TV REVIEW : YOSEMITE DOCUMENTARY MISSES MARK

A collection of interviews does not a meaningful program make. That’s the lesson of “The Law of Nature: Park Rangers in Yosemite Valley,” a 30-minute documentary airing at 10 tonight on Channel 28.

John Harper Philbin, who wrote, produced and directed the program, presents interviews with 12 Yosemite rangers who talk about the changing nature of their duties--how the growing number of visitors has made the rangers’ work what one of them calls “largely a people-management job rather than a resource-management job.”

Philbin’s point is unclear. Some of the rangers resent their law-enforcement responsibilities; others were attracted to the job because of them. That they are necessary seems beyond doubt, however, and hardly new: A Yosemite ranger was killed in 1973 and some rangers have been required to carry guns since 1980.

Yet Philbin is so preoccupied with the jarring notion that crime could exist amid the natural splendor of this magnificent national park that he all but passes over a matter that should be of far greater concern: dramatic budget cuts that, he says, have pared the staff of rangers on duty at any given time to half of what it was 10 years ago.

Even less in evidence is any suggestion of how the rangers’ problems relate to the general public. Not until the credits are rolling at the end of the documentary do we hear a ranger suggest that “a lot of the resources are being damaged because we don’t have enough people to always be out there to look to see what’s going on.”

Now, corroborating that statement would have made for a meaningful program.