William Rollins

reflections on a spare tire: SUVs AND POSTMODERN ENVIRONMENTAL CONSCIOUSNESS

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.

Figure 1. "Suzuki Likes Nature."

Photo courtesy of the author.

It is tempting to decry SUVs as yet one more example of how an evil urge for consumption inherently con-flicts with the environment. But it would be a mistake to approach the problem in this schematic way. Goods and foods comprise a cycle of material exchange that stands at the center of physical, economic, and social life; as Jean-Christophe Agnew has pointed out, we can no more abandon the principle of consumption than we can give up "the air we breathe."⁴ Furthermore, it would be impossible to set up the environment as the sole criterion of value when judging SUVs. Cars are eminently useful objects that allow people across the globe to socialize, to do things for others, and to negotiate their own paths in a world whose road infrastructure is, in the first instance, already built; there is thus a complicated "plurality of ethics" around these objects of consumption that demands to be taken into account.⁵ Recent research on cultures of automobility even would suggest that consumer-drivers in the industrialized West are "locked in" to the time-scheduling and kinaesthetic patterns of automobile use at a fundamental psychological level.⁶ Nevertheless, it is clear that people still enjoy a significant degree of choice as they seek to strike a balance between their everyday life patterns and the exigencies of the environment. Society's mistakes and shortcomings over the previous decades may mean that many of us cannot do without a motor vehicle. Still, we can almost certainly do without an SUV.⁷

This brings up the crucial question: Why do "we" consumers, collectively, keep buying these outsized gas-guzzlers? The answer to this environmental problem is quite obviously in our heads. But at the same time it is rooted in an entire phase of economic and social history. SUVs became widespread quite suddenly in the late 1980s and 1990s, the golden age of "postmodernism." Indeed, SUVs are an expression of this time in the fullest sense of the phrase: They reflect characteristically "postmodern" aspirations and anxieties, and in particular they embody a profoundly contradictory set of desires having to do with nature. The advertising surrounding SUVs suggests that these vehicles are prized not just because they can triumph over obstacles of weather and terrain, but also because they promise to bring buyers closer to nature. This is an especially powerful appeal in a postmodern age suffused with an awareness of environmental problems and saturated with a yearning for a more "natural" lifestyle. According to their very essence, though, four-wheel drives contradict this desire and turn it into its opposite. They hint at a new synthesis of civilization and nature, but with their deep-lugged tires and high emissions, SUVs ultimately must be regarded as an egregiously perverse expression of our postmodern environmental consciousness.

VEHICULAR ERAS

A HISTORICAL BACKDROP can help put this set of hypotheses about the SUV and nature into perspective. Ever since the dawning of the railroad age, one of the important ways in which people have used and experienced mechanized passenger transport has been to enjoy "landscapes," "the countryside," and "nature." As people have come to live and work in more and more urbanized settings, this access has become central to our ideas of what these things are: "Landscape" is what we can see out the window as we move from town to town, just as "the countryside" is the scenic destination at which we arrive. Vehicles and "nature" in the industrial age are thus locked in a curious dialectic of destruction and appreciation. On the one hand, roads, vehicles, and infrastructures have had a tremendous and often destabilizing impact on ecosystems; on the other hand, experiences made possible by various transport technologies have undeniably formed the basis for many people's efforts at appreciation, preservation, and conservation. But if there is a cause-and-effect relationship between transport and environmental consciousness, it is a highly variable and complex one. Different national and regional groupings, not to mention individuals, may take advantage of different aspects of the same technologies at different times, and may deploy them differently as a result of their respective situations. The farmer who used his Model T to saw wood and go to church on Sundays in Ohio quite possibly had a different understanding of nature from that of the educated adventurer who used his car to tour the national parks and vistas of the American West. Nevertheless, the last 150 years have seen three basic vehicular ages where changes in vehicle technology have aligned with changes in widespread cultural norms and have accordingly helped produce distinct geographies and generally accepted ways of approaching nature.

The first of these periods was the railroad era of the mid-nineteenth century, which at a purely spatial level produced a characteristic distribution because trunk lines and spurs were present only in small numbers. This distribution left correspondingly large tracts of land in between the lines. These vehicular "hinterlands" still could be accessed by horse or on foot, to be sure, but they were not plugged into the fast-moving circuits of industrial society to the same degree as were rail and shipping corridors.⁸ Mass tourism was one of the novel effects of the railroad, but it cannot be said that it was unambiguously bad for the environment. It is still not widely appreciated that the touristic consumption made possible by railroads was instrumental in leading to some of the first large national parks in the American West; and rail was an influential factor in the creation of the Tongariro National Park in New Zealand as well.⁹ The rail network cast a loosely woven net over the countryside. It produced localized development pressures that were answered, at least in some areas, by equally localized attempts at appreciation and protection. This pattern can be partly explained by the specifically visual effects of the new technology. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch has shown, rail travel "flattened" the perception of passengers newly confined to looking out a side window at high speed.¹⁰ This flattened and now purely visual perception of a countryside in the distance—sounds and smells having been cut off by the train's own overpowering rush of cinder-filled air—was arguably less than conducive to awakening strong environmental convictions. Efforts were sometimes made to beautify isolated rail corridors, but they possessed little of the popular appeal and none of the legislative power that gathered behind national parks and similar destinations, where tourists on foot could avail themselves of multiple senses and participate bodily in the setting. By producing this differential in perception, rail helped define the typically Realist or nineteenth-century view of worthy or protectable nature and thereby helped to create an environmentalism in its own image, one that celebrated the aesthetics of isolated, exotic, and often socially exclusive attractions.

