Ken Burns' Ode to the National Parks Airs on PBS

Ken Burns' six-episode series The National Parks: America's Best Idea is currently airing on PBS, and it's a must see.

Burns and writer/co-producer Dayton Duncan worked on the series for six years, filming at America's most spectacular natural wonders. The series presents breathtaking images of protected national park locales from Acadia to Yosemite, Yellowstone to the Grand Canyon, Florida's Everglades to Alaska's Arctic wilderness.

But the series is more than just pretty pictures.

As the America's Best Idea part of the title suggests, the series connects the creation of national parks and the stories of conservationists -- men like John Muir, who is profiled in the first episode -- who helped to establish them to the very core values of American social and political ideology, and its historical evolution. The series clearly points out that these lands belong to the American people in perpetuity, and must be protected, and that all people must have equal access to them. This, suggests the series, exemplifies democracy, and it is an education about the meaning of the word and a lesson in the way it should work.

Whether you've toured the national parks, dreamed of doing so or never even thought of taking such a trip, the National Parks series is an entertaining and thoroughly satisfying travelogue. Replete with its rich cinematography, archival footage, personal profiles and interviews with historians, Sierra Club experts and other concerned citizens, it becomes almost as much of a national treasure as the national parks it documents. You can see it now on PBS, and it will eventually be available for watching online and on DVD. And, as usual, you'll find a remarkable wealth of background and educational material on the PBS Website.

(PHOTOS: Old Faithful geyser at Yellowstone National Park. Courtesy PBS and Horace Albright at the Grand Canyon, 1915. Courtesy PBS).