious

waterfront once everything was completed.

It would become, she warned, "a rich man's paradise."

GREENE: I could see that for the average Joe who wanted to

go to the beach on Sunday afternoon, there were fewer

and fewer places to go.

I didn't think that that was fair that only people who

could live in the fancy hotels or the condominiums had access

to the beach.

I objected mightily to it and wrote a story in which I said

"This is a freak city with lots of power and no people."

And it was true.

COYOTE: At a meeting held around her dining room table,

Greene, Lloyd Miller, and another friend,

Art Marshall, decided that the only way to stop the

development of the islands was to make it a national park.

Greene persuaded her newspaper to at least cover the budding

opposition movement and to allow her to write occasional

opinion pieces advocating her point of view.

As the public leader of the opposition, Miller found his

car sprayed with paint.

People urged his employer to fire him.

An anonymous caller threatened his family.

GREENE: And somebody poisoned his dog.

So Lloyd had to put up with a lot, but he was a determined

man, and he was not gonna be run out of this.

COYOTE: Slowly their movement gained strength.

A slate of anti-refinery candidates was elected to

the county commission.

Local political leaders withdrew their support

for a bridge to the islands.

And after visiting the bay, Stewart Udall came out

in favor of protecting it.

In October of 1968, Lloyd Miller was peering over

the shoulder of President Johnson as he created Biscayne

National Monument, saving 173,000 acres of the bay,

coral reefs, and islands.

[Seagull cawing]

MAN SINGING: Sitting in the mornin' sun...

COYOTE: The first private landowner to sell his land to

the federal government for the new national monument was

Lancelot Jones... 277 acres on 3 islands on the condition that

he be allowed to live out his life in the family home

on Porgy Key.

MAN SINGING: Sittin' on the dock of the bay...

GREENE: And that's the kind of guy he was.

MAN SINGING: ...tide roll away...

GREENE: He was not one of these greedy people that was

waiting for the developers to come pay him big bucks

for his land.

He just liked things the way they were and was willing to

help other people have an opportunity to enjoy

the islands.

COYOTE: His favorite pastime was teaching small groups

of schoolchildren about the bay's fish and sponges

whenever the Park Service brought them to Porgy Key.

The only compensation he asked for was a key lime pie.

MAN SINGING: Watching the tide roll away...

MAN AS LANCELOT JONES: I like the name "monument."

It means that things here are going to stay pretty much as

they are today.

Lancelot Jones.

[Singer whistling]

MAN AS WALLACE STEGNER: The national park idea, the best

idea we ever had, was inevitable as soon as

Americans learned to confront the wild continent not

with fear and cupidity, but with delight,

wonder, and awe.

Once started, it grew like the backfire it truly was, burning

backup wind against the current of claim and grab

and raid...

proving that our rapacious society could hold its hand,

at least in the presence of stupendous scenery, and learn

to respect the earth for something besides its

economic value.

Wallace Stegner.

COYOTE: On March 1, 1972, Yellowstone, the world's first

national park, celebrated its centennial.

During its 100 years of existence, the park had seen

its wildlife wantonly slaughtered by poachers

and then protected by law.

Yellowstone had been guarded by cavalrymen and park

rangers, defended by poets, and studied by scientists.

Endlessly painted and photographed by artists

and amateurs alike, toured by one American president after

another, seeking everything from exhilarating inspiration

to simple relaxation.

Yellowstone had been the site of everything from Indian wars

to bitter fights over the limits of commercial

exploitation, battles over the value of nature,

and a continuing argument over how Americans could enjoy its

treasure house of wonders without ruining it

for the next generation.

Along the way, Yellowstone had become one of the most

recognizable symbols of America itself.

In 1972, Old Faithful, still spouting

as regularly as it did when it got its name a century

earlier, would thrill 2.2 million people.

But they would represent a tiny fraction of the 165

million visitors who came that year to a park system that now

had a presence in nearly every state in the union... 38

national parks and roughly 200 historic sites, national

monuments, and other places Americans had set aside

for posterity.

By the 1970s, the park idea had spread from Yellowstone

all the way around the world, ultimately becoming, like the

idea of freedom itself, one of America's greatest exports...

More than 4,000 parks in nearly 200 nations.

