tavis: good evening from los angeles. i'm tavis smiley. tonight my conversation with acclaimed filmmaker ken burns. all this week burns is unveiling his latest project, a sweeping 12-hour documentary devoted to america's national parks. it focuses on the ideas and individuals that created some of america's greatest national treasures. a concept burns calls america's best ideas.

we're glad you have joined us. 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're looking forward to helping build stronger communities and relationships because with your help, the best is yet to come. >> nationwide insurance proudly supports tavis smiley. tavis and nationwide insurance working to improve financial literacy and the economic empowerment that comes with it. ♪ nationwide is on your side ♪ ♪ >> and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. [captioning made possible by kcet public television]

tavis: over the course of his career, ken burns has established himself as one of the great story tellers in all of film history. his wide range of subjects have included everything from the civil war to baseball to jazz and one of my favorite films "unforgivable blackness." all this week, you can catch him with his latest offering called "the national parks: america's best idea". >> they are a treasured house of nature. 84 million acres of the most stunning landscapes anyone has ever seen. including a mountain so massive it creates its own weather. whose peak rises more than 20,000 feet above sea level. the highest point on the continent. tavis: ken burns joins us tonight from new york. ken, nice to have you back on this program. >> thank you so much, tavis. great to be with you.

tavis: let me start by saying congratulations. i got a chance to see some of this and it is absolutely phenomenal. once again, you have done it, my friend. congratulations. >> it is not a travel log. it is not a nature film though there is great stuff of nature. it is about ideas and individuals. it is about stories. i think that is what makes it different from other things about the national parks. it is not even a recommendation to what lodge or inn to stay at. tavis: you are one of the great storytellers. i said americans and folk around the world are going to appreciate seeing the kind of stories that you bring to life. let me start with the obvious, the beginning at least for me, which is this title. "the national parks: america's best idea." i know there is going to be some conversation kicking up just around that subtitle. america's best idea, mr. burns? >> we kick it up in our film the first few minutes. we steal this from a writer who

said it is the best idea we have ever had and immediately someone comes on and says not best idea. the best idea comes from thomas jefferson, all men are created equal. that's of course right. once you set a country in motion with those ideals at least ahead of you because we know mr. jefferson meant all white men of property free of debt when he wrote that. he didn't see the hypocrisy when he wrote those words, he owned 100 human beings but if you sets in motion a country dedicated to that you would be hard-pressed to find a better idea or at least an expression. we like to think that the national parks are the expression of the declaration of independence applied to the landscape because for the first time in human history land was set aside not for kings or noble men or the rich but for everybody. and for all time. it is an utterly democratic impulse and it comes out of opportunities, fresh opportunities here on this at least apparently virgin continent that we have inherited.

this garden of eden that thomas jefferson thought it would take hundreds of generations to fill up. very quickly four or five, we have filled it up and we're not only in danger of losing those places but losing the animals that occupy those places. somebody who goes against repatience interest of progress. it is not now have look at every river and think dam and it is not enough to look at every beautiful stand of trees and think board and look at canyons and say what minerals can be extracted from it. what kind of residue of this garden of eden could we have? the original impulse to have national parks is in some ways 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 somebody

saying here goes ken burns again. he wants to spin this conversation about conservation. he wants to spin conversation about the environment. next he'll be talking about global warming and the trees. he wants to spin the conversation. it is not about spiritualism. it is about conservation. you ought to just come out and say it. >> well, you know what? part of it is. this impulse to save it comes out of spiritualism. but then it moves to conservation in the old teddy roosevelt version. moves to patriotism. when we said "my country tis of thee." we're not talking about trade statistics or the shadows cast by lofty metropolitan skyscrapers. we're talking about this land that we have saved in this national parks, later on it becomes economic. these places are the permanent pipeline when the resources that we may have extracted have long disappeared and then more recently and that is not our province because we're history.