In the early twentieth century the traveling public came to favor automobiles over railroads. Decisively kick-started by federal funds for better roads, mass motoring started in the late 1910s and early 1920s in the United States, and later spread to other countries such as Germany, where lower incomes and higher purchase prices limited the extent of auto ownership. Even in these early days people embraced the personal car with a passion that was not devoid of environmental overtones. Theodore Dreiser was probably representative with his perception of the many advantages that the automobile had over travel by train:

At best the railways have become huge, clumsy, unwieldy affairs little suited to the temperamental needs and moods of the average human being. ... Think what you have to endure on the ordinary railroad—and what other kind is there—smoke, dust, cinders, noise, the hurrying of masses of people, the ringing of bells, the tooting of whistles, the brashness and discourtesy of employees ... [Modern railroad travel] is so fixed; it has no latitude, no elasticity ... But the prospect of new and varied roads, and of that intimate contact with woodland silences, grassy slopes, sudden and sheer vistas at sharp turns, streams not followed by endless lines of cars—of being able to change your mind and go by this route or that according to your mood—what a difference! These constitute a measureless superiority.¹¹

This passage from 1916 sounded some of the key themes of auto ownership that resonate even in the later era of the SUV. Dreiser laid particular emphasis on the flexibility and self-determination that the car made possible, but also, quite significantly, praised the improved relationship to nature. The open automobile afforded a greater range of sensory impressions than a railway carriage: Woodland silences and the sounds of evening cowbells are experiences full of meaning in Dreiser's travelogue, and the passengers absorb a sense of the total environment through smells like hay and damp. That a variety of routes were available to the auto tourist signaled a quantitative and spatial change as well. Even in 1916 the highly imperfect road system cast a much more tightly woven net over the countryside than did the railroad. Access to nature—and certainly the potential for access to nature—jumped up a step as a result of the new vehicular technology, which promised to bring people closer and closer to more and more of the landscape through its more finely grained mosaic of routes.¹²

In the early days of the automobile, of course, this new "elemental contact with the reality of nature" was often anything but contemplative.¹³ Poor signage, neglected roads, and non-existent services meant that drivers often had to approach nature—in the form of rain, mud, washed-out river crossings, and animals in the road—as an obstacle to be overcome, and as a stage for resourceful feats of engineering. As Warren Belasco observed, the car itself was such a novelty that the vehicle (and its care and maintenance) could often be "the trip's focal point. In early touring the sights were often just excuses for being in the car."¹⁴ One could argue that, to a certain extent, not much has changed in the age of the SUV. A high proportion of SUV advertising stresses the vehicles' ability to "conquer nature" and to face the challenges of inclines, rivers, boulders, and deserts. As in the earliest days of the automobile, the tendency to drive for the sake of driving is not unknown today; indeed, with digital sound and numerous comforts studding the interior, the luxury SUV would seem to represent the linear continuation of the trend toward "being in the car" seen at the beginning of the century. There are some important differences, however. For example, early drivers understood their machines; the car was the trip's focal point because it kept breaking down and had to be fixed with ingenuity and loving care. Even when drivers of these open, drafty vehicles were too busy cleaning mud off their distributor caps to look at the view, they were, in a fundamental way, experiencing nature through its material effects. Being in the car was to a considerable extent being in a particular place, whereas being in an SUV is arguably defined by not having to suffer the least inconvenience of terrain or weather.

