If you asked me what America's best idea was, I'd say it’s the Bill of Rights. But according to Lord James Bryce, eminent British historian and ambassador to the United States in 1912, our national parks are “the best idea America ever had.” Wallace Stegner echoed that sentiment in 1982. And now we have noted American documentary filmmaker Ken Burns (The Civil War, Baseball and Jazz) with The National Parks: America's Best Idea. The 12-hour series is scheduled for six nights on PBS starting Sept. 27 Stegner generally knew a good idea when he saw one. But even the best ideas need hard work to become – and remain – a reality. Because he thought the parks were suffering from neglect, one of Stegner’s contemporaries, the great Western writer Bernard DeVoto, proposed in 1953 that they should be closed and sealed off by the U.S. Army. DeVoto argued that