[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

II, 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 6.8ilillion 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-ness, 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 get 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 dam 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 II,

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 publiopinion and

kill the project in Congress,
where approval of the dam
seemed almost certain.

Harold Bradley helped persuade

the Garden Club of America to

oppose the dam 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.

Um, 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 roadless 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 ofaps,

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 II.

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.

Captioning made possible by

Friends of NCI

Captioned by the National

Captioning Institute
--www.ncicap.org--