MAN SINGING: Light out singing

And walking in the morning sunshine

Sunshine daydream

COYOTE: But back in the United States, in the farthest corner

of the nation, the national parks were about to experience

their most dramatic expansion.

WOOD: Most people ask, "What brought you to Alaska?"

but the question to ask is "What made you stay?"

We just fell in love with the country.

The country told us what it should be and what it

shouldn't be.

I think that being out there was a little bit like Conrad

said of the sea... it's not for you or against you.

It's just very unforgiving of errors.

COYOTE: In the hundred years since Secretary of State

William Seward had purchased it from Russia in 1867, Alaska

had had the nickname Seward's Folly, especially by those who

believed a territory so remote and so far north was

a colossal waste of the $7.2 million Seward had agreed to

pay, even if it was more than twice the size of Texas.

John Muir had a different name for it.

MAN AS JOHN MUIR: To the lover of pure wildness, Alaska is

one of the most wonderful countries in the world.

This is nature's own reservation, and every lover

of wildness will rejoice with me that by kindly frost it is

so well defended.

MAN: Alaska was the last chance to do it right.

This is it. This is the end of the line.

So we buckled down, and it became a very serious affair

about what to do with Alaska.

COYOTE: After Alaska was granted statehood in 1959,

a federal law was passed to settle the claims of Alaska's

native peoples, including the Inupiaq and the Tlingit,

the Aleut and the Athabaskan.

The land was to be divided up, some for the new state to

control and open for development if it wished,

some for the tribes, and a portion to be withheld forever

in the national interest for all Americans.

As the discovery of vast oil deposits on the north slope

and the construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline

demonstrated, the stakes were enormous.

The fight over what to do with the federal land would consume

more than a decade and would quickly become a national one,

waged in the halls of Congress, involving commercial

and industrial groups capable of spending millions

of dollars in advertising and lobbying, versus the Alaska

Coalition, a collection of 50 environmental groups which

quickly mushroomed to 1,500 organizations,

representing 10 million members, most of whom had

never set foot in Alaska.

It was the largest grassroots conservation effort

in American history.

POPE: An entire generation came along and said, "We want"

"to be part of this," and for them, the Alaska battle was

the culmination.

We'd passed clean air and clean water acts.

We'd passed the Wilderness Act.

We'd set aside millions of acres of wilderness

in the 1970s, and suddenly we had a landscape where we could

really save what was best about it.

People embraced it. People rallied to it.

It was the chance to get it right.

COYOTE: In the mid-1970s, Congressman Morris Udall

of Arizona, the brother of Stewart Udall, sponsored

a bill setting aside 110 million acres of federally

owned land in Alaska.

In May of 1978, Udall's bill passed overwhelmingly

in the House... 277 to 31.

But in the Senate, even though a clear majority favored

the legislation, a threatened filibuster by Alaska Senator

Mike Gravel tied things up, preventing a vote before

Congress adjourned.

It appeared that the big dreams for preserving large

sections of Alaska would be for nothing.

Then, President Jimmy Carter, acting on the recommendation

of his Interior Secretary, Cecil Andrus, decided to

bypass Congress and invoke the Antiquities Act, a tool

presidents have been using in the name of conservation since

Theodore Roosevelt.

On December 1, 1978, Carter took out his pen and signed

executive orders creating 17 national monuments covering

56 million acres of the most critical areas

in Udall's bill.

In Alaska, all hell broke loose.

MAN: I'd be in favor of sending a contingent of state

troopers to Washington to arrest President Carter

and Andrus for conspiracy to commit a felony, namely the

theft of millions of acres of land in Alaska.

DIFFERENT MAN: In a new national monument near Mt.

McKinley, about 1,500 Alaskans staged what they said was

a trespass.

They ran races, shot guns, claimed they had violated 27

laws, and dared park rangers to arrest them.

HEACOX: You have a frontier mentality in Alaska.

"We want to do things our way."

The opposition was intense.

Park planes were burned.

President Carter was burned in effigy.

People protested in the streets.

RUNTE: In New York City, 99% of the people would be

for the park.

In Alaska itself, 99% of the people in some of these towns

were against the parks because they lived there, and they

didn't see how the tourist industry was going to benefit

them in any way.

COYOTE: To handle the volatile situation on the ground,

the administration chose John Cook, a westerner who had

earned a reputation as a tough problem-solver.

