[Leica] National Park series - epiphany

[mark at rabinergroup.com (Mark Rabiner)]

> OK, I get it now. Ken Burns' TV series on the National Parks is not about
> the parks themselves. Rather it is a story about people who became so
> obsessed with a feature of the natural environment that they spent a
> lifetime trying to sway the public to accept their ideas. If you want to 
> see
> pretty pictures of the parks tune in the PBS Nature programs or the 
> National
> Geographic programs.The second episode of the series detailed the
> relationship between John Muir, a naturalistic zealot, and Theodore
> Roosevelt, an "outdoors" political dynamo who never saw an animal that he
> didn't want to kill. Somehow their interaction produced the legislation
> which resulted in the National Park system. Burns' barely hidden agenda was
> that the rich cannot be trusted to care for the environment, nor can the
> politicians. Experience in New York state indicates that this is probably
> not true. New York is replete with large state parks endowed by the
> affluent. The land comprising the Adirondack State Park, a forever wild
> region of mountains and forests, three times the size of Yosemite, was
> purchased and donated to the public by a consortium which included the
> Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Goulds, and the Roosevelts. The 
> Harrimans
> donated a big swath of land along the Hudson River for the Bear Mountain
> State Park. The Hudson Valley was cleaned up because the rich didn't want 
> an
> industrially polluted river spoiling the view from their shoreside estates.
> Of course other states might not be as environmentally enlightened.
> Larry Z
> 


I check the Park list to see which one was the most visited I recalled it
being not far from NYC which might explain it. Proximity.
What turns up this time I'm not recognizing.
#1 is the The Blue Ridge in Virginia. Not that far from here really but that
was not it.
#3 is Gateway National Recreation Area.
An odd one. It's in Brooklyn.
And scattered around into other places like Staten Island.
A kind of Endocrine system National park.
Isolated seemingly unrelated areas.


Mark William Rabiner