| Book Review | Environmental History, 13.1

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 13.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Windshield Wilderness: Cars, Roads, and Nature in Washington's National Parks. By David Louter. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books series. xvii + 240 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $35.00.

A recent article in the New York Times announced a ten-year, nearly $200- million project to reconstruct the famous Going-to-the-Sun Road in Montana's Glacier National Park. According to the paper, to drive the Going-to-the-Sun Road—a winding two lane highway slicing through the most impressive scenery in the Rockies—is to "travel back in time" and see primeval nature at its most spectacular and sublime. The idea that a road could provide access to pristine nature strikes many as blasphemous. A number of scholars, including Paul Sutter, have already shown that for many, parks and their heavily traveled roads represent the antithesis of wild nature. For decades, nature advocates campaigned to keep wide swaths of asphalt and exhaust-belching automobiles out of nature. Yet in his latest book, David Louter explains how for other, indeed most, visitors to nature, America's national parks are nature. From this baseline, park roads do not simply intrude, but rather define our nation's relationship with nature. And contrary to the Times' assessment that park roads take visitors back to an idyllic nature, Louter illustrates how roads and road-building are part of very dynamic process that produced the modern park ideal.

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