The whole question of whether a transportation system can have a positive environmental effect turns on the ways in which it encourages an awareness of place or topography and/or allows people to take pleasure in surroundings that are ecologically stable. An example comes from northern California, where advocates of redwood preservation were among those who embraced the automobile, structuring their forest preserves so as to enable "drive-by viewing." Gabrielle Barnett has recently argued that these early road-centered excursions were powerful environmental experiences because they provided for a slow-speed exposure to overarching redwood stands. Rather than flattening perception as the railroads did, this car-based technology succeeded in producing the visual depth and immersion that had characterized pre-rail travel.¹⁵

CARS AND NATURE IN MODERNIST CULTURE

A VISIT IN A MODEL T to the giant redwoods, however, was in some important ways unrepresentative of nature appreciation in what we could call the mature automobile age. Roads gradually became smoother and straighter, and engines and drive trains more reliable. Speeds rose, and by the late 1920s the passenger compartment was also much more effectively sealed against precipitation and wind infiltration. Matthew Gandy has summarized the consequences of these refinements well: "Nature became simultaneously more distant (framed by the window of a moving car), more accessible (through greater public contact with remote areas), and at the same time more individualized as an aesthetic experience. Just as the nineteenth-century extension of railways generated new forms of 'nature tourism,' so the spread of car ownership fostered new types of cultural engagement with nature. Nature was now a panoramic experience, the tactile and olfactory senses subsumed by an emphasis on separation, movement and power."¹⁶ A key word here is "separation," for it neatly describes a specific relationship to nature circa the 1930s and simultaneously links it to the dominant trend in public and intellectual culture, namely, the culture of modernism.

"Modernism" is a term with a number of specific meanings in social analysis and in the fields of art and cultural history, a fact that reveals not incoherence, but rather the richness and synthetic power of the concept. At its core it designates a mindset constitutive of a self-consciously industrialized (Western) society, one that increasingly rejected the authority of tradition in the sphere of culture and that was grounded, economically speaking, in "Fordist" mass industrial production. A defining feature of this system was that it demanded a highly complex division of labor that was, for its part, reflected in a spatial differentiation of functions. Just as assembly lines imposed a linear arrangement of different tasks inside the factory, the home became separated from the workplace, and specific spheres of production and reproduction found their own highly articulated structures and locations in the city or region—linked, of course, by robust new forms of mass and individual transit. Modernist architects such as Le Corbusier pursued the ideal of differentiation with particular zeal, and sought to separate out and articulate specific functions within their buildings; and modernist city planners imposed differentiated zones on the urban landscape. And at a more generalized level of the culture, urban civilization was consistently played off against its opposite, nature. Modern-era artists, park tourists, and zoo visitors all sought out the "primitive" and the "untouched"—not in order to live there, but rather in order to experience a civilization-affirming thrill of contrast.¹⁷ Modernist design in many different fields accentuated this same gap between artifice and natural process. Landscape architects asserted their right to create provocatively unnatural designs like concrete trees, or envisioned the new era as one that would feature "very highly mechanized schemes, set amidst wildest scenes of untouched nature."¹⁸ Engineers and architects of the 1930s contributed to a similar love of contrast with their constructivist forms, whose geometric, sharp-edged figures arguably derived their compelling quality from the way they cut across the organic visual ground provided by nature.

The automobile was a key tool that helped to mediate—culturally and practically—between the two poles of civilization and nature. Advertising images juxtaposed shiny new cars with scenic vistas; holiday-makers picnicked in the countryside beside their faithful steeds, and resorts and garden suburbs like Radburn, New Jersey, (planned 1929) blossomed, as their advertisements seldom failed to mention, "within an easy drive" of the metropolis. Cars were the circulatory lifeblood of the system: they allowed people to have both "nature" and civilization at their disposal. Only later did the contradictions in this conception begin to emerge. In the meantime large and increasingly influential motoring associations made common cause with government agencies and business-hungry rural towns in promoting tourist itineraries to sites of natural beauty and interest. Administrators of the national park system in the United States discovered over the course of the 1920s and 1930s that their tourists were coming more and more by car. Visitor numbers kept climbing even in the worst years of the Depression. Numerically even more significant than visits to the sublime aesthetic attractions so characteristic of national parks were activities in venues closer to people's homes. A second wave of park establishment resulted in a patchwork of county and state parks oriented toward more "functional" recreational concerns and more "typical" landscape experience. The roads to these parks, and indeed driving itself, took on added significance with the growing realization that "any state highway system is, in effect, a state park system."¹⁹ Given that the automobile was now central to everyday nature appreciation, there was a compelling logic in the fact that a new, regionally inflected landscape aesthetic featuring native plants was developed along the roads of the period. The Bronx River Parkway, completed in 1925, stands as the seminal example of this "interwar ecological modernism"; succeeding years saw a network of parkways in the New York and other metropolitan areas.²⁰ The spirit of the age was captured not just in the United States: Germany's autobahn system was realized as an elaborately naturalized touristic parkway in the mid-1930s, and many of the technical advances made there were quickly adopted by American road builders as they began construction of the Interstate highway system and ambitious scenic drives such as the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia.²¹

