A study of the first ideas which led to the establishment of America's national parks, with an emphasis on the work of John Muir and the exploration and preservation of Yosemite and Yellowstone.
Americans begin to question the nation's rush across the continent that has devastated forests and ravaged animals. Conservation's greatest champion is Theodore Roosevelt, who sets aside 800,000 acres of the Grand Canyon.
Stephen Mather accepts the offer to oversee the national parks for one year. He launches a campaign to publicize the parks as a unified system and to persuade Congress to create a single agency to oversee it: the National Park Service.
Mather and Albright ally themselves with the automobile to "democratize" the national parks. Horace Kephart and George Masa launch a campaign to save the forests of the Smoky Mountains from destruction by establishing a national park.
Franklin D. Roosevelt enters battles to create national parks on the Olympic Peninsula, Florida's Everglades, and California's High Sierra. George Melendez Wright begins arguing that the parks are not doing enough to protect wildlife.
After World War II, an increasingly mobile nation visits the parks as never before. When Jimmy Carter sets aside 56 million acres in Alaska-the largest grassroots movement in conservation history fights for the creation of seven new parks.
Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan discuss the significance of the project and briefly touch on some of the dedicated heroes who made it their mission to fight for the preservation of certain areas around of the country. The segment technically acts as a preview for the series by splicing in a handful of excerpts from the episodes. Optional Spanish audio and subtitles are available.
Footage of Ken Burns, Dayton Duncan, the crew and their families trekking out in the field to gather footage at a variety of National Parks.
A collection of six themed montages of park footage set to instrumental music: 'National Parks Timeline,' 'Peace At Last/Across the Ocean,' 'Horizons,' 'Green Groves of Erin,' 'The Shores of Ogygia,' and 'Teddy Bears Picnic.'
A pair of additional sequences that didn't make it into the final documentary: 'An Interview with Nevada Barr' and 'The Boss.'
A shorter documentary in the same style as the main feature, only this one is narrated by Ken Burns. The feature expands on a handful of the interviews, but a fair bit of the content is recycled so it isn't really essential viewing. This inclusion also has optional Spanish audio and subtitles.
An assortment of park related and self explanatory mini-featurettes: 'San Antonio Missions: Keeping History Alive,' 'Yosemite's Buffalo Soldiers,' 'Mount Rushmore: Telling America's Stories,' 'Manzanar: Never Again,' and 'City Kids in National Parks.' Optional Spanish audio and subtitles are provided for these as well.