National Parks

[lorin]

Really worth seeing.
www.pbs.org/nationalparks/#close

[Menolly]

*nodding*

I've been keeping up with the promos a fan of PBS on Facebook receives. Since I don't have t.v. anymore, I'll watch the full episodes put up online starting tomorrow.

[matrixman]

Just watched the opener. Awesome, moving, beautiful. For me, this is the television event of the year.

[lorin]

Just watched the first two hour installment. Really interesting. Peter Coyote was the narrator, I could listen to him for hours. A good deal of this episode focused on Scotsman John Muir. Now that was a fascinating man. He came from an abusive home of an itinerant preacher that beat him into memorizing word for word the old and the new testament. In his early twenties he literally walked off his abusive past. The man continued to walk and walk and heal and heal. He became a valuable instrument in the establishment of Yosemite and Yellowstone as federal parks.

He spent a good part of his life trying to make people realize about the lack of completeness in their lives with spending time in nature, in the mountains. He reminds me so much of what I imagine Lord Mhorham may have been, a calm sole, guided in purpose and spiritual in nature. Even though SRD doesnt read Non-fiction, I wonder of he has done
some reading on Muir.

This episode so struck me how much of nature I have lost in the last twenty years, how desperately I need to re communicate with the natural world. I have seen too much of the un-natural, the perverted and need to look elsewhere.

Changes in the wind.

[matrixman]

Good to have learned about John Muir. What a remarkable life! He doesn't remind me of a Lord so much as an Unfettered One, intensely devoted to a private vision - that got transformed into a very public mission. Yosemite must have been like a "Wounded Land" to him, when he returned to it after years of absence, only to see all kinds of commercial development invading what he (rightly) considered a sacred place.

Sad to say, but I've never experienced nature on the scale of a national park, so I can't feel the loss of something I never had. Visiting at least some of the national parks, in the US and in my own country, is on my list of things-to-do-before-I-die.

[Menolly]

Sad to say, but I've never experienced nature on the scale of a national park, so I can't feel the loss of something I never had. Visiting at least some of the national parks, in the US and in my own country, is on my list of things-to-do-before-I-die.

It has been a long-time dream of mine to one day experience Banff...

[matrixman]

I might actually try for Banff or Jasper next summer. Those places seem to be just a convenient train trip away, so I've no excuse not to go.

[Menolly]

Ooo...

The PBS Video Portal has links to deleted scenes from the documentary and an area called "Untold Stories", as well as the full length episodes the day after each airs...

[lorin]

He doesn't remind me of a Lord so much as an Unfettered One, intensely devoted to a private vision - that got transformed into a very public mission.e.

I do understand how you would connect him to an Unfettered One, they were unattached to to the outside world. I think he reminded me of a Lord because he took on the fight to defend the land. What an interesting man, and he wrote so beautifully.

[matrixman]

Continuing the Chronicles analogies, if there ever was a High Lord of the National Parks, it must have been in the person of Theodore Roosevelt. He was the "star" of Episode Two. I didn't know he had played such a fundamental role in the creation of national parks. I'm guessing few leaders - of any country - have done as much good for the preservation of wilderness as Teddy Roosevelt did.

I liked the story of him stealing away from his entourage to camp with John Muir. It's like a High Lord going off in secret to consult with an Unfettered.