Table Of ContentWEYERHAEUSER 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
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system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN 0-295-98219-5
(cl.; alk. paper)
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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.