This new, auto-borne relationship with nature could cut both ways. Many landscape architects such as Gilmore Clarke, Philip Elwood, and Frank Waugh in the United States and Alwin Seifert in Germany hoped for a greening of roads; but in all too many instances it was a case of roading the green. Automakers themselves echoed this unstable equilibrium between the automobile and nature. As early as the 1930s, Detroit lent a sympathetic ear to anglers and sportsmen who were concerned about pollution emanating from manufacturing.²² On the other hand, pollution and other side effects of car use such as accidents were seen as minor flaws, and not a reason to change the basic nature of the product. This is just one more indication that the "system of automobility" (to use John Urry's phrase) had established itself firmly in the patterns of everyday life.²³ But tourist flows had begun to have recognizable effects even in the more remote corners of the countryside. Boosters pushed through more and more road projects, entrepreneurs and municipalities set up drive-in campsites, and cars threatened to overflow the parking lots, especially at national parks. By 1935 the contradictions of a fully automobilized consumer modernity had become clear to a number of far-sighted environmentalists. Paul Sutter has detailed how the steadily growing presence of cars on an increasingly dense network of roads served as an important catalyst to the Wilderness Society, which included in its ranks highly influential figures such as Aldo Leopold, Robert Marshall, and Benton MacKaye.²⁴

Their new idea of wilderness—or rather its realization in a federal government practice of designating wilderness areas—is significant because it confirms a complex interaction linking automobile use, general cultural convictions about the place of nature, and environmentalism. In the title of a seminal essay, Leopold challenged his contemporaries to see "Wilderness as Land Use." This was environmentalism according to the rules of modernist culture, whose cardinal assumption is that anything, in principle, is possible.²⁵ The maintenance of wilderness in certain areas was just one of the options open to modern society, one possible land use among others; there were no sacred absolutes. Leopold was typical of many modernists with his conviction that humans had the reach and the power to affect any given area of the earth. Critics of modernism often connect this belief with environmental arrogance. Especially for some ecologically minded proponents of postmodernism, modernism almost axiomatically smacks of the Tennessee Valley Authority and wild constructivist fantasies, an insensitive cultural regime of "big business, big government, and big unions" whose "violent industrial exaltations" made it "fundamentally hostile to nature."²⁶ But there is little point in playing off the environmentalism of one cultural era against that of another. Every era has the environmentalism that it deserves, or that it can muster. Polemical broadsides against industrial modernism obscure the fact that it was also an epoch of environmental concern and innovation. David Harvey correctly perceived this dual character of modernity when he observed that the "annihilation of space" went hand in hand with a reinstatement of place; more pointedly it could be said that the same perception of human power and domination that could intoxicate dam builders led others such as Leopold to accept an entirely new degree of human responsibility vis-à-vis the natural world.²⁷

This sense of responsibility found characteristically modernist expression in the rigid spatial configuration sought in the first instance by the wilderness advocates. Nature was zoned, given its own differentiated space on the map. More complicated, mixed-use areas with variable degrees of "wildness" were also envisioned, and yet it was the distinctive project of wilderness that decisively dovetailed with government jurisdictions and then, later, captured the modern public's fancy.²⁸ No doubt there were shortcomings and blind spots in this idea; the subsequent era of environmentalism has been largely about critiquing wilderness, which means focusing on areas closer to home and achieving a fine-grained mixture of wildness and domesticity. But the baby should not be thrown out with the bathwater. An explicitly differentiated conception of the landscape allowed modernists to highlight real tensions and contradictions. Leopold and his fellow members of the Wilderness Society correctly perceived that the automobile and its roads had the potential to divide, subdivide, and finally atomize the natural world. Without denying the rights of tourists and consumers, they held up the competing rights of primitive outdoorsmen and of a self-determining nature; by insisting on the preservation of islands of untrammeled wilderness, they helped calibrate the tools of perception and imagination that people would need later in order to arrive at a meaningful respect for their own backyard.²⁹

A central thrust of modernist-era thinking was to identify essential opposites or extremes and then to move toward a reconciliation that could only be tentative and provisional; with regard to the environment, a tension permeated the relationship between civilization and nature. This tension was palpable in the strained relationship between cars and nature in many different areas of the culture. Cars could be driven up to nature, and nature could be viewed from the car, but the two never lost their essentially antagonistic character. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the phenomenon of "windshield wilderness" identified by David Louter. National Park Service designers in the Pacific Northwest built roads up to and around the perimeter of designated nature preserves; these "rim roads" made pieces of wilderness visually accessible to auto tourists, but at the same time reinforced the idea that the two were not intended to mix.³⁰ The conscious rusticism of other New Deal park designs can be interpreted as a different solution to the same problem: Because cars could never really enter nature, road signs and fencing hewn out of rough, undressed timber were needed to drown out the cultural contradiction.³¹ The disparity was felt on the German autobahn system as well, but there it was consciously highlighted by the sharp-edged grade transition which set the engineered roadbed off from its naturalistically landscaped corridors. All of these examples are reminders of the special role played by the automobile in the modernist culture of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. As the element that allowed people to go from civilization to nature, it came close to challenging that cultural boundary, and it certainly helped equip large sections of the public with meaningful personal experiences of their environment.³² Most of the time, though, the automobile massively reinforced a sense of separation. Well into the 1960s, the modern passenger car—which in the United States tended toward ever more ostentatious displays of chrome and eye-catching design in this period of mass marketing—was solidly linked to the sphere of urban consumption.³³ Any such machine was a foreign object in the realm of nature—which in turn was glimpsed only fleetingly, and seemingly only while the observer was on vacation (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. A Modernist View.

