tavis: good evening from los angeles, tavis smiley. tonight, a conversation with filmmaker ken burns. beginning september 27, ken burns unveils his latest documentary about the national parks. if focus on the ideas and individuals that helped create some of america's greatest national treasures. next, he will have a look at baseball. ken burns, coming up right now. >> there are so many things that wal-mart is looking forward to

doing, like helping people live better. but mostly, we are looking for two boeing strong relationships. because of your help, the best is yet to come. >> nationwide insurance problem supports tavis smiley. tavis and nationwide insurance, working to improve financial literacy and economic empowerment that comes with it. >> and by contributions to your pbs stations from viewers like you. thank you. ♪ tavis: always pleased to welcome ken burns to this program. through the course of his brilliant career he has become one of the great storytellers in history with projects like

jazz, baseball camera and unforgivable -- baseball, and unforgivable blackness. his latest documentary focuses on the state parks and premiere september 27 right here on tv pbs. >> they are a treasure house of nature super, 84 million acres of the most stunning landscapes anyone has ever seen. including a mountain so massive it creates its own weather. who's peak rises more than 20,000 feet above sea level. the highest point on the continent. >> can -- tavis: ken burns joins us from new york. great to have you back on this program. >> thank you, great to be with you. i have tavis: a chance to see some of this and it is phenomenal -- tavis: i had the

chance to see some of this and it is phenomenal. once again you have done it, my friend. the >> it is not a travelogue. it is about ideas and individuals. i think that is what makes it different from other things about the national parks. it is not even a recommendation as far as which lodge or inn tuesday accurate -- to stay out. tavis: let me focus on the obvious, which is this title, "the national parks, america's best idea." i know there will be conversation kicking up just around that the subtitle. america's best idea, mr. burns? >> yes, well we can get up in our first few minutes of the film. wallace said it was the best idea that we had ever had and immediately someone comes out and says, it is not the best idea. the best idea comes from thomas jefferson when all men are

created equal. but when you set a country in motion with those ideals ahead of you, at least, and mr. jefferson did not see the contradictions and hypocrisy in the fact that as he wrote those words he owned 100 human beings. but as you set in motion a country dedicated to that, you would be hard-pressed to find a better idea, or at least an expression. çbut we would like to think tht national parks are the expression of the declaration of independence applied to the landscape. because for the first time in humanaside not for kings or nobn or the very rich, but for everybody and for all time. it is an utterly democratic impulse and it comes out of fresh opportunities here on this, at these, apparently virgin continent we have inherited. this garden of eden that thomas jefferson himself thought would take hundreds of generations to fill up.

but very quickly, four or five, and we are in danger of losing the animals that occupy these places. someone goes against the inquisitive and extractive and some would say, rapacious pace of progress and says, we will save these places. it is not enough to look at every river and beautiful stand of trees and think, board feet. it is not enough to look at the landscape and wonder what minerals can be extracted. what can we save? what kind of residue of the garden of eden could we have? this is in some ways and spiritual. it is easier to worship god in cathedrals in nature than those made by the hand of man, which was the european tradition that we were trying to escape the specific gravity of. >tavis: i can hear people saying, here goes ken burns, he wants to spin this conversation about conservation.

he wants to spin this conversation about the environment and the next he will be talking about global warming and the trees. this conversation is not about spiritualism. it is about conservation. you ought to just come out and say it. >> you know what, part of it is paid is -- the impulse is spiritualism and then moves to conservation. and in the teddy roosevelt tradition, it moves to patriotism. when we sing "my country, 'tis of thee" we are not talking about lofty skyscrapers. we are talking about the this land. these places are the economic pipeline and the resources that we may have extracted and have long disappeared. and then more recently -- and that is not our province because we are history -- it has moved into ecological and environmental issues. no, we want to tell you a story. we want to introduce you to 50 or so human beings, most of whom

you have never heard of. of course, you have heard of teddy roosevelt and john muir, the great wilderness profit and john d. rockefeller -- john d. rockefeller jr. and to -- who was devoted to good will. but this a story of black and brown and andand yellow and female as much as it is a story of well-known white guys. tavis: tell me about sheldon johnson. >> we met sheldon johnson we were filming this film. he is a park ranger right now stationed at yosemite and he is an african-american. he is the only african-american ranger in the sierra nevada. he interprets the little-known story of the african-american buffalo soldiers, the celebrated

cavalrymen who were in the first decade of the 20th century the parks protectors in the sequoyah and yosemite national park's, two of the earliest national parks. it is an interesting little known phenomena, but if you go back and remember that, of course, more african-americans are lynched in the first decades of the 20th century than any other time in our history, you begin to understand what a challenging and interesting story it therefore becomes if people are telling you how to behave in a national park and most of those cavalrymen are, how should we say, overseeing our weitz, it makes, as sheldon johnson said, a very interesting day. he not only brings alive the story of the buffalo soldiers, which is wonderful, but as shall be put in the story like buck o'neil in baseball, like wynton marsalis with jazz, like jack johnson, he hits it out of the park when we go off the questions that are specific to

