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Title: National Geographic Kids National Park Guides U.S.A Written by: Sarah Wassener Flynn and Julie Beer Published by: National Geographic Kids, 2016 Themes: national parks in the USA, sights, activities, trips, conservation Ages: 7- adult Opening: In the last hundred years, life in the Unites States has changed a lot, … Continue reading →

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Wild About Bears will be published on March 11, 2014, and I am jumping for joy at the prospect of visiting schools to share the many bear facts I have been collecting for several years. Kids will marvel at the uniqueness of each of the eight bear species as well as the commonalities they share.

I am currently working on the illustrations for The Decorated Horse,written by Dorothy Hinshaw Patent (forthcoming from Charlesbridge).


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Posted by Jeannie Brett, author and illustrator of Wild About Bears. Visit Jeannie's wesbite at www.jeanniebrett.com, "like" her on facebook, and follow her on twitter, @jeanniebrett. Be sure to check out the Wild About Bears facebook page too!

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I have told the story of my great-grandfather here before—the Horace Kephart of Great Smoky Mountains fame, whom Ken Burns brought to life with care and meaning in his most recent series, "National Parks: America's Best Idea."  Kephart was the father of six when he left his life as a librarian to travel and then to live mostly alone in the Smokies; one of his children, a son named George, would become a forester and an official in the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.  He would also be my grandfather.

This tiny porcupine-quill basket is among the many artifacts George Kephart left behind.  Recently I helped my father take this and a series of other Indian-crafted baskets to an auction house, with the hope that a collector will rightly make room for them.  It is hard, however, to give up family history, even if one doesn't quite know, nor will ever know, how a basket this tiny and carefully made came into the possession of a handsome, taciturn man.

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In honor of the new Ken Burns series starting on PBS next Sunday we asked Donald Worster, Hall Distinguished Professor of American History, University of Kansas and the author of A Passion For Nature: The Life of John Muir, to take a look at the series and let us know what he thought. His response is below. Tune in on Sunday and let us know what you think in the comments.

I have been watching the new Ken Burns series for PBS, “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” and it is a gorgeous and inspiring achievement. The hero of the series, and of our long history of creating national parks, is John Muir, the subject of my recent biography. Muir had nothing to do with setting aside Yellowstone park in 1872, but he was the main force behind the preservation of Yosemite, and he was the founder of a movement that would go on to add the Grand Canyon, Great Smoky Mountains, Big Bend, Cape Cod, Haleakala, Glacier Bay, and many others. Altogether, Americans would set aside more than two hundred million acres in a vast, diverse system of terrestrial parks and marine preserves spanning the continent and the Pacific Ocean. Muir would have endorsed the claim that those parks are this nation’s best idea ever. But what is the idea behind the parks?

“Recreation” is a commonly expressed purpose of the parks, which usually means outdoor exercise in the form of hiking, camping, fishing, or boating. But one can find mere physical exercise in a gymnasium. Muir understood that recreation should be a “re-creating” of our inner selves through immersion in nature. In his 1901 book Our National Parks he wrote that the parks should offer “wildness” (another word for “nature”) and that “wildness is a necessity.” A nation of “tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people” seek in the parks an escape from “the vice of over-industry and the deadly apathy of luxury.” They go there to reawaken something deep within their souls—a sense of being part of the natural world. Modern society has repressed that feeling of connectedness, of kinship with other forms of life, and has buried people under the burdens of too much work, too much economic insecurity, too much noise and machinery.

Muir thought the parks should be preserved for poor people as well as rich. Americans of all sorts shared the same need for getting back in touch with nature. The rich could buy a private summer retreat in the Adirondacks or a ranch high up in the Santa Barbara mountains, but the poor could not. They could, however, claim a right of access to the “people’s parks,” although it was not clear in 1901 how an impoverished sharecropper or a low-wage factory worker could afford traveling to a park. Muir seems to have assumed that eventually the railroad and the automobile would be cheap enough for almost everybody to use—and in fact that has come true. As well, he supported the creation of urban “natural” areas, like Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and Central Park in New York City. It took art to design them, but they could bring the green world within reach of city dwellers.

Besides restoring Americans’ psychological and physical health, the great parks were supposed to serve a religious purpose. Muir was one of this country’s greatest spiritual prophets, and he envisioned the parks as a kind of church or temple. They should become sacred places, rigorously protected in their pristine beauty from too much profane intrusion. He would never draw a rigid line between what is sacred and what is profane; after all he wanted people to come to those new churches and they would need food, lodging, and transportation while there. It was an old dilemma that has plagued all religions. “Thus long ago,” he noted, “a few enterprising merchants utilized the Jerusalem temple as a place of business instead of a place of prayer, changing money, buying and selling cattle and sheep and doves.” He was under no illusion that the temple of Yosemite or Mount Rainier would be safe from the ancient struggle between what is appropriate and what is not.

