Driven wild: how the fight against automobiles launched the modern wilderness movement PDF
Preview Driven wild: how the fight against automobiles launched the modern wilderness movement
WEYERHAEUSER ENVIRONMENTAL BOOKS William Cronon, Editor WEYERHAEUSER ENVIRONMENTAL BOOKS Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books explore human relationships with natural environments in all their variety and complexity. They seek to cast new light on the ways that natural systems affect human communities, the ways that people affect the environments of which they are a part, and the ways that different cul- tural conceptions of nature profoundly shape our sense of the world around us. The Natural History of Puget Sound Country by Arthur R. Kruckeberg Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares: The Paradox of Old Growth in the Inland West by Nancy Langston Landscapes of Promise: The Oregon Story, 1800–1940 by William G. Robbins The Dawn of Conservation Diplomacy: Canadian-American Wildlife Protection Treaties in the Progressive Era by Kurkpatrick Dorsey Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West by Mark Fiege Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis by Joseph E. Taylor III George Perkins Marsh, Prophet of Conservation by David Lowenthal Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement by Paul S. Sutter WEYERHAEUSER ENVIRONMENTAL CLASSICS The Great Columbia Plain: A Historical Geography, 1805–1910 by D. W. Meinig Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite by Marjorie Hope Nicolson Tutira: The Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station by H. Guthrie-Smith A Symbol of Wilderness: Echo Park and the American Conservation Movement by Mark W. T. Harvey CYCLE OF FIRE by Stephen J. Pyne Fire: A Brief History World Fire: The Culture of Fire on Earth Vestal Fire: An Environmental History, Told through Fire, of Europe and Europe’s Encounter with the World Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica DRIVEN WILD How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement PAUL S. SUTTER Foreword by William Cronon UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS Seattle and London TO JULIE, HENRY, AND WYATT Driven Wildby Paul Sutter has been published with the assistance of a grant from the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books Endowment, established by the Weyerhaeuser Company Foundation, members of the Weyerhaeuser family, and Janet and Jack Creighton. Copyright © 2002 by the University of Washington Press Printed in the United States of America Design by Veronica Seyd All right reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. ISBN 0-295-98219-5 (cl.; alk. paper) The paper used in this publication is acid-free and recycled from 10 percent post-consumer and at least 50 percent pre-consumer waste. It meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. CONTENTS Illustrations follow pages 48 and 112 Foreword: Why Worry about Roads, by William Cronon vii Acknowledgments xiii 1.The Problem of the Wilderness 3 2. Knowing Nature through Leisure: Outdoor Recreation during the Interwar Years 19 3. A Blank Spot on the Map: Aldo Leopold 54 4. Advertising the Wild: Robert Sterling Yard 100 5. Wilderness as Regional Plan: Benton MacKaye 142 6. The Freedom of the Wilderness: Bob Marshall 194 7. Epilogue: A Living Wilderness 239 Notes 264 Sources 308 Index 332 v 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 “wilder- ness.” 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 Col- orado, 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 moun- tain 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 longstand- ing 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 viii Foreword places like Yosemite and Yellowstone. Our affection for such parks, based on their natural beauty but also on the romantic and nationalist symbol- ism 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 Pro- hibition 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 struc- ture or installation within any such area.” Despite all the possible activ- ities 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 na- tion 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 puz- zling. 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 Wildis 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 conservation- ists 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 looking at four of the men who founded and led the Wilderness So- ciety in the years surrounding its creation, he weaves together biogra- Foreword ix phy and history to demonstrate that people’s motives for protecting wilderness were surprisingly diverse. The different backgrounds of these four men help account for the richness and sophistication that charac- terized wilderness advocacy by the mid-twentieth century, and make it even more intriguing that they were so much in agreement about the dangers posed by roads and cars. Of the four figures Sutter studies in depth, some will be more familiar than others. Robert Marshall, for instance, will be known to anyone who is even casually familiar with the early history of wilderness preservation in the United States. No one was more responsible in the 1930s for per- suading the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs to set aside wilderness areas on the lands they managed. Marshall was an ex- traordinary figure, tireless in his travels and lobbying efforts on behalf of wilderness, and his tragic early death at the age of thirty-eight only makes more remarkable the number of acres that he was personally re- sponsible for protecting. Equally well known among the founders of the Wilderness Society was Aldo Leopold, the eminent wildlife ecologist and nature writer who served as the chief theorist of wilderness protection in the 1930s and 1940s. It was Leopold who argued that wilderness pro- vided a crucial ecological baseline against which more humanized envi- ronments could be compared, and he also produced some of the most lyrical celebrations of wilderness and wilderness values in all of Ameri- can literature. His A Sand County Almanac remains essential reading for anyone interested in wild land protection today. Much less well known among the subjects of Driven Wild is Robert Sterling Yard, who was involved after 1916 in the early development of the National Park System before deciding that the parks were doing an in- adequate job of protecting wild lands. Yard played an essential role in the day-to-day management of the Wilderness Society during its early years, was among the most important publicists for wilderness, and helps us un- derstand why a growing number of advocates believed that the National Park Service should not be solely responsible for protecting such places. Finally, Benton MacKaye, a regional planner, was as interested in pro- tecting rural communities as he was in protecting wilderness. One of his most valuable contributions to the movement was his suggestion in the 1920s that a trail be constructed along the crest of the Appalachian Mountains all the way from Georgia to Maine. That suggestion led over the next two decades to the construction of the famed Appalachian Trail, as potent a symbol of wilderness as anything in the eastern United States.
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