Grinding Gears on the Roads that Ruin

Paul S. Sutter. Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002. xvi + 343pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00.

Automobiles and wilderness may not always make good bedfellows, but both have long served as key symbols of freedom and independence. At times, the protean nature of what they symbolize can lead to a powerful congruence of meaning—as in the iconography of an SUV advertisement that places a shiny new vehicle in the heart of a vast expanse of mountainous desert. On the other hand, wilderness is also defined by the complete absence of motorized vehicles. In this respect, cars and wilderness represent an essential conflict between the freedom to do as one wishes and the freedom to avoid the wishes of others. The true nature of the relationship between automobiles and wilderness, if such a claim can be made, is neither based on synthesis nor antithesis. Rather "our love for wild nature is intimately connected with our affection for the automobile" in a confounding but indissoluble relationship that constantly oscillates between pure antagonism and absolute conflation (p. 18).

As Paul Sutter makes clear in Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement, commercialized leisure is the axis that binds and separates automobiles and wilderness. For most of the past century, a constellation of wilderness values like "escape," "purity," "national pride," "adventure," and "sublime beauty" have helped to sell outdoor products and experiences to an eager buying public. While using wilderness to sell things and vice versa has long made dollars and sense, it has also engendered a good deal of passionate criticism—especially of the automobile and the host of commercial industries it supports. For Bob Marshall and the founders of the Wilderness Society, the freedom of the open road represented a direct threat to what he called "the freedom of the wilderness." Cars and roads were the arch enemy of wilderness, Marshall intoned in 1930, and only the "organization of spirited people who will fight" against the motels, souvenir shops and wayside attractions that roads engendered could save wilderness from becoming just another expression of the mass consumerism that was overtaking the country (p. 218).

The commodification of wilderness and leisure dates back at least to the nineteenth century. The process was especially evident when powerful railroad interests sponsored the creation of the first national parks. ¹ As Sutter makes clear, however, the connection between merchandising and wilderness appreciation took a quantum leap in the 1920s when the automotive industry, road builders, car clubs, recreational outfitters, camp equipment manufacturers and local chambers of commerce actively promoted visitation to national parks and forests. It was in this context that Marshall made his appeal for wilderness, fearing that roads and the various enterprises they fostered would destroy the one place where Americans could stand apart from, and critically assess, the social and environmental effects of advanced industrialization. As Sutter puts it, "modern wilderness advocacy sprang from a sense that as roads and the automobile carved up the nation's remaining wild spaces, the American desire to retreat to nature, traditionally a critical gesture, was becoming part of the culture's accommodation to the modern social and economic order" (p. 16).

The association of automobiles with wilderness -and the passionate effort to dissociate the two -inaugurated what Sutter calls "the modern wilderness movement" and led to the establishment of the Wilderness Society in 1935. The first national organization dedicated to wilderness preservation did not originate in the "Bully" days of Theodore Roosevelt's presidency, nor did it stem from the nineteenth-century romanticism that informed the spiritual passions of John Muir. Where Muir, Roosevelt, and others railed against industrialists who viewed nature as an inexhaustible resource, the founders of the Wilderness Society worried about the threat of motorized leisure on lands already protected by the federal government. "Modern wilderness," Sutter writes, "emerged as a new...