The National Parks: America's Best Idea

The Morning of Creation (1946–1980) (1x6)

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Following World War II, the parks are overwhelmed as visitation reaches 62 million people a year. A new billion-dollar campaign—Mission 66—is created to build facilities and infrastructure that can accommodate the flood of visitors. A biologist named Adolph Murie introduces the revolutionary notion that predatory animals, which are still hunted, deserve the same protection as other wildlife. In Florida, Lancelot Jones, the grandson of a slave, refuses to sell to developers his family's property on a string of unspoiled islands in Biscayne Bay and instead sells it to the federal government to be protected as a national monument. In the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter creates an uproar in Alaska when he sets aside 56 million acres of land for preservation—the largest expansion of protected land in history. In 1995, wolves are re-established in Yellowstone, making the world's first national park a little more like what it once was.