Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement by Sutter Paul (2005-01-01) Paperback

Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books

by Paul S. Sutter

In its infancy, the movement to protect wilderness areas in the United States was motivated less by perceived threats from industrial and agricultural activities than by concern over the impacts of automobile owners seeking recreational opportunities in wild areas. Countless commercial and government purveyors vigorously promoted the mystique of travel to breathtakingly scenic places, and roads and highways were built to facilitate such travel. By the early 1930s, New Deal public works programmes brought these trends to a startling crescendo. The dilemma faced by stewards of the nation's public lands was how to protect the wild qualities of those places while accommodating, and often encouraging, automobile-based tourism. By 1935, the founders of the Wilderness Society had become convinced of the impossibility of doing both. In Driven Wild, Paul Sutter traces the intellectual and cultural roots of the modern wilderness movement from about 1910 through the 1930s, with tightly drawn portraits of four Wilderness Society founders - Aldo Leopold, Robert Sterling Yard, Benton MacKaye, and Bob Marshall.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Nature, Environment, Wilderness, American History, Conservation

Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Dayna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm really enjoying this already. Sutter begins the book by taking about wilderness/nature as something to be consumed, and the rise of the leisure class and automobiles at the beginning of the 20th century. Some people were arguing for the democratization of the wilderness (i.e. providing access) and others were pushing for the commercialization of it. The trick was teasing out the difference between the two. Also of note is the idea that people who first had autos liked it because they could wander where they would and weren't on a fixed track (RR) with set destinations (hotel owned by RR). Of course this all changed and roads and rest stops became the new railroads, with everyone following the same path to the same sites to read the same placards.

Little did I realize that the fight to preserve wilderness in the interwar years was led by foresters who felt that wilderness and automobiles/roads were incompatible. With these autos came a tourist infrastructure (permanent camps, placards, restaurants, gas stations, etc.) that changed the character of a place. They railed against these consumerist recreational uses that were becoming ever more popular, challenging that the driving through nature in a car was not doing justice to the wilderness experience. It was not getting away from the mechanized world, it was bringing this world to pristine places. Conversely, it was felt that wilderness and resource extraction were not incompatible - an idea that is anathema to present-day environmentalists. I found this idea thought-provoking but counterintuitive, because, in my experience doing field work in both National Parks and National Forests it definitely seems that the Forests are riddled with roads (albeit dirt/unimproved/logging ones) and the Parks are not. Forests do allow for resource extraction (the salvage logging of burned areas, for instance), but Parks do not. So, I was confused how these interwar wilderness advocates didn't see this conflict - that resource extraction birthed roads, which they railed against. My understanding from the epilogue (in which the author kind of fast forwards through an additional 70 years of history) is that roads weren't used to extract timber back in those days (between WWI and WWII, the focus of this book). From 1945-1960 the road mileage almost doubled as the country developed an insatiable appetite for timber. So, what I was seeing in my field work was a result of these later developments.

This really got me to question my consumer attitudes towards wilderness, outdoor recreation and what access and wilderness truly mean. How important is it to leave beind the car at some point (realizing that you need the car to get to these places, which is the supreme irony)? Is scenic beauty required to designate something as a wilderness? If so, how does one define this beauty? Can wilderness areas produce (timber, oil, etc.) and still be consumed (through recreational activities, which lately seem to include more and more motorized vehicles)?

This is a must read for people who see themselves as the outdoorsy type: it opens your eyes to the history of the wilderness designation, and how we may need to modify that definition going forward to the future. This was not an easy read in which the pages flew by; rather, I made myself stick with it since it is a subject that I have thought a lot about recently because of my aforementioned field work (blogs on such things are here, for those interested: http://flycatching.blogspot.com/
http://anotheranodyne.blogspot.com/ )

[Ben Goldfarb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well-marshaled research in service of a clearly stated and powerful argument.

[Stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Despite what should be awesome content this book was really dull. The author made a few good points but the execution was lackluster and there were too many 'intuitive leaps' in the delivery that it glossed over a lot of important information on developing our current idea of wilderness. It used mini-biographies to highlight the story which also lead to the book feeling disjointed. At the end of the book it was hard to tell if you were reading a book about the automobile and wilderness as a larger concept (what the book says it covers) or a book about the development of the Wilderness Society which the author presumes the reader knows a fair bit about.

[Samuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The 1964 Wilderness Act represents the U.S. Government's commitment to protect “wilderness” from development. Section 4(c) prohibits permanent or temporary roads for motor vehicles of any kind. In the end, Sutter demonstrates that the American conceptualization of "wilderness" is synonymous with roadlessness (viii).

Sutter weaves the biography of four founders of the Wilderness Society within a broader socio-political history of America in order to show that the Act was aimed at not only saving wild nature but also Americans/humans also:

Robert Marshall—1930s lobbyist who advocated for the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Indian Affairs to set aside wilderness areas on the lands they managed.

Aldo Leopold—1930s/40s eminent wildlife ecologist (wilderness as a crucial ecological baseline to measure humanized environments against) and nature writer—A Sand County Almanac.

Robert Sterling Yard—1916 onwards involved in National Park Service development, which he eventually saw as insufficient in protecting wild lands.

Benton MacKaye—1920s regional planner suggested a trail (the now famed Appalachian Trail) be constructed along the crest of the Appalachian Mountains from Georgia to Maine.

These four men brought diverse ideas to the table on wilderness. They were neither “starry-eyed romantics blessed with a singular revelation of how wilderness should be protected nor conservative reactionaries fleeing into the backcountry because they could not make their peace with modernity” (x).
They were in fact men of their age, who saw “middle-class tourists seeking to visit wild places in their automobiles” as the main threat to wilderness. Value of wilderness not just ecological but moral as well; thus the touchstone focus on roadlessness (car exclusion) was simply brilliant (xii).

[Will Connelly · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sutter stumbles

Paul Sutter typically writes excellently researched books that explore the nuances of environmental history. Unfortunately, this is not one of them. In exploring the careers of four men directly connected to the wilderness movement, his attempts to connect the rise of the automobile to this movement falls terribly short. Mired down in the minutiae of their careers, Sutter loses sight of his main argument and instead offers mini-biographies of key people tied to the National Park Service, but in no way shows how the fight to protect pristine wilderness areas from development connects to the modern wilderness movement, and in fact is a testament to the threads of elitism that was truly defining the movement in its early stages.This slow-moving narrative not only goes into too much granular detail on the careers of the likes of Aldo Leopold, but alienates both the academic and casual reader alike.

[Annette · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book details the historical wilderness movement and it's political implications during the interwar period (Between WWI and WWII), the time when the Wilderness Society emerged to counter the rapid development of roads and the commercialization of outdoor recreation.The author provides four brief biographies of the most important founders of the Wilderness Society: Aldo Leopold, Robert Sterling Yard, Benton MacKaye, and Bob Marshall. (lj)

[Jeffrey Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love this subject. It's actually a conclusion I came to myself while researching for a book I'm currently writing. The rise of the automobile was so rapid that conservationists feared all wilderness would be lost. With time of the essence, they galvanized enough support to designate and protect parcels that would otherwise been lost forever. Well researched and well written.

[David Kessler · Rating 4 out of 5]

the book profiles four impt people:Stephan Yark, Bob Marshall, Aldo Leopold and Benton MacKaye.
All four men were instrumental in defining what wilderness was and why it was impt to keep.

[James Hiebert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent research on the interwar period of conservation when, the author contends, much of the conservation and preservation community worked together from both inside and outside the government. During this time, the founders of the Wilderness Society debated and created much of the philosophical ground work on which modern-day environmentalism and the broader wilderness movement rests. The author discusses extensively the rise of the personal automobile and how this trend influenced the founders to proactively define roadlessness as the defining characteristic of wilderness.