The parks were in his blood.

His father and his grandfather had worked at the Grand

Canyon, and he joined the Park Service the day he graduated

from high school, steadily working his way up the ladder.

COOK: When I stepped off the plane, I was the third least

popular person in Alaska.

The least popular was President Carter.

Cecil Andrus was pretty unpopular as well.

He was the number two man, and then it was me.

We were told they would kill the first Park Service person

that set foot in Duffy's Tavern in northeast Alaska.

4 days later, I walked into Duffy's Tavern with a tape

recorder and a roll of maps, wearing Alaska clothes,

in the middle of winter flew a ski plane in and sat there

with 200 people, half of them getting pretty tanked up,

and faced them all, talked to them, told them what was gonna

happen and what wasn't gonna happen.

COYOTE: On the Kenai Peninsula at the head of Resurrection

Bay was the small town of Seward, named for the

much-maligned politician who had made Alaska part

of the United States.

Its economy revolved around fish harvesting

and a commercial port that had briefly boomed with activity

during the oil pipeline's construction.

Nearby was the Harding Icefield, a sheet of ice 700

square miles wide and one mile thick, spawning more than 30

glaciers, many of which descend directly to sea level,

where they have carved a series of deep coastal fjords.

Their waters teem with wildlife... whales, sea lions,

and seals beyond number.

Carter's proclamation had created a 570,000-acre Kenai

Fjords National Monument in hopes it all would eventually

become a national park.

The sentiment in Seward was dead-set against it.

Twice, the city council passed resolutions

condemning the idea.

MAN: Beverly Dunham.

DUNHAM: Alaskans are being criticized for wanting as much

of state lands under Alaskan control as possible.

We have been termed selfish for wanting development...

DUNHAM, VOICE-OVER: I was fearful of it.

I thought the same thing that most people did, that it was

going to harm us.

Any interference by the federal government in any way

was offensive to Alaskans in general and Sewardites

in particular.

We were just fearful of what would happen to us.

COOK: I was sent up there to make it work, and what I did

is I hand-picked people.

I brought up a task force the first year.

I said, "Whatever you do, never lie to the people."

"Don't whitewash anything. Go from town to town."

"Live in the towns. Be truthful."

It's awfully hard to stay angry at your neighbor if your

neighbor's a good neighbor.

Governor Hammond and I came up with a term that he used to

help soften things, and that was that the new national

monuments and tourism would be Alaska's permanent pipeline

because we won't run out of visitors but in a long time

run out of oil.

COYOTE: While John Cook tried to dampen the local hostility

to Carter's proclamations, the Alaska Coalition prepared

for another Congressional battle to settle all

the Alaska land issues once and for all.

My friends, the vote you make in just a few moments is the

one you've got to live with and your grandchildren have to

live with.

There ought to be a few places left in the world the way

the Almighty made them.

We'll never see a buffalo herd again, but if we're wise

today, your grandchildren might be able to see

a caribou herd.

This is the test of conservation in your

Congressional career.

This will be the most important vote you will cast.

COYOTE: On December 2, 1980, after another year

and a half of debate and compromise, President

Carter signed the Alaska National Interest Lands

Conservation Act into law.

It wasn't everything he and the Alaska Coalition had once

hoped for, but it was still the largest single expansion

of protected conservation lands in world history,

creating 4 national forests, 10 national preserves,

16 national wildlife refuges.

The national park system, with 47 million acres added to

its care, had suddenly more than doubled in size.

Within those additions were 7 brand-new national parks.

WOMAN: I got a question which... To write an article on why

we need national parks, and the question struck me

dumb for a minute.

It was like saying, "Why do we need air?"

I mean, we need to have these places,

even if I never go... the only place I've never been

is Alaska.

Even if I never go to Alaska, I need to know it's there.

COYOTE: And at Seward, the national monument at Kenai

Fjords became the seventh of the new national parks.

5 years later, as the tourist economy and Seward began to

emerge as a crucial part of the town's livelihood,

the city council quietly but officially rescinded its two

previous resolutions denouncing the park idea.

Several years after that, they asked that the national

park at their doorstep be expanded.

DUNHAM: I think it's great.

It has done a lot for Seward.

As far as tourism is concerned, it has made

a vast difference.

There are, I think, a thousand seats on day cruisers that

come in and take people out to the fjords.