For people who do not share Muir’s religious stance toward nature, the whole idea of setting aside and carefully preserving national parks may seem loony. Conservative Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Muslims may find the idea of national parks a dangerous slide toward paganism or pantheism, a threat to their traditions. On the other hand, there are a lot of “nature atheists” who find Muir’s religion misguided, anti-human, or too restrictive. They don’t find nature at all inspiring or holy—it’s just a set of economic resources to be used for the benefit of humankind. Why shouldn’t we let snowmobiles into Yellowstone? Or why shouldn’t we give the parks back to their “rightful owners,” the Indian tribes that once hunted and gathered there and let them use the lands for economic development? That the parks should have a predominately religious purpose is not a universal point of view, and thus they are constantly embroiled in America’s cultural wars.

Yet I am impressed by the extent to which Muir’s way of thinking has spread through American society and the parks have become part of the nation’s religious life. The Ken Burns series promotes this success. It suggests again and again that we should come to these places in a spirit of awe and respect for something grander, more transcendent, more beautiful than we could ever create. Here are places to make us proud but also make us humble. They are the result of immense forces working over immense periods of time, and the outcome is goodness and beauty beyond our capacity to improve. This is a view that has gathered power in our culture. I am convinced that democratic societies are especially open to the religion of nature, for it takes faith out of the hands of priests and gives it back to the people. As long as Americans hunger for religion and as long as they pursue democracy, the national parks will likely be treasured as places where the people can go to worship as they see fit.

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Ammon Shea recently spent a year of his life reading the OED from start to finish. Over the next few months he will be posting weekly blogs about the insights, gems, and thoughts on language that came from this experience. His book, Reading the OED, has been published by Perigee, so go check it out in your local bookstore. In the post below Ammon reflects on Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson’s unusual editing actions.

A pair of purportedly well-intentioned young men who have an avowed interest in fixing our language have recently proved to me that the road to hell is not only paved with good intentions (or at least self-righteous ones), but also that this road has the capacity to be rather expensive.

According to a story last week that ran in the Associated Press, and several other gloating publications, Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson ran afoul of the law after they had completed a several-week long quest, during which they crossed a wide part of the country, fixing many typographical and grammatical errors that they found on various signs. They appear to have mostly done so with the knowledge of those who owned the signs. But supposing you are a young man, brimming with vigor and the dissatisfaction that comes from overmuch reading of the Chicago Manual of Style, and you come across a sign that is positively reeking of poor grammar, with no visible owner in sight – what then do you do? Well, you take out your magic marker and fix it.

And then you brag about it on your blog.

Unfortunately for Deck and Herson, the sign in question happened to be hand-painted by Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter, the architect who had designed that which the sign described – a 1930s watchtower in the Grand Canyon National Park. They have been ordered to pay a fine of $3,035, and are banned from fixing public signage or entering national parks for a year.

According to the Associated Press, “Authorities said a diary written by Deck reported that while visiting the watchtower, he and Herson “discovered a hand-rendered sign inside that, I regret to report, contained a few errors.”” Deck then proceeded to ‘fix’ these errors, which amounted to a misplaced pair of apostrophes and an added comma, but neglected to fix the far more egregious spelling of the word ‘emense’. Said Deck in his diary “I think I shall be haunted by that perversity, emense, in my train-whistle-blighted dreams tonight.”

Personally, I believe that Deck will be haunted by the absence of the several thousands of dollars more than he will be by the alternative spelling of this word, but maybe I’m wrong. In fact, I sincerely hope that I am wrong – I would love it if this self-righteous prig were haunted in his dreams, tonight and for many nights to come. Because I would like to point out to him that the sign he saw is hardly the only incidence of immense being written ‘emense’. It comes up in the OED - Caxton used it in Eneydos in 1490. And a quick perusal of Google Books shows that it was use in the Journal of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and also in Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters (by Joanna Baillie in 1821), and also in 476 other sources listed. If Mr. Deck has the courage of his convictions, and if his diary was telling the truth, it would be appropriate if he has ‘train-whistle-blighted dreams’ once for every one of those 478 emenses found in Google Books.

When I lived in Queens, there was a nail salon just down the street from me, with the wonderfully improbable title on its awning ‘Hannah And Her Sister’s Nail’. Every day I walked by this store on my way to the train. And every day as I did so I imagined that somewhere in the back of the store Hannah sat arguing with her sister’s nail, or perhaps asking the nail if it wanted a cup of tea. The misspelling gave a personality to the store that an ordinary nail salon could never have, and in being so in need of fixing it managed to make me smile every day.

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sorry for the lateness.

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It's a little late but here's my angels, demons, and thoughts of upcoming vacations.


Tim

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