Salvaging Wilderness from the Tomb of History: A Response to The National Parks: America’s Best Idea Kevin Michael DeLuca In the age of industrialism, wilderness is the counterbalance to human excesses and the inspiration for environmental activists. Today, wilderness is even more important and contested as people face multiple environmental crises on a planet with an exploding human population and voracious consumer appetite. Too often obscured by the technosphere that engulfs us, wilderness awaits its ecoteur filmmakers to give it greater presence on the public screens of the technoscape. After The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, wilderness still waits. By treating wilderness as an historical relic and vacation spot, the film saps it of its vital relevance and political power. Audiences must understand the foundational role of wilderness in their lives, instead of being pacified with an history drained of color that disconnects them from wilderness. As people wonder if there is a future for industrial civilization, wilderness provides the last best hope for rethinking our place on earth. Keywords: Wilderness; Industrialism; Yosemite; History; Force The National Parks: America’s Best Idea is terrible. Despite what must have been their best intentions, Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan have produced a documentary that is terrible because of both the damage it does and the good it does not do. In choosing to make a stereotypically somber and soporific Ken Burns classic, they have butchered an opportunity to engage Americans and instead perform an inadvertent autopsy on the idea of wilderness while entombing the environmental movement under 12 hours of slow pans of black-and-white stills. This response essay will focus on four fatal choices. First, the decision by Burns and Duncan to relegate the idea of wilderness to the dustbin of history robs it of its force, both political and rhetorical. Kevin Michael DeLuca, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah. Correspondence to: Department of Communication, 2864 LNCO Bldg, 255 S. Central Campus Drive, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA. Email: kevin.deluca@utah.edu ISSN 1752-4032 (print)/ISSN 1752-4040 (online) # 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/17524032.2010.522146 Environmental Communication Vol. 4, No. 4, December 2010, pp. 484493