Becoming Elemental

As I was driving home from work this afternoon, I heard Ken Burns, in an interview on National Public Radio about this new documentary The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, articulate almost perfectly my inspiration for creating Becoming Elemental:

More than six years of work on this series led Burns to some interesting discoveries, like the true motivation that inspired the preservation of vast swaths of territory, to create the National Park system. “When I would say I was working on a film about the history, not a travelogue, not a nature film, but a history of the National Parks, [people] go ‘oh, Theodore Roosevelt, conservation’ I say, yeah, that was the second impulse, the first impulse is spiritual,” Burns tells NPR’s Robert Siegel.

Many of the early supporters of the creation of a national park system had experienced revelatory moments out in nature, and wanted to salvage wild land so future generations could have similar experiences.

“Let us set them aside,” says Burns about the thinking of the early park proponents. “Wouldn’t it be possible for a democratic people to own in common these things?”…

“We didn’t yet know why we needed these places and he [John Muir] reminded us, for both scientific and but also sort of spiritual reasons, why saving these places would be good for our souls,” Burns says. “The parks represent in the early years almost a spiritual advancement for the United States, and only later does the conservation ethic come in.”

During that NPR interview, Burns said that being in the National Parks “rearranges your molecules.” Scientific research on meditation, such as that of Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin, confirms that insight. It is my belief that practicing meditation, or other forms of contemplation, in wilderness areas does in fact change your brain waves (temporarily) more quickly and more powerfully than technological tools (e.g., meditation CDs or Holosync) and possibly more powerfully than hours of meditation in less natural settings.
-CDP

This entry was posted on Friday, September 25th, 2009 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.