ABSTRACT
This article identifies sport utility vehicles (SUVs) with postmodern developments in industrial society, automobile manufacturing and marketing, land use, and the environment. A historical backdrop demonstrates links between vehicular systems and conceptions of nature protection: nineteenth-century rail produced monuments at discrete points, whereas the modernist automobile culture of the 1930s-1950s separated nature and urban civilization and created zones of wilderness. Today's SUV culture echoes a more complicated "de-differentiated" ideal that can be approached through advertising slogans and spare-tire covers. Viewed pessimistically, this postmodernism means "no boundaries" in people's exploitation of the environment; more optimistically it means seamlessly integrated concern–even in vehicles.
| "SUZUKI LIKES NATURE." Emblazoned on the spare-tire cover of a Grand Vitara, these words imply that nature is of interest for the owners and manufacturers of four-wheel drives. More generally, they challenge us to reflect on environmental consciousness in an age of sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) (see Figure 1). Millions of people all over the world have flocked to buy SUVs: Until recently they have made up almost half of all new car sales in the United States, and they are popular in virtually every other industrialized Western nation as well.1 The problem is that SUVs are big and heavy—up to three times heavier than an ordinary passenger car—and bigger, gas-guzzling engines are needed to move them. Many of the larger models are now available only with 8-cylinder engines. Their fuel economy thus ranges somewhere between poor and disastrous and they necessarily produce enormous quantities of carbon dioxide—a gas that is firmly established as a cause of global warming. To make matters worse, legal loopholes in the huge U.S. market have allowed designs that belch out disproportionately high levels of smog-producing pollutants.2 Such extrava-gance might be excused if it came about in response to some urgent need for rough-terrain capability, but this is not the case: 87 to 90 percent of four-wheel-drive owners never take their vehicle off-road.3 Thirty years after the Club of Rome report, the SUV craze is a phenomenon that makes one wonder whether people in the industrialized West are interested in reducing their impact on the world environment. |
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Figure 1. "Suzuki Likes Nature."
Photo courtesy of the author.
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