Transcript of conversation with Ken Burns

Art has a role to play.  Tolstoy I think it was said that art is the transfer of emotion from one person to another.  And in the case of the history of the national parks, it’s been so interesting that from the early Bierstadt paintings of Yosemite to the photographs of Jackson and the paintings of Mora, George Catlin himself, a great western painter, was the first one to propose a kind of peoples’ park, a nation’s park and was ignore, that artists had been there.  They’ve been what would be an amanuensis.  They’ve been that liaison between the reality of the parks, which everyone should have, and those folks who didn’t believe they existed, didn’t understand the full beauty of them.  The art was great.  They were instrumental.  Sometimes the photographs were hung in the halls of Congress and helped to convince people to vote for the setting aside of these places.  Later on, Ansel Adams would prove how seminal and responsible art is to showing the glories of the world.  So, they’re not substitute for the real experience, but they can be that bridge that might lure you.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a paraplegic, helped create Kings Canyon, a roadless wilderness national park during his time in office based solely on the photographs of Ansel Adams.  He would never have been able to get there given the fact that he was a paraplegic.  There was no way he could possibly experience the glories of Kings Canyon, but he could understand them.  And I think we’re hoping in some small way our film drives people to the national parks, that they see the beauty still like Plato’s cave, just mere shadows and reflections, but be drawn inexorably to the real thing.