CBS Sunday Morning showcases America’s beauty ahead of 250th birthday
CBS Sunday Morning marked America’s 250th with Jonathan Irish’s landscapes, from all 59 national parks to conservation-minded images of the country’s open spaces.
CBS News Sunday Morning used its June 28 special, These United States - America at 250, to put America’s landscape at the center of the semiquincentennial. Jane Pauley hosted the program, and the photo feature “America the Beautiful” by Jonathan Irish turned mountains, parks and open country into the show’s clearest national symbol.
The Emmy Award-winning broadcast airs Sundays at 9:00 a.m. ET and streams on Paramount+ and the CBS News app. CBS describes Sunday Morning as a program that moves across arts, music, nature, entertainment, history, science, sports and Americana, a mix that made the landscape feature fit naturally into a wider look at what still holds the country together.
Irish brings a fitting lens to that assignment. Based in Golden, Colorado, he specializes in fine art nature photography and has built a career around images that highlight the beauty of the natural world. His own stated goal is to pair that beauty with conservation stories, with an emphasis on protection for future generations.
National Geographic says Irish’s work includes a year-long road trip in which he photographed all 59 U.S. national parks for the 2016 centennial of the National Park Service. That kind of project makes the parks more than scenic backdrops. It casts them as a shared civic inheritance, one of the few places in the country that still carries a common name, common access rules and a common sense of belonging.
That is the larger argument embedded in the Sunday Morning special. In a country split by politics and strain, the images that endure are often the ones that can still travel across state lines without explanation: a national park, a desert horizon, a coast, a mountain range. By pairing Pauley’s semiquincentennial special with Irish’s conservation-minded photography, CBS placed those landscapes at the center of the 250th birthday conversation and treated them as part of the nation’s identity, not just its scenery.
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