The documentary filmmaker Ken Burns is directing a new television series celebrating the history of America’s national parks over 150 years. The 12-hour, 6-part film will air on PBS in the fall of 2009.

Following in the tradition of The Civil War, Baseball, and Jazz, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, is an upcoming major documentary series on another quintessentially American subject: the national parks, according to Burns, who answered a number of questions about what’s next for his team. The places themselves are unique. And they all have histories inextricably intertwined with the nation’s. But equally important, it was in the United States that the radical notion of setting aside such special parts of the landscape for the enjoyment of all the people was first proposed and enacted.

The series will tell the remarkable story of these places from Acadia to Yosemite, Yellowstone to the Great Smoky Mountains, the Everglades of Florida to the Gates of the Arctic in Alaska, and scores of other parks that preserve unique landscapes and icons of our national existence. Ours will not be a travelogue or a “nature film” but a documentary history, albeit with some of Nature’s most spectacular locales as its backdrop, according to Burns.