• The National Parks: America's Best Idea, 8-10 p.m. Sunday, WPBT-PBS 2

• The Story of Florida's State Parks, 7:30-8 p.m. Monday, WPBT-PBS 2

All you really need to know about Ken Burns' newest marathon documentary you can learn from the title: The National Parks: America's Best Idea. Really, the best? Better than the polio vaccine, air conditioning, the Internet, the airplane, liberal democracy, rock 'n' roll, bourbon and the abolition of slavery? Better than toilet paper?

Unfortunately, The National Parks -- an exhausting and overwrought series airing for a total of 12 hours over the next six nights -- is full of such ill-considered hyperbole, to the point that it feels less like a documentary than a recruiting film for a druidic cult.

At various points during the first two hours (which, frankly, was all I could bear to watch), Burns' documentary refers to the national parks system as the basis for American democracy, the foundation of human DNA and God's only earthly refuge from rampaging sin and Satanism.

In fact, it barely stops short of demanding a loyalty oath to national parks. In an interview in the documentary, historian Clay Jenkinson says no less an authority than Thomas Jefferson would have argued ``that American nature is the guarantor of American constitutional freedom, that if you don't have a genuine link to nature in a serious -- even profound -- way, you can't be an American.'' Drop dead, New York. Stick it, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Churlish skeptics who think a documentary should deal in facts rather than paganist religious mania might note that Jefferson never said a word about national parks when he was president, and they weren't even invented until four decades after his death.

But Burns, in National Parks, makes it clear he isn't bound by narrow conceptions of truth. A good chunk of the show's first episode is worshipfully devoted to California naturalist John Muir and his boasts of holding conversations with rocks and twigs. Muir's Christian father, on the other hand, is ridiculed because he ``placed man above nature.'' That is, if you think a human being has more rights than a lichen on a rock, Burns regards you as agent of repression and species imperialism.

The idea that human progress is unnatural and degrading, that the world was a better place when we were squatting in caves, echoes through National Parks like an Old Testament prophecy of doom. ``I think that deep in our DNA is this embedded memory of when we were not separated from the rest of the natural world, that we were part of it,'' says one writer interviewed by Burns.

But actually it's parks that are unnatural. They're an attempt to impose stasis on nature, to halt its evolutionary change. Conservationist zealots like Burns are the ones who deny a human relationship with nature, because they treat man as the lone creature with no right to modify his environment.

Sadly, National Parks' frequent forays into animist nuttiness are the only interesting thing about it. Burns' previous documentary subjects, including the Civil War, jazz, baseball and World War II, have warranted the epic treatment he gives them. But unless you're endlessly fascinated by disputes about whether Yellowstone is administered by the scandalously deficient Government Bureaucracy X or heroically perceptive Government Bureaucracy Y, National Parks is one eminently boring piece of work. No one will say so, of course, for fear of arrest by the Park Loyalty Oath Police. Mark your ballots now -- National Parks is a shoo-in for next year's Emmy for Most Praised and Least Watched Program of the Year.

As for The Story of Florida's State Parks, a three-part companion series produced by WPBT that starts Monday and is full of drippy poetry about God asking trees what time it is, the best that can be said is that it's 10 ½ hours shorter than National Parks.

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