Douglas Brinkley Quotes
It's very important that we keep these special, wild places. It defines the United States. Imagine our country without our national parks and our monuments. Here in California, imagine if you didn't have in Southern Cal the Channel Islands or the great Highway 1, Big Sur up to Point Reyes up to the Redwood country.
Brinkley, Douglas. Interview. Forum, KQED, 2009.
In the 1930s, the only practical way to get to and around a National Park was to have an automobile or horses nearby. It was very difficult for the poor and the middle class to enjoy the parks. In poor economic times, it was hard to justify tax money being spent on national parks which would only benefit the upper classes. FDR however, had a more futuristic, egalitarian vision that became a reality with the development of the National Highway System under Dwight Eisenhower. At one time, camping in a National Park was a luxury that only the rich can afford. Today it is a very inexpensive vacation that even all but the poor can afford.
Douglas Brinkley is an American author, Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and professor of history at Rice University. Brinkley is the history commentator for CNN, Presidential Historian for the New York Historical Society, and a contributing editor to the magazine Vanity Fair. He is a public spokesperson on conservation issues. He joined the faculty of Rice University as a professor of history in 2007.