that and that is the great glory of american history. as long as you pigeonhole people, segregate them into their areas, you are not doing anyone any favors. sheldon johnson knows how to talkç about the buffalo soldie, but more importantly, he knows how to talk about the national parks. there are too many communities in our country that do not yet feel and ownership of these parks, and it is quite often inner-city african-americans. sheldon comes from inner-city detroit. are also a a hispanic americans. -- or also hispanic americans. our outreach has sent me to many cities and i can show these kids, these schools, these folks in these communities heroes that look and sound like them, heroes of the national parks that are as important as anybody else. that is the great bottom up democratic story, the bigger arc of the story of the national parks. >> there are a number -- tavis: there are a number of great

parks where i live in california. i work out -- i do my work out outside at a park called kenny hahn. there are other parks around the city that i have run through. but at this one to the park, i noticed one day that the persons that are now taking advantage of what the parks offer, the water and the hills, the places for pickney at -- picnicking, etc., tend not to be right, but african-american and hispanic. i did my informal research before my conversation with you and is one of the last vestiges in the country where you do not have to spend a lot of money to get in, where you are next to god, there is nature, kids can run around and the rangers are there to protect you and your kids are not going to get harmed, etc. contextualize that for me with regard to these theories you have? >> you have said it better than

anyone could. i was just in yosemite and we went to bridlevale falls and there was a little 4-year-old hispanic girl. she did not know where she was. she was just raising up to this place. i was in tears. she was probably from the central valley. it is cheap now. the national parks thrive during our great depression not just because of the new deal. the civilian conservation corps set up 1000 cans within three months, employing thousands of young men sending money back to the americans and we could not get a trailer to katrina victims, let's remember that. it is about individual experience. let's forget about the spiritualism, ecology, patriotism. when we go to a national park -- and you felt this to -- you are closer to something bigger than

yourself this is the paradox. as you submit yourself, you perceive yourself, your insignificant, that makes you bigger, just as the egotist among us is a diminished by his or her regard. and when you perceive your co ownership of these parks, man, you and i own the grandest canyon on earth. how lucky are we? tavis: and yet, when we think of the parks, we have not thought of them as being owned by everyone of us, including people of color. we tend to think of them as a preserve, a wholly owned subsidiary of the white america. >> that has been the case from the very beginning. the people that came to the parks were the very rich from the east. they were the travelers by railroad, the first promoters of the parks. they got the cross-country to get and the hotels.

then the automobile came along and it got democratized. the depression came along and was about desegregated a lot of those jim-crow facilities in the national parks and began to steadily erode changes that we had been waiting a long time for. what happened is that people who are aware of that very powerful sense of co ownership, that it does not matter whether you are a billionaire or whether you are changing the beds at the hotel just outside the park, you own that park. your eco-honor. and all you have to do there as a co-owner is to go in there and take care of it. all we need is a bit more money say some people with inquisitive interest. but man, it is ours and when you look around at the geysers or even at an historical site,ç we have had the presence of mind as a country to eve of

this idea. just as thomas jefferson said all men are equal we mean it with mint and color can -- we mean when in, and color, and handicapped and so, too, the national parks set aside natural scenery. evolved into complex archaeological site of the native americans before us. and it got into historical battlefields. the spectacular everglades turns out to be one of the most diverse environments on earth. then we save slave cabin -- slave cabins. we have the area where the japanese americans were interned during world war ii shamefully. the planes for the indians were massacred by united states

soldiers. we have saved martin luther king's boyhood home. we have got the statute on not rushmore, but we have been a complex enough country to hail to logical history, but also complex cultural, and historic, and now ethnographic past that says we i understand our history and at what will make of things better. oklahoma city, the side of the greatest domestic terrorism event. i mean, it is a great system. i will argue on that great idea. and tavis: and so you have. i want to know how much you paid barack obama to go to two parks this summer with his kids. >> you know, i bumped into him and said, we are going to the national park -- and he said,

we're going to the national parks. i said, i heard and we are so pleased. he had his daughters look at the films and now they have become junior rangers. we are at an existential moment in the united states, my friend. and existentialism as a brief conversation as the tension between being an doing. the world our children live in is neater. we know about nature deficit disorder. i've lived in a suburb of duch -- growing up and i would pile out of the house at 8:00 a.m. and come back when the dinner call came. now everyone sits in their room all day and a text and cannot stay off of their facebook accounts, whatever. we are starved for that relationship of something bigger. i hope that the president going as he did, by those girls getting involved as they did, that the rest of us can be reminded that all those toys will be there when we get back, but we will make lasting

memories. my grandmother took my daddy, my daddy took me, and i have taken my three girls to the national parks. that is what we will remember each other, not in the quotidian moments of getting up and going to work, but in the special moments of getting out in nature where we are reminded of our atomic a and significance and in that great way that the parks' work, made better because of that. tavis: is still that we have a generation of kids who think that parks are boring. >> it is true, and as soon as you get them out you have total converts. we sent an african-american family into the everglades. that was a traditional place that african- american families did not go. i met the mother and she said, i cannot wait to go back.

