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Book Review
| Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement. By Paul S. Sutter. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002. xvi + 343 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00
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| Glance at any environmental mailer or promotional brochure that appears in your mailbox and it quickly becomes apparent that modern environmentalists are obsessed with wilderness. For their part, environmental scholars have been no less consumed with understanding how this reverence for wilderness began, expanded, and has affected human society. Much of this scholarship includes the usual cast of characters—right-minded preservationists and wrong-headed developers—weighing the demands of consumer culture against the forces of conservation. Paul Sutter's Driven Wild attempts to expand our understanding of wilderness in America. Pulling back from the landmark Wilderness Act of 1964 by nearly four decades, Sutter anchors his narrative in the often-overlooked interwar period and argues that the campaign for wilderness was not only based on protection of the picturesque, but also on the defense of critical American values. Many wilderness advocates, Sutter believes, were not anti-modernists, but rather individuals who believed that the loss of pristine nature jeopardized the authenticity of the American experience. The shared source for this anxiety was the rise of the automobile. |
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To frame the narrative, Sutter offers portraits of four of the founding members of the Wilderness Society: Aldo Leopold, Robert Sterling Yard, Benton MacKaye, and Bob Marshall. Driven Wild, however, is not a multi-part biography. Rather, Sutter uses these individuals to illustrate how personal politics both inform and reflect larger social themes. The lives and experiences of these men varied widely, but they shared a commitment to protecting wilderness from the advance of consumerism and its most powerful expression—the automobile. Sutter questions the notion that in the first decades of the twentieth century the growth in outdoor recreation (supported by the spread of America's car culture) was fueled by a growing appreciation of wild nature. In fact, the arrival of the automobile meant that retreat into nature, an effort that once required thought and decision, became part of society's everyday, non-thinking behavior. As cars pushed deeper into distant nature, roadside commerce and garbage marred the landscape. But no less damaging to the environment was the change in ideas of leisure and notions of consumption that accompanied the automobile into the natural world. The founders of the Wilderness Society supported wilderness preservation, Sutter argues, not just as a substitute to the industrialized landscape, but as an alternative to modern notions of leisure and mobility. |
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Throughout Driven Wild, Sutter attempts to unravel the paradoxes and contradictions that marked interwar wilderness advocacy. To achieve their preservation goals, for example, members of the Wilderness Society needed to publicize the benefits of the natural experience, but increased awareness led to more tourism and the demand for more roads. More directly, wilderness supporters insisted that enjoyment of nature was a democratic right, but then balked when others suggested that mechanized access could bring such rights to greater numbers. Charges of elitism frequently coincide with wilderness preservation efforts (then as now), but Sutter insists that Leopold, Yard, MacKaye, and Marshall remained painfully aware of the larger social picture. It was not romance or escapism that motivated their efforts, but a shared belief that reshaping geography could reshape American culture as well. Sutter's insistence that roadlessness was the primary motivation behind the formation of the Wilderness Society means that other social factors get less attention than they may deserve, but Driven Wild remains an insightful examination of how a new and powerful preservationist ideal emerged from motor-crazed modern America. |
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Reviewed by John Herron, co-editor of Human/Nature: Biology, Culture, and Environmental History (New Mexico, 1999). He is currently in residence at the Huntington Library finishing a manuscript on the connections between science, gender, and nature. |
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