Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Environmental Movement, by Paul S. Sutter. . - Reviews - book review

American Forests, Spring, 2003 by Carl Reidel

Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Environmental Movement, by Paul S. Sutter.

$35.00 [C], University of Washington Press, 2002

An automobile field trip at the 1934 annual meeting of the American Forestry Association (now AMERICAN FORESTS) at Knoxville, Tennessee, provided the setting for the creation of the Wilderness Society. Four of the original founders left the caravan to meet by the roadside and draft the principles for a new organization. Paul Sutter sees this "roadside creation" as "rich with symbols of the founders' motivating concerns."

Sutter's thesis is that road building and "the nascent American car culture" accounts in great part for the emergence of modern wilderness advocacy and the Wilderness Society's forming. His book, however, is far more than a defense of this intriguing theory. It is an important insight into the broader social and cultural context in which the organized wilderness movement in the United States was born between the World Wars. Sutter argues that "a subtle understanding of the origins and content of the modern wilderness idea" is vital to the "search for environmental solutions" today.

Focusing on the lives of four of the Wilderness Society's eight founders (Aldo Leopold, Robert Sterling Yard, Benton MacKaye, and Bob Marshal), Sutter leads readers through the "complex terrain of the interwar period" and the debates over social, political, and ecological bases for wilderness advocacy. Each man contributed a unique perspective and strength to that debate and played a decisive role in the creation of the national wilderness system.

With the exception of Yard, a journalist with a Park Service background, the others were foresters, a fact Sutter suggests accounts for their commitment to "reforming the exploitive aspects" of resource development and their understanding of ecological concepts. For the most part, however, they rejected the narrow techno-scientific forestry of their day in favor of a more liberal social-forestry philosophy. They came from a forestry background but shared a more progressive vision than the profession in general, advocating wilderness protection and recreation use on the national forests within a clearly social agenda.

Regardless of your stand on wilderness protection, this book is a landmark history of the wilderness idea and the central role played by the men Sutter profiles. It is solid scholarship, well written with thorough endnotes and references.