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Foreword: Why Worry about Roads
- University of Washington Press
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FOREWORD: WHY WORRY ABOUT ROADS William Cronon Among the benchmark environmental events of the twentieth century was the U.S. government’s decision in 1964 to protect from development a growing acreage of public lands by legally designating them as “wilderness .” The process began in a few obscure places in remote corners of the country: the Gila National Forest in New Mexico, Trapper’s Lake in Colorado , and the Boundary Waters in northern Minnesota. By the 1930s, a new national organization—the Wilderness Society—had been created with the explicit mission of protecting wild places on the public lands and securing legislation that would guarantee that they remain forever wild. Although less well known by the public than it deserves to be, the Wilderness Society played an essential role in drafting and lobbying for the legislation that created the national wilderness system as we know it today. The 1964 Wilderness Act that eventually resulted from this effort remains among the most important environmental laws ever passed in the United States. Why should Americans be so interested in protecting wilderness? This question has long been at the heart of American environmental history. It has many answers. One is the romantic sublime: the belief since the late eighteenth century that certain natural sites and phenomena—the mountain top, the chasm, the waterfall, the storm, the rainbow—are the places on earth where God is most immanent and where we are most likely to experience the deity at firsthand. Another is the frontier: the longstanding conviction among many Americans that their nation was forged by the pioneer encounter with wilderness. One of the founding myths of American nationalism is articulated in Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous (and infamous) frontier thesis, which argues (problematically, but in the popular imagination still compellingly) that American character and American democracy are both the products of a frontier encounter with wilderness. There can be little doubt that the sublime and the frontier played key roles in the early movement to set aside national parks in vii places like Yosemite and Yellowstone. Our affection for such parks, based on their natural beauty but also on the romantic and nationalist symbolism we still find in them, continues to this day. But neither the sublime nor the frontier can adequately explain one curious feature of the 1964 Wilderness Act. The authors of the Act, in their effort to protect lands “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man,” included in Section 4(c) a “Prohibition of Certain Uses” that were to be explicitly outlawed in wilderness. The Prohibition declares that there shall be “no permanent road within any wilderness area,” and furthermore that there shall be “no temporary road, no use of motor vehicles, motorized equipment or motorboats, no landing of aircraft, no other form of mechanical transport, and no structure or installation within any such area.” Despite all the possible activities that threaten the integrity of wilderness and that could easily have been named in this crucial section, the Act’s overwhelming concern is to outlaw motorized vehicles and roads from the lands it seeks to protect. At a time when automobiles were very nearly the defining core of what was proudly described as “the American way of life,” and when the nation was in the midst of constructing an Interstate Highway System that was among the wonders of the modern world, this hostility toward cars and roads in the 1964 Act seems at least intriguing, if not downright puzzling . Where did it come from? What can it tell us about the origins of wilderness protection in the United States? And what might be its lessons for today? Paul Sutter’s signal contribution in Driven Wild is to answer these and many other questions by arguing that one cannot understand the role of wilderness in modern American culture without recognizing its crucial relationship to roadlessness. Sutter demonstrates that the movement to protect wild land reflected a growing belief among many conservationists that the modern forces of capitalism, industrialism, urbanism, and mass consumer culture were gradually eroding not just the ecology of North America, but crucial American values as well. For them, wilderness stood for something deeply sacred that was in danger of being lost, so that the movement to protect it was about saving not just wild nature, but ourselves as well. To shed new light on the ideas and values that underpinned the early days of this movement, Sutter adopts as especially appealing strategy. By...