it has evolved into complex ecological environmental issues. we want to tell you stories. we want to introduce you to 50 or so human beings. most of whom you never heard of. of course you have heard of teddy roosevelt and might have heard of john muir, the great wilderness prophet and john d. rockefeller jr. who reversed his father's energies and devoted himself to philanthropy of which the national parks were great beneficiaries. this is a story that is black and brown and red and yellow and female and unknown as much as it is a story of well known white guys. tavis: let me throw one person at you. tell me about shelton johnson. >> we met shelton johnson when we were leading up to this film. he is a park ranger stationed at

yosemite. 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 and the celebrated cavalry men. the parks protectors in sequoia and yosemite national parks, two of the earliest national parks. it is already an interesting little known phenomenon but if you go back and remember that of course more african-americans are lynched in the first decades of the 20th century than at any other time of our history you would begin to understand what a kind of challenging and interesting story it therefore becomes. if the people that are telling you how the behave in a national park and most of these cavalry men are, how shall we say, overseeing, are white, it makes as sheldon johnson said, for a very interesting day. he not only brings alive the story of the buffalo soldiers, which is wonderful. but of course like shell by foot in "the civil war" and like

wynton marsalis in "jazz" and stanley crouch in "jack johnson". he hits it out of the park. that is the great glory of american history. as long as you pigeon hole people. segregate them into their areas. you're not doing anybody any favors. so sheldon johnson knows how the -- to talk about the buffalo soldiers but more important he knows how to talk about the national parks and as we know there are too many communities in our country that do not feel an ownership in these parks. it is quite often inner city african-americans. sheldon comes from inner city detroit. or hispanic americans and i can now go to those neighborhoods and thanks to a grant, our educational outreach has sent me there to many, many cities and i think show these kids and these schools and these folks, in these communities, places that heroes that look and sound like them.

national parks that are as important as anybody else. that is the great bottom-up democratic story, that the bigger arc of the national parks entail. tavis: there are a number of great marks the california and l.a. where i live and work every day. i work outside. i get my workout at a park called kenny hawn. i work out two or three days a week. i work outdoors. i do my workout on at a park called kenny hawn. they tend not to be white but oftentimes hispanic and african-american. i did my informal research preparing for my conversation with you. you don't have to spend a whole lot of money to get in. where you're next to god. where there is nature and kids can run around. rangers are going to protect you

and you know your kids are not going to get harmed. explain that to me with regard with this series that you have done. >> you know, you have said it better than anyone could. i was just in yosemite. went to bridal veil falls and there was a 3, 4-year-old hispanic gal. she didn't know where she was. she was just racing up to the spray of this place. i was brought to tears. she is probably from the central valley. it is cheap now. the national parks thrived during our great depression. not because they got the first shovel-ready stimulus dollars of franklin roosevelt's new deal. in the form of the c.t.c. that set up 1,000 camps, employing 300,000 young men sending money back to millions of americans. we couldn't get a trailer to katrina victims in three months. let's remember a federal government that actually worked even in the depths of the depression. it is about an individual experience.

when we go to a national park, and you felt this, too, you are closer to something bigger than yourself. this is the paradox and that doesn't -- as you perceive, as you know, as you submit yourself, you perceive yourself, your insignificance that makes you bigger. just as the egotist among us is diminished in that regard. that's what the parks do at a visceral level and as for everybody 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: yet, our conversation not withstanding when we think of the parks we have not thought of them as being owned by us including people of color. we tend to think of them as the preserved subsidiary of white america. >> that has been the case for most of it. at the very beginning of the parks the first people to come were the very rich from the east. they traveled by rail. the railroads were the first

promoters of the park. it cost a lot of money for that cross-country ticket and then hotels in there. what happened is the automobile came along and it got democratized. the depression came along and franklin roosevelt desegregated a lot of those jim crow facilities in the national parks and then goon suddenly erode and changes as you know we have been waiting a long time for. but i think what happens is those people who are aware of that powerful sense of co- ownership, that it doesn't matter whether you're a billionaire or whether you're changing beds at the hotel just outside the park, you own that park. you're a co-owner. all you to do is make sure somebody is taking care of it. we could use some more money. that is to say we need people who are arguing against those extractive and inquisitive interests and say let's keep up the maintenance. but man, it's ours.