Image provided by the author.

This ad for the 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air Sport Coupe, showing vacationers and deer, is an example of the separation between urban civilization and nature typical of the modernist age of the automobile.

POSTMODERNISM: THE AGE OF THE SUV

THE FIRST GREAT FLOWERING of passenger-car culture generated a contradiction-filled relationship with nature. On the one hand, as in the case of the redwoods, cars made possible, for a brief window in time, an exhilarating, slow-paced passage through and into direct contact with places where natural systems held their own against human interventions. On the other hand, though, the logic of ubiquitous, high-speed transportation began to undermine the possibility of any such positive environmental experience. In the 1950s and 1960s, roads and the suburban development they abetted sprawled across more and more of the countryside outside of wilderness areas; thus in a quantitative sense there was less autonomous nature on hand for many people to experience. But there was an important qualitative decline as well. Higher speeds on high-volume roads meant that drivers in particular became separated from the landscape. At low speeds drivers had time to turn their heads and take in well over 100 degrees of horizontal view, but at 65 miles an hour drivers were forced to concentrate on a much narrower "tunnel" of 40 degrees centered on the roadbed.³⁴ Already in the 1930s designers of the autobahn and interstate realized that they would have to adopt a radically simplified, large-scale sense of aesthetics in order to transmit the landscape to high-speed viewers. Budgetary considerations massively attenuated these efforts even before the war, however, and engineers' overriding concern for safety, uniformity, speed, and volume quickly reduced the modern, road-based experience of nature to a bare, topographic minimum. This "dearth of nature" on roads and in the built environment was doubtless among the factors that led to a creeping dissatisfaction with the conventional wisdom of the decades that have here been associated with the words "modernity" and "modernism." When the modernist epoch ended is open to debate; nevertheless many scholars accept that the 1970s were a pivotal decade, and that by the 1980s the very different cultural paradigm of postmodernism was dominant.³⁵ Coincidentally, this is when the market for a new generation of four-wheel drive vehicles began to boom. If we look at the SUV as a specifically postmodern phenomenon, we can see a series of telling congruences.³⁶

Postmodernism should be understood as the cultural dimension of so-called "late capitalist" or "postindustrial" economic and social changes. As such it is an outgrowth of tensions and forces solidly rooted in modern-era society; in Chris Rojek's felicitous phrase, postmodernism is the "pursuit of the contradictions of modernism."³⁷ Mid-twentieth-century modern life was based on a Fordist mode of production that had tended to maintain a large, stable, and relatively uniform class of worker-consumers clustered in urban centers.³⁸ But in the eyes of many scholars, this system harbored a dynamic of aggressive capitalism and more highly individualistic consumption that gradually broke free of the old order and began to reshape economy and society along new lines.³⁹ These changes affected the landscape and the distribution of the population as well. Around 1970 the suburban population of the United States exceeded its urban population for the first time. By the 1980s "edge cities" at the periphery were flourishing at the expense of traditional city centers, progressive government redistribution programs were yielding to an era of neoliberal deregulation, and job tenure, even for managers and white-collar employees, was becoming increasingly precarious under a regime of "flexible accumulation" that featured international capital flight, volatile markets, and unpredictable corporate acquisitions.

Scholars such as Tom McCarthy have observed that this uncertain economic atmosphere probably played a large role in the rise of the SUV, for many purchasers of the day could be characterized as inwardly insecure Reaganite Baby Boomers, "rich victims" of an age in which rapid stock gains were offset by the prospect of equally rapid mergers and firings.⁴⁰ David Gartman further noted a whole series of changes in the way U.S. automobile manufacturers did business starting in the late 1970s. As margins thinned, workers and unions were pressured to accept more "flexible" working conditions, and Detroit's entire sales and design approach began to embrace the idea of developing a wider range of cars for "niche market[s] based on a specific leisure interest or identity."⁴¹ The roots of the SUV thus go deep into the sharpened economic tensions of the post-Oil Shock era, as a segment of high-earning, mostly white-collar employees left other sectors of society behind in their search for a new kind of automobile that would reflect their own particular set of desires and priorities.⁴²