It has proven that it hasn't hurt anything.

If anything, it's enhanced it.

COOK: And in Alaska, man was acknowledged.

The natives, who were a part of that landscape long before

European man came and called it wilderness, were using it.

They still get to use it for subsistence purposes.

It's still a part of their culture, and they are a part

of the preservation.

And it's not preserving museum Indians.

It's preserving a dynamic culture that's within

a dynamic landscape that's also changing.

COYOTE: Mt. McKinley National Park, which had been

in existence since 1917, was also affected by

the Alaska Lands Act.

Its area was nearly tripled in size... 2.4 million more acres

to the park itself, plus an additional 1.3 million acres

in two national preserves next to it... a dramatically larger

expansion than even Adolph Murie had proposed just before

his retirement.

The old park, surrounded by the new additions, was now

officially designated a wilderness, bringing with it

even greater protections to the land and animals Murie

had championed.

And as if to symbolize all that had happened, the park's

name was changed to reflect its deeper history.

It would revert to the Athabaskan Indian name

for the tremendous mountain at its core... Denali,

the high one.

COOK: History will, of course, view the creation of those

national parks along with Seward's purchase of Alaska.

History will show that it was the right thing to do.

COYOTE: John Cook would soon go back to the lower 48 to

become superintendent of Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

As his father and his father's father had done, he would pass

on his love for the national parks to his children,

including his daughter Kayci, who would become the fourth

generation of the Cook family to serve in the Park Service.

KAYCI COOK: At the end of my father's career in 1999,

I had become what I always wanted to be,

a superintendent, and I used my power in that position to

honor my father for his 43- year career with the National

Park Service, and I invoked the tradition of the military

tattoo at Fort McHenry National Monument Historic

Shrine, and I bestowed upon my father the title of Honorary

Colonel of the Fort McHenry Guard.

I felt very proud doing that for him, and as we stood up

and saluted one another, commander to commander, I felt

much more strongly that it was a mantle that he was passing

to me much more than anything that I was giving to him.

I have a 4-year-old son, Sean, and he has already

expressed an interest in being a ranger like his mommy.

He sees me put this uniform on every day.

He loves to wear my hat around.

I think he's showing some real promise in terms of being

a fifth generation, and that would not hurt my feelings.

[Car horn honks]

MAN: When I was a child in Detroit, national parks really

didn't exist.

There were no family trips to national parks, so it really

didn't exist for me and for my friends.

We didn't sit around talking about, "Boy, can't wait to get"

"to the Grand Canyon," you know.

That didn't come up as a topic of conversation in Detroit

for me as a child.

But always, there was this desire to see Yellowstone.

There was a desire to see the Grand Canyon, to see Yosemite.

There was a desire to fully invest my physical self and my

spiritual self in America because that's a part

of America that I didn't know, and I wanted to become

familiar with it.

COYOTE: In 1984, Shelton Johnson became the first

generation of his family to visit a national park when he

stepped off a bus at the entrance to Yellowstone

and immediately fell in love with everything it offered.

Johnson soon started a career in the Park Service and by

the 1990s he was working in Yosemite as an interpretive

ranger, proudly telling visitors the little-known

story of the African American buffalo soldiers, the park's

earliest protectors.

In the last decades of the 20th century, the focus

of the Park Service shifted.

More and more historic sites were saved, including

reminders of painful episodes in American history, set aside

on the belief that a great nation could openly

acknowledge them.

From Kingsley Plantation in Florida, preserving not only

the owner's grand home, but also the cluster of small

cabins used by the slaves who made his comfortable

life possible.

The central high school in Little Rock, Arkansas,

where in 1957 federal troops had to escort 9 African

American teenagers past angry mobs to their classes,

crystallizing the crisis of school desegregation.

From Andersonville, a deadly Civil War prison camp

in Georgia to a polished slab of marble in Washington D.C.

listing the names of 58,000 dead and missing soldiers

who served their country in Vietnam.

From Sand Creek and Washita on the Great Plains, where Chief

Black Kettle's peaceful Cheyenne villagers were

massacred by American soldiers.

To Manzanar in the high desert of eastern California,

where American citizens of Japanese descent were kept

behind barbed wire during World War ll.

From Oklahoma City, where 168 empty chairs now

commemorate the men, women, and children killed

in a senseless act of domestic terrorism in 1995.