when you look around at the rim of the grand canyon for geysers or a historical site, we have had that presence of mind as a great country to evolve this idea. just like thomas jefferson's all men created equal just meant all white men of property, we now mean all people of color and women and we protect our children and the elderly and the handicapped and we debate the unborn. so, too, the national parks set aside obvious natural scenery and it evolved to complex archaeological sites that recorded the ancient history of the native americans before us. many got into historic sites like battlefields, habitats, the everglades. nothing spectacular about a swamp. turns out to be one of the most diverse environments on earth. then we saved slave cabins and central high school in little rock, arkansas. still a working inner city high school today. unit of the national park system.

manzanar where japanese american citizens were interned during the second world war shamefully. we've saved martin luther king's boyhood home in atlanta. we have the statue of liberty and mount rushmore but we have been a big enough country to inhale complex geographical history but also a complex cultural and historic and now ethnographic past that says you know, we're a complicated country and by understanding all of that we so shanksville, pennsylvania, where united 1993 went down is the site of a national park city. so is oklahoma city, the site of the greatest domestic terrorist events. it is a great system. i'll argue on that great idea. tavis: so you have. the timing could not have been more proficious. i want to know how much you paid barack obama to go to two parks this summer with his kids?

>> i bumped into him before he went. he said we're going to the national parks and i said i heard and we are so very pleased and he had melia and sasha look at the films and they are now becoming junior rangers. existentialism. the purpose for a brief conversation between being and doing. the world so many of us and particularly our children live in is neither. we know about you know, nature deficit disorder. i lived in a subdivision growing up and i would just pile out of the house at 8:00 a.m. come back for lunch and come back when the dinner call came. now everybody sits in their room all day and text and do video games and they can't stay out of the facebook account. and we are starved for that relationship, for something bigger. i hope by the president going as he did and by those girls

getting involved as they did that, the rest of it can be reminded that all of those toys will be there when we get back but we will make lasting memories. my grandfather took my father and my father took me and i have taken my three girls to the national parks. that's where we'll remember each other. not in the moment of getting up going school and washing but in these special times that we had together, out in nature where we are reminded of our atomic insignificance and are in that great way that the parks work made better. tavis: it is still case that we have a generation of kids, who, to be blunt about it, think that parks are boring, ken burns. >> it is true and so sad because once you get them out. a pbs station sent an african-american family into the everglades. that is a place where they didn't go. the family had a wonderful

time. they did sort of a pbs version of a reality show and i met the mother and she said i can't wait to go back so i think that there is always just that resistance to something new, particularly when we've got all of these distraction in front of us but i have never had somebody not be transformed by time out in the national parks. it is not like ho hum. somebody once said that people who are bored by the view from the grand canyon will be disappointed on the day of judgment. [laughter] tavis: i read a quote from you somewhere. relative to this wonderful series where you said that parks are good places for epiphanies. what did you mean by that? >> i think it goes back to what we were talking about. you stand on the rim of the grand canyon. you look at the colorado river that has been carving rock. 1.7 billion years old. nearly half the age of the planet. if i'm lucky, if i'm fortunate,

i get four score, 80 years. i'm nothing in comparison to that. yet in that hew hue military something has opened up and i'm able to participate in a relationship that john muir spoke so passionately about. i think every one of the 50 people that we introduce you do had a moment like that. there were a couple of people or an association that got together and devoted their lives to saving it. at the heart of it was that personal transformation. everyone we interviewed for the series over the last 10 years had their own experiences. each one of us, or most of us who worked on the series, i know had that moment where you just feel like you opened up. whatever you want to call it. you can call it religion, science, art. whatever it was. something was transformed. my molecules were rearranged.

