Allies of the Earth: Railroads and the Soul of Preservation (review)

Those who love the landscape must also love trains. Alfred Runte clearly has loved both railroads and the environment since childhood. Unfortunately, this has given him license to turn a rather short book into a lengthy polemic on the general stupidity of Americans who, unlike Europeans, have turned their backs on what must be the best form of transportation ever devised. Aside from this smug condescension, Runte fails to provide a discernable thesis other than that the wilderness is nice and trains are even nicer. Allies of the Earth represents a triumph of broad generalization over meticulous scholarship, one that leaves out virtually every seminal work on railroads and the environment in which they operated.

What makes all of this so disheartening is that the book is based on an intriguing premise—too weakly substantiated to be labeled a thesis—that Americans who once traveled by train perceived the natural environment differently than do their descendants in automobiles. Rather than link this contention to the emerging literature on perception and travel, Runte merely asserts that railroad companies were inherently eco-friendly, determined to preserve the natural environment in order to market a pleasing panorama to prospective passengers.

This claim fails on two counts. First, railroads have long been instrumental in the destruction of the natural environment, facilitating such depredations as deforestation, open-pit mining, the slaughter of the buffalo, and the breaking of the sod on the agriculturally marginal Great Plains; and second, the willingness of the Santa Fe or the Union Pacific to promote the scenery along their routes (they would have been foolish not to) hardly indicates that they held the preservation of the wilderness in high esteem.

Still, Runte concludes that Americans would be better off if they traveled by train: less harried, less wedded to the clock, and more willing to appreciate the natural beauty arrayed just outside the window. While many people (including this reviewer, as it happens) agree with this assertion, it hardly constitutes a defensible thesis, hardly entitles Runte to presume what must be best for everyone else, and certainly does not form the basis for any sort of prescriptive public policy. One could as easily argue that no one can truly appreciate the grandeur of the American landscape without traveling at the sedate pace of an 1840s canal boat. Runte acknowledges that jet aircraft "certainly made the world smaller and more accessible" (p. 161), yet his travel philosophy would seem to dictate that the QE2 would have been a morally and aesthetically superior choice for a transatlantic sojourn. In truth, the luxury liner might have been too expensive for his budget, just as trains were—and remain—too pricey for ordinary Americans. Runte waxes eloquent about elite trains of the past like the 20th Century Limited and the Phoebe Snow, without acknowledging that such travel was as far beyond the reach of most Americans then as a trip on the Concorde would be a generation or two later.

Runte's frequent trips to Europe have exposed him to what he justifiably considers the finest passenger rail network in the world, one that (in his view) is the obvious model for the United States. He views Europe through the rose-colored glasses of a tourist, mesmerized by the frequency and quality of the rail network, and this tourist mentality perhaps explains why he is wrong about significant elements of the European transportation experience. While they might agree that their trains are "servants of public space," many Europeans would be astonished to learn that "Europe knows to use railroads for preservation, while America forgets what it truly wants preserved" (p. xvii), or that "Europe sees transportation differently—as a way to encourage human interaction" (p. 35). Runte lauds the use of the "hydroelectric power [that] abounds in the Alps and Pyrenees" (p. 32) to propel trains, without mentioning the devastating affect of dams and reservoirs on the natural...