Ken Burns: The National Parks - America's Best Idea

In 1851, a band of Indian fighters in California encounters a place of astonishing beauty, setting in motion events that bring other newcomers to Yosemite Valley, including John Muir, who becomes a national voice for preservation.

Americans begin to question the nation’s rush across the continent that has devastated forests and ravaged animals. Conservation’s greatest champion is Theodore Roosevelt, who audaciously sets aside 800,000 acres of the Grand Canyon.

Stephen Mather accepts the offer to oversee the national parks for one year. He launches a campaign to publicize the parks as a unified system and to persuade Congress to create a single agency to oversee it: the National Park Service.

Mather and Albright ally themselves with the automobile to “democratize” the national parks. Horace Kephart and George Masa launch a campaign to save the forests of the Smoky Mountains from destruction by establishing a national park.

Franklin D. Roosevelt enters battles to create national parks on the Olympic Peninsula, Florida’s Everglades, and California’s High Sierra. George Melendez Wright begins arguing that the parks are not doing enough to protect wildlife.

After World War II, an increasingly mobile nation visits the parks as never before. When Jimmy Carter sets aside 56 million acres in Alaska–the largest grassroots movement in conservation history fights for the creation of seven new parks.