i feel. i pinch myself. i'm getting paid to stand up here. i got up at 3:00 a.m. and i carried this heavy equipment out to this point and waited for the sun to come up at the national park where the first light hits the united states of america every day or hawaii volcanoes where they are making new land. that lava comes out and makes that island just a little bit bigger every day. just in the natural aspect of the national parks, unbelievable legacy. tavis: 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, we signed a

deal in 1999, we knew regardless to have financial crisis, 2009, that would be over and we had already replaced them in this case with bank of america and we have lots of oer funders, the national park foundation, the park foundation itself, corporation for public broadcasting, the few charitable trusts, not easy but over a 10-year period we accumulated their support. you're right. it takes a lot of generalship to film at the gates of the arctic and northern alaska and the dry tortugas off the florida keys and to those hawaii volcanoes and everywhere in between. but what we were looking for is not -- you can go shoot that. anybody can do that and get beautiful pictures in these places. they look exactly the way john muir saw them and the way the ancestors of the native american who is once called them home. then you have to figure out how the tell a story. i think most of the time, most of the effort, most of the love

and energy that went into this was trying to weave together like a russian novel. it is not set against backdrop of catastrophic war but of these beautiful places, travis, they just knock your socks off, you know? you stand there and you can't imagine that the next place was going to be any better than the one before and all of a sudden, you see a new view and sometimes it is something specific like a rock or a glacier in july or a piece of an -- an animal walks by. we saw grizzly bears. we're had the experiences of our lifetime and still able to engage those themes that we have been doing. the diversity in this film is not politically correct. it is naturally occurring. tavis: i -- your passion. i can feel it here in l.a. 3,000 miles away from you in that studio in new york. i know viewer at home can feel your passion as well. i want to close by saying i've

always believed is all you know is what you're giving. now never know what people have receiving. further more, you never know who is receiving it. i don't know if you heard about this or saw this but not long ago on this program we had this guy named prince. a guy you may have heard of. he was on this program for two nights. he shared with us for the first time publicly about his childhood. over that two-night period, i was blown away by the fact that his entire narrative was built around "unforgivable blackness." i don't know if you saw this. i kept thinking this is prince talking about ken burns' documentary. your stuff just impacts people in so many myriad of ways that i just want to say thank you for doing this piece in advance of it coming out. >> that is so kind, tavis. i bumped into a guy at the airport who was headed to the nba. he now teaches middle school. he sd i probably could make more money if i stayed in the nba but i feel so rich having made the decision that i made and i just looked forward to the

time i would be able to thank you. he thanked me. i thought oh, my god, why are we here at pbs where if not for a moment like that where somebody, whether it is prince or a guy who is carrying all that extra load for the rest of us teaching our middle schoolers about american history, which you know, is for most kids, castor oil. this is great. this is why we get up in the morning and that's the kind of thing that i think that the parks are speaking to. that you're speaking to, that i'm trying to do in all of the different subjects that we tackle. i thank you, brother, for that kind comment. tavis: "the national parks: america's best idea." burns may be right about that. the good news is we'll all be able to judge for ourselves as you'll be able to see it on pbs "the national parks: america's best idea," produced by the one and only ken burns. congratulations again. nice to have you on again. >> thank you. tavis: that's our show for the night.

catch me on the weekend. you can access our radio pod cast at pbs.org. good night from 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 for the people as a whole. instead of leaving the joiment thereof to be confined to the very rich, it is noteworthy in essential democracy one of the best bits of natural achievement which our people have to their credit and our people should see to it that they are preserved for their children and their children's children forever. with their majestic beauty all unmarred. theodore roosevelt. >> for more information on today's show, visit tavis smiley on pbs.org.

>> join me next time for a conversation with oscar winning filmmaker michael moore. that's next time. we'll see you then. >> there are so many things wal-mart is looking toward to doing like helping people live better. but mostly we're looking forward to helping build stronger communities and relationships. because of your help, the best is yet to come. >> nationwide insurance proudly supports tavis smiley. tavis and nationwide insurance, working to improve financial literacy and the economic empowerment that comes with it. ♪ nationwide is on your side ♪ ♪ and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you.

>> we are pbs.