there's always a resistance to something new, particularly when we got all of these distractions in front of us. but i have never had somebody not be transformed by time out of the national parks. somebody once said that people who are bored by the view of the grand canyon will be disappointed on the day of judgment. [laughter] tavis: i read a quote from you somewhere relative this wonderful series where you said that parks are good places for epiphanies. what did you mean by that >> it goes back to what we've been talking about you stand out on the river and you haveç that carving that is 1.7 billion years old, nearly half the age of the planet and if i'm lucky i get "fourscore -- i get

fourscore, 80 years. i get open upper to all things -- i did open up to relationship, to all things. every single one of the people that we introduced you to have a moment like that. there was someone or a couple people or an association who got together and devoted their lives and their fortunes and sacred honor to saving it, but at the heart of that was that personal transformation. everyone we interviewed over the last 10 years had their own experience like that. most of us who worked on the series i know how bad moment that you feel that you are opened up, you have this transformation, whatever you want to call it. you can call it a religion, science, art -- whatever it was, something was transformed. my molecule's were rearranged. i pinch myself. i'm getting paid to stand out here? i got up at 3:00 a.m. with all

of this equipment and i'm waiting for the sun to come up at the acadia national park were the first light on america hits at the landscape every day or the first light on volcanoes and the law comes out and makes the ivan just a bit bigger every day. there are very few places -- and makes the island just a bit bigger every day. there are very few places where new land is being created. the dry tortugas, i mean, just in the natural aspect of the parks, unbelievable. tavis: i know that you lost one of your major funders, and still you got this thing done. tell me about how you did this. >> general motors, which had been funding us since 1987 -- we signed a 10-year deal in 1989, so we knew that because of the financial crisis in 2009 that it would be over. we had already replaced them with bank of america and we had

gotten lots of other founders -- saunders, the national park foundation, the corporation for public broadcasting, the pew charitable trust. it was not easy, but over a few years we accumulated their support. but it takes a lot to film at the northern gate of alaska and the dry tortugas up to the florida keyes and the acadia, maine and everywhere in between. but anybody can go shoot that and get beautiful pictures in those places. they look exactly the way john deere saw them and the weight of the ancestors of the native americans who once called them home -- and away the ancestors of the native americans who once called them home did 10,000 years ago. but you have to tell the story. it will not matter unless you collect those stories. the love and the energy that went into this was trying to weave together like a russian novel. it was not set against a

backdrop of a catastrophic war, but these beautiful places, tavis, that just knock your socks off. you stand there and just cannot imagine that the next place is going to be any better than the one before and suddenly you see a new view and something specific like lichen on iraq or a glacier in july or -- liken on a rock or a glacier in july or grizzly bears. we have still been able to engage those things that we have been doing. the diversity in this film is not politically correct. it is naturally a current trade -- naturally occurring. tavis: i can fill your passion and i know the viewers at home can fill your passion as well -- feel your passion as well. you never know where you are giving and, furthermore, you never know who is receiving.

not long ago we had this great iconic artist named prinz, a guy you may have heard of, was on this program for two nights and shared with dust for the house -- shared with us for the first time publicly about his childhood but his entire two nights was built around unforgivable blackness. i do not know if you saw this, but the cat -- kept coming back to that. i wasç like, this is prinz talking about a ken burns documentary your stuff and that touches people in a myriad of ways. i want to say thank you for coming down. >> that is so kind, tavis. i was talking to a guy in the airport that was headed for an mba and a changed his mind. he said, i probably could make more money staying with an mba, but i feel so rich making the decision that i made. i want to thank you. i think, oh, my god, why are we

not hear except for those moments? -- where are we here except for those moments? whether it is prince teaching about american history, which is for most kids, castor oil, the the subjects that we tackle, i thank you for that kind comment. tavis: the national parks from america's best idea. now that i am at the end of that conversation, you might be right about that comment. [laughter] you will be able to see it on pbs "the national parks, america's best idea" produced by the one and only ken burns. that is our show for tonight. you can access our podcast at pbs.org. good night, l.a., thanks for

watching and as always, keep the faith. >> it is the preservation of the scenery, of the forests, and the wilderness game or the people as a whole instead of leaving the enjoyment thereof to be confined to the very rich. it is noteworthy in its essentials democracy, one of the best bits of national achievement which our people have to their credit and all people should see to it that they are preserved for their children and their children's children forever. with their majestic beauty. theodore roosevelt >> for more information on today's show, visit tavis smiley at pbs.org. tavis: join me next time for a conversation with ted kennedy

jr. and that is next time. we will see you then. >> there are so many things that wal-mart is looking forward to doing, like helping people live better. but mostly, we are looking forward to building ionships because with your help, the best is yet to come. >> nationwide insurance probably supports tavis smiley. tavis and nationwide insurance, working to improve financial literacy and the economic empowerment that comes with it. >> and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. ♪