The first sport utility vehicle American buyers seized on was the Jeep Cherokee, which began recording high sales in 1984. Precisely what they saw in the Jeep and subsequent imitators, though, is still a matter of speculation. No doubt the tough, obstacle-overcoming image of a four wheel drive (4WD) appealed to buyers for whom self-reliance might well have seemed a necessity in the face of rising crime statistics and a steep decline in many employers' health-care contributions. Toughness and a sense of safety, especially in city streets that are often portrayed as unpredictable and threatening, remain among the cornerstones of SUV appeal to this day. Ads for the Chevy Blazer bluntly promoted it as providing "a little bit of security in an insecure world"; after examining owners' psychology in depth, one of Detroit's top design consultants came to the conclusion that "SUV buyers want to be able to take on street gangs with their vehicles and run them down."⁴³ This kind of implicitly violent "rugged individualism" is the key to understanding the SUV phenomenon, according to Shane Gunster. For him, the SUV mirrors the desires of the "neoliberal subject" who is inclined to use his or her privileged position to bulldoze a path through society.⁴⁴ Gunster's analysis is too sweeping in the end, but it does help to explain why many designers have consciously tweaked their vehicle exteriors to project an image of menace and machismo. The aggressive me-first message of SUV aesthetics finds its concrete expression in disturbingly one-sided accident statistics: In crashes involving a car and a heavier, stiffer, and higher-mounted truck-based SUV, the occupants of cars accounted for 80 percent of the deaths.⁴⁵ Some people who would otherwise buy a regular car thus feel compelled to purchase a hulking SUV "in self-defense"; they say quite rightly "It's like the arms race."⁴⁶ Such reasoning unfortunately flies in the face of mounting evidence that SUVs bring with them considerable risks of rollover and paralysis for their own occupants—not to mention the danger for nearby children. Evidence from Australia indicates that SUVs back over children two and one-half times more frequently than ordinary passenger cars, causing fully half of all driveway deaths.⁴⁷

Personal safety is an understandable motivation for buying a car, and thus it seems clear that the decision to purchase an SUV can easily reflect a genuine desire on the part of the owner to provide care and protection to others, particularly family members—however misguided the calculation may be in practice. But there appear to be less-social aspects involved as well. Research in the United States and in Australia suggests that SUV buyers are less likely than average to be involved in community work; indeed, according to auto industry insiders cited by Keith Bradsher, SUV drivers are "apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed," and buy their vehicles based less on practicality than on the image that is projected. Along with simple machismo, a key part of that image appears to be a kind of promiscuous vitality. The typical SUV driver is anxious to preserve the impression that s/he is "able to go out and find another mate," according to Chrysler's market research director; other observers agree that "sex [is] at the root" of the four-wheel craze, and that the average SUV driver is "not exactly eager to advertise his or her married status."⁴⁸ Ford's own market research in Australia has shown that many Australians describe four-wheel drivers in more direct language as "exhibitionists, would-be's and wankers."⁴⁹

Of course, roughly the same catalog of epithets is often applied to purchasers of sports cars, and the sex-drive/macho explanation is moreover unconvincing for the much broader range of people—including significant numbers of women—who began to purchase SUVs in the 1990s. A more straightforward explanation for the mass popularity of Explorers and Hummers is that they are examples of conspicuous consumption, rubber-tired demonstrations of social capital. "Why does anyone need a 6,000-lb truck to run to the store?" the editor of an engineering journal asked rhetorically. The people who buy an oversize 4WD are simply buying a status symbol like any other: "They need it because it is the 5-bedroom house they don't own. It is the vacation in Acapulco they never take. It is the country club they don't belong to."⁵⁰ Given SUVs' high level of interior appointments and the ongoing rush to buy ever more exclusive models by luxury carmakers such as Mercedes, BMW, and Lexus, status-oriented consumption certainly seems credible as another major reason why this vehicle type began to take off. Nevertheless this begs the question of the specific object of consumption: Why buy SUVs, and not European convertibles, or diamonds? The enormous explosion in SUV sales has a lot to do with nature, and this in turn has to do with the peculiar role of nature in postmodernity.

The starting point for this train of thought is to recognize that environmental concerns are an essential component of the postindustrial society that gave birth to SUVs. Again it needs to be emphasized that these postmodern concerns are often best understood as flow-on effects from the contradictions and struggles rooted in previous decades. Suburban development, which had transformed vast areas of the countryside by the 1960s, provides a clear example of how these contradictions came to a head in the landscape. Although low-density suburbs were supposed to provide a "natural" counterweight to urban existence, they instead confronted millions of homeowners with environmental woes, as Adam Rome has detailed.⁵¹ Poorly designed septic systems leaked their contents into yards and streams; attractive farmland, hillsides, and wetlands disappeared under a blanket of roads and cookie-cutter ranch houses; energy consumption skyrocketed.⁵² Quantity arguably "tipped over" into quality. As Samuel P. Hays has demonstrated, these close-to-home issues inspired a new wave of activists in the United States to develop the "quality of life" criterion that guides the environmental movement to this day—a finding that appears to hold for other developed countries as well.⁵³

