The Road Taken

An American friend recently returned from an extended visit to Sweden and loved the time he spent there. He was especially impressed with the country's environmental program, which he said was, by American standards, taken to epic levels. The entire country seemed to have an environmental consciousness that permeated everyday life. When he met with other Americans during monthly expat gatherings, they all marveled at such actions and discussed how the practices might be exported to the United States. At one such meeting, however, one of the Americans confided that, while he loved recycling, walking, and using mass transit, he missed his car. “Sometimes I just want to get in my car, drive around, and buy things,” he said. The others confessed that this sentiment was familiar to them, as well; it was one that my friend wasn't especially proud of, but one that seemed to be hardwired into American consciousness. The evolution of such ideas and behaviors is at the very core of Chris Wells’ book, Car Country: An Environmental History. In it, he asks just how America became such an auto-centric nation.

By focusing our attention on the built environment, Chris Wells explains why Americans are so accustomed to driving everywhere. “This book,” he tells us, “will ask you to think about landscapes: the everyday world around us, from the mundane to the magisterial, and especially the various principles that guide its physical organization” (p. xxvi). While keeping his eye on the built environment, Wells confronts the two main interpretations of how Americans became addicted to driving their cars—and to the roads, suburbs, and strip malls that shape the landscape and organize American patterns of mobility. In doing so, he offers a more nuanced view of the history of U.S. society and its transportation streams, while moving away from the interpretations that normally dominate discussions about automobiles and traffic. In his words, “It is a mistake . . . to explain this state of affairs either as a simple product of an ardent love affair with automobiles or as a result of a conspiracy to foist cars on an unwary public” (p. xxxi). Instead, Wells reorients our view toward the built environment in order to establish a new interpretation. “Americans drive because in most places the built environment all but requires them to do so. Landscapes in the United States that are easily navigable without personal vehicles have become rare—small islands in the vast sea of Car Country” (p. xxxi).

This interpretation begs a question: Did the automobile beget Car Country, or did the built environment give rise to auto dependence? Wells strives, over the course of the book, to provide an answer. Making informative and engaging pit stops along the way, Wells guides readers as he maps how Americans became increasingly dependent on their cars. Embedded in the book is a discussion about the field of environmental history itself. Yet, rather than focusing solely on the ways roads altered landscapes or cars utilized precious resources, Wells directs our attention to the large-scale processes of social and cultural change that facilitated our reliance on cars. He does so by organizing the book into four parts, each covering a different time in history and a different set of issues.

In part one, “Before the Automobile, 1880–1905,” he balances the sociological and environmental factors that set the stage for a series of debates about roads, their primary users and uses. Noting that people cared passionately about transportation networks long before “legions of motorists began clamoring for good roads,” Wells uses this section to provide essential background information about infrastructure that would direct the terms of the debate surrounding roads in subsequent eras. He also demonstrates how the chaos that urbanization and industrialization ushered into existence led people to search for order via an organized system of road design and construction. In some ways, this is ground other scholars have already covered. Yet Wells offers new insights and...