"We need Michelle Obama to save the national parks."

[babylonsister]

Michelle’s Next Mission
Timothy Egan
MOUNT RAINIER, NATIONAL PARK


You would not know, just as egg-yolk-colored glacier lilies are pushing through ground newly unburdened of its snow, that there is so much trouble around these lands that form America’s Best Idea.

You could not fathom, among the babble of languages bouncing off granite walls in Yosemite, that these places may one day be unloved.

Our shared outdoor spaces, our attics of history and graveyards of sacrifice — from Devils Tower to Death Valley, from Martin Luther King Jr.’s birth home to the Pennsylvania ground where Flight 93 crashed on 9/11 — are being overlooked. The physical embodiments of the American story are being ignored by too many.

Last year, there were 274 million visits to all areas run by the National Park Service. These places still draw more people than Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association and Nascar combined. This is a crisis?

Well, yes. The problem is that 10 years ago, the parks attracted about 12 million more visitors than they do today. Attendance has been in gradual decline for more than a decade.

Could the first lady do for national parks what she did for growing lettuce?

And, worse, visitors all look sort of the same: generally white, fairly prosperous, sensible-shoe-wearing adults.

This is where Ken Burns is supposed to come to the rescue. The film that he and the writer Dayton Duncan have produced — “The National Parks, America’s Best Idea” — which is scheduled to be shown over six nights on PBS in the fall, is stunning and restorative, like the parks themselves. There will most likely be a Ken Burns Effect — just as there was after his films on the Civil War and baseball. But it will not be enough.

For that, we need something else. A superstar. A style-shaper. A person who could get whiny city kids not only to eat their vegetables, but to grow them.

We need Michelle Obama to save the national parks.

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http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/11/michelles-next-mission/

[XemaSab]

1. Generally white, fairly prosperous, sensible-shoe-wearing adults?

Depends on what park you go to.

Generally Japanese, fairly prosperous, sensible-shoe-wearing adults can be found at many parks. :hide:

[Cha]

2. This sounds Grand! I'd

love to see that PBS Special. I think First Lady Michelle Obama would be a wonderful spokesperson.

My sister and I camped in National Parks all the way down from New York to Georgia last summer..it really is awe inspiring.