To a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, that

immortalizes the sacrifices made by passengers aboard

United Flight 93 on September 11, 2001.

CRONON: When you're asked, "Well, what is coherent"

"about a system that contains natural wonders"

"and birthplaces of famous people?"

I think the answer you come to is that they are all finally

about a vision of where the United States comes from.

We come from nature, but we also come from our own past,

and so the interpretation of nature and history together is

not a distraction that the parks face.

It is the very core of the enterprise.

They are all about where we come from.

COYOTE: In the years to come, Americans would continue

expanding the number of national parks and continue

using them in ever-increasing numbers, from 255 million

visitors in 1990, then closing in on 300 million visitors

a decade later... each visit an opportunity to forge a new

relationship to their land, their nation, and themselves.

MAN: We need national parks to have people... especially our

kids... understand what America is.

America is not sidewalks.

America is not stores.

America is not video games.

America is not restaurants.

We need national parks so people can go there and say,

"Ah. This is America."

DUNCAN: And then it was my turn to take my family out to

see the national parks.

It was gonna be our own epic journey as a family.

If there's a national park between Arizona

and the Canadian border along the spine of the Rocky

Mountains, we went there.

We broiled in the sun in Arches and Canyonlands,

went and visited Dinosaur as I had when I was a small boy,

hiked around Jenny Lake in the Grand Tetons, then to wear

bear bells, which was very exciting for the kids

because bears might be around.

At Yellowstone, I got to watch my children see their

first bison.

And then we came to Glacier National Park, and it was

something of a sentimental return for Diane and me

because 13 years earlier, when we were courting, we had

gone there.

And as we went up Going to the Sun Highway, I took a picture

of my daughter, about to become a beautiful woman

in the same place that her beautiful mother had once sat

for a photograph, and then we got to Logan Pass, and my son

Will and I decided to go on a buddy hike and headed up

toward Hidden Lake.

And we came around a corner, and coming toward us were

these mountain goats. And I said, "Shh. Just be quiet."

"Don't do anything to disturb them, and maybe we'll get to"

"take a picture."

Well, we just stepped to the side, and this family

of mountain goats came right down the trail within about 2

or 3 feet of us, and I don't know whose eyes were bigger,

Will's or mine.

I had asked everybody to keep a diary during our trip,

and that night in his diary, Will wrote, "This was the most"

"exciting day of my life."

And so it was the most exciting day of my life, too.

COYOTE: In January of 1995, a convoy of trucks entered

Yellowstone National Park at its northern gate, where

a stone arch dedicated by Theodore Roosevelt proclaims

the park's purpose... "for the benefit and enjoyment"

"of the people."

Riding in cages in the trucks were 14 gray wolves recently

captured in western Canada.

Two months later, after being kept in small pens to

acclimate them to their new surroundings, the wolves were

set free, part of a long-range plan to reestablish

the predators in their former habitat and make the world's

first national park a little more representative of what it

had once been.

I keep imagining that first wolf coming out of its cage,

and I think of Adolph being there, and he probably would

have cried.

Just think... we now have wolves in Yellowstone.

COYOTE: Within only a few years, the wolves were

thriving... part, once more, of the entire

Yellowstone ecosystem.

WHITTLESEY: I was in the back country with one of my good

friends, and we're standing out there in the dark, and we

hear this long, low, throaty howl, and I'd never heard that

sound before.

[Wolves howling]

And I knew immediately what it was, and I remember standing

there thinking...

"I am so lucky to get to hear that"

"sound that has not been heard in the back country"

"of Yellowstone for 60-some years."

WILLIAMS: I think our challenge as lovers of our

national parks in the 21st century will be the challenge

of restoration.

I think that's the story that's yet to be told,

the story of restoration.

And not only are our national parks a gift, I think they're

a covenant.

They're a covenant with the future, saying, "This is"

"where we were."

"This is what we loved..."

"and now it's in your hands."

MAN: One learns that the world, though made, is

yet being made, that this is still the morning of creation.

This grand show is eternal.

It is always sunrise somewhere.

The dew is never all dried at once.

A shower is forever falling.

Vapor is ever rising.

Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn

and gloaming.

On sea and continents and islands, each in its turn,

as the round earth rolls.

John Muir.