Such local awareness grew in parallel to a new kind of global environmental concern that started in the 1960s. From Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1962) to the influential report on Limits to Growth (Club of Rome, 1970) and on through the oil shortages of the mid-1970s, people around the industrialized world were confronted with urgent ecological challenges to the modes of production and living to which they had become accustomed. Economic challenges of the time, meanwhile, transformed manufacturing and commercial sectors, with rationalization and retooling in many industries on the back of new, globalized communication and media technologies. By the 1980s, when these postindustrial structural changes were in full swing (and generating handsome corporate commissions for a number of postmodern architects), a wide-ranging environmentalism that addressed problems of Third World sustainability and planetary climate change was simultaneously becoming part of the developed world's intellectual land-scape. Given this syn-chrony it is not sur-prising that a range of architects, theorists, and activists have claimed to combine postmodernism with environmentalism in their work.⁵⁴ In a less concentrated form, ord-inary citizens and con-sumers absorbed the same commingled agen-das. A constant flow of information about eco-logical fears and envi-ronmental issues trickled into postmodern popular consciousness and helped reinforce a characteristic spatial patterning in which global knowledge infiltrated and informed decentralized local decision making. Even in the many cases where material habits did not change, green thinking comprised an increasingly powerful backdrop that served to raise people's general appreciation of nature across the industrialized world.

Accentuating this new awareness by way of contrast was the fact that, by 1984, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were at the height of their powers as a tag-team of globalization, deregulating everything in sight and unleashing a wave of rapid but spotty growth, complete with unpredictable mergers and ac-quisitions. Many of the baby boomers who were by now at mid-career reaped considerable profits as the result of the new business climate, but these "bour-geois bohemians" did so in a fractured epoch in which their corporate achievements competed with strong influences left over from the 1960s counterculture, above all an emphasis on casual lifestyles and the ideal of naturalness.⁵⁵ In this swirling, historically specific atmosphere of environmental angst, insecure employment, divided cultural loyalties, and sudden wealth, the SUV's strong connotations of nature and "an active outdoor lifestyle" were absolutely central to its appeal.⁵⁶ But if "commodities help us express ourselves," then what were people with SUVs trying to say?⁵⁷ Like the polar fleeces, hiking boots, extreme-weather parkas, and other aspects of outdoorsy "preparedness chic" that mushroomed in popularity at the same time, SUVs allowed people to broadcast their desire to be in touch with physical rootedness of "place" and also gave them the tools to subvert—in a somewhat timid, I've-got-a-good-excuse fashion—the buttoned-down conventions of the office and of bourgeois social life.⁵⁸

That SUVs are supposed to evoke a hidden utopia of "dropping out" and embracing "place" is suggested in a remarkable German-language TV ad for the Volkswagen Touareg (see Figure 3).⁵⁹ In the ad, we zoom in over a fissured green landscape to see figures modeled on Australian Aborigines making music and participating in rituals. Among these profoundly non-Western people, though, three are singled out and labeled for us. They turn out to be professionals and managers from Germany, such as "Hermann Sievers—formerly a department head." In Volkswagen's signature style of laconic advertising, the ad exposes us to lengthy, uncaptioned segments of drumming and dancing. Only at the end do we see a very short scene of a Touareg bouncing over rough territory, and then the message in black: "It could change more than just the way you drive." The ad works precisely because it operates with extremes: It suggests to its wealthy target audience that they could give up their high-paying jobs in the same way that an architect and a financial adviser supposedly did, and that they could integrate themselves into a community full of traditional culture and local environmental meaning—even though they know that they will not take this extreme step. In terms of both social and natural ideals, therefore, the Touareg ad seems to demonstrate that SUVs can easily function as signs of the buyers' inner convictions that remain comfortably divorced from their day-to-day reality.

Figure 3. "Going Native."

Image provided by author.

Still from television ad for the Volkswagen Touareg, which features professionals and managers from Germany like a "former department head" named Hermann Sievers, all of whom have succeeded in "going native" with the help of the Touareg.

One of the lessons of the hyperbolic Touareg ad is that outdoors-oriented equipment can signify different levels of the purchaser's interest in nature, from the genuine to the disingenuous. With manufacturers' drives for novelty and one-upmanship, moreover, any environmental meanings have become increasingly submerged in the pursuit of pointless functionality, the "gear fetish," that continues to envelop the SUV. It was already questionable in concrete terms whether drivers needed big tires and four-wheel drive in order to experience nature, or even to drive home in snow; on the other hand, these goals at least plausibly justified the added traction that people lined up to purchase. But since then the list of "capabilities" and capability-mimicking accessories has expanded almost endlessly to include the ubiquitous bull bars, heavy-duty towing packages, winches, and GPS navigation systems that largely define what it is to drive a "real" four-wheel drive, while the plush interior appointments reveal a functionality of a different sort—namely, the consciously hedonistic pursuit of convenience and luxury.⁶⁰

To object that most SUVs are not used to enter off-road nature is to miss the point of all these gadgets—or rather, to misunderstand the way things work in a postmodern society. Dean MacCannell attempted to explain the situation in his provocative essay titled "The Desire to Be Postmodern." He was initially struck "that among the most popular forms of cars today is the off-road vehicle with high-gloss paint, automatic transmission, cruise control and concert hall-quality stereo." After giving it some thought, though, he declared this to be "perfectly predictable and symptomatic" of postmodernism.

