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It is too bad that NBC has not cleared the online rights for Roger O'Neil's (no link) Fleecing of America travelogue to the Arkansas swamplands. The federal Fish & Wildlife Service is spending $27m to conserve the ecosystem where the ivory-billed woodpecker--dubbed the "ghost bird" because it was thought to be extinct--may still be alive. O'Neil's characterization of such spending as a "fleecing" was tendentious--and the very beauty of his nature video gainsaid his argument.
The waterfalls of Yosemite National Park have a more conventional picturesque charm. They were the location for ABC's extended Key to Success feature by David Muir on volunteer efforts by mountaineers and hikers to clean up trash from the park. He showed us the wreck of a 1951 Nash that apparently careened off a mountain road into a ravine. The motor was completely encased in squirrel nests and pine cones, but the clean-up removed it anyway. Not pristine.
It is hard to trump the Great Wall of China for spectacle. How did CBS turn the 4,000-mile-long edifice into a news story? Barry Petersen told us that Chinese academics have no interest in it as an object of study so he introduced us to David Spindler, "making solitary hikes to create a massive computer database." Historian Spindler, an American expatriate, "may be the only person whose life is all about the Great Wall."
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