The key postmodern aspect of the SUV is that it embodies the principle of de-differentiation.⁶¹ It allows people to believe that there are no choices that need to be made, and that there are no trade-offs or contradictions in using the vehicle. You can carry heavy loads over rough ground, for example, but you can remain ensconced in the lap of luxury. You can have the folksy truck of a blue-collar worker and the stand-offish limousine of an executive. You can also be outback-tough in the middle of a city. Indeed, the SUV allows people the illusion that modernity's complicated division of labor can be dispensed with at will, and that the driver can become a self-determining, free-roaming, free agent at the turn of a key. Paired with this imaginary de-differentiation in the social realm is a spatial one with important implications for the environment. Consider the oft-advertised scenario that pictures SUV drivers (or often enough, just their vehicles) enjoying direct access to spectacular nature. A typical example is the Mercedes billboard upon which an ML320 sparkles, perched confidently upon a remote wilderness mountain top. The tag-line reads: "Knowing that you can get here is standard." A more complete reversal of modernism's carefully compartmentalized spatial regime would be hard to imagine. By and large, modernist culture accepted that one could not reach every destination in a motor vehicle. The ideal of the four-wheel drive, by contrast, is clearly one of a spatially de-differentiated world in which there are, as the Ford ads put it, "no boundaries."

Ford's slogan deserves to be taken seriously as a signature of the postmodern environmental condition. It has significant truth content, for we recognize that there really are no hard and fast boundaries in ecological systems: As much as wilderness advocates may have wanted to think otherwise, it is impossible to draw a line around nature in order to protect it, just as it is impossible fully to isolate human-generated substances that may pollute or unexpectedly interact. Automobiles and other elements of human technology are part of this universe of fluid and permeable borders, in both a good and a bad sense. When Australian four-wheel-drive campers begin to recognize that "suburb, wilderness and city are interconnected," that is arguably a useful insight.⁶² On the other hand, SUVs are not a necessary condition for such an insight, and they are a disproportionately wasteful and destructive way of arriving at it. For "no boundaries" must also be taken as a reminder that ground, soil, and water are the ultimate recipients of automobile emissions, lubricants, and the by-products and end products of manufacturing.

If interpreted fully, the slogan of "no boundaries" must also be seen as a dystopian description of current land-use patterns. Geographers Michael Dear and Steven Flusty have argued that the postmodern landscape is shaped by global forces of deregulated capital and robust telecommunications, energy, and transportation networks. These forces are increasingly independent of local factors and can converge to select virtually any spot on the map for development. The result in many places is a landscape of "keno capitalism" in which development is spotty, rapid, transient, and sprawling. Increasingly, there are no boundaries anymore between cities, or between cities and rural areas, just an unruly patchwork of developed, undeveloped, and decaying land parcels spread out from one horizon to the other.⁶³ Within this multitude of land uses the SUV plays a symbolic reinforcing role. With its mix of capabilities it tends to support the notion that one can and one needs to switch rapidly from rough terrain to city streets; indeed, it dovetails perfectly with the disturbing trend toward exurban settlements, the most current, most expensive, and most radical wave of auto-borne back-to-nature residential development.⁶⁴ Like the automobiles of the modern era, SUVs promise their owners the freedom to access nature, but in a new setting: for their deep-lugged tires and other off-road equipment underscore the fact that today's drivers see no need to abide by the earlier doctrine of separation. As an ad for the out-sized Hummer asks, "What good is the world at your fingertips if you never actually touch it?"

Figure 4. "Shake."

Courtesy Jeep New Zealand.

This still from a Jeep Grand Cherokee 'Shake" ad shows the Jeep wriggling and flinging mud. Note in the background the large suburban house with which buyers are expected to identify.

An ad that is worth discussing in this context is the Jeep Grand Cher-okee "Shake" tele-vision ad, produced by the agency BBDO and aired in New Zealand in 2001.⁶⁵ The heart of it is a striking sequence in which a mud-caked Jeep arrives in the driveway of a pretentious sub-urban home, dis-gorges its family of passengers, and then wriggles like a dog, splattering the house and the mildly remonstrating family with thick globs of mud. Precisely because it is well done, this clever but perverse Jeep commercial throws a particularly clear light on nature under the cultural condition of postmodernity. First, we have an almost fully realized blending of a four-wheel drive with (domesticated) nature. Owning a Jeep is like having a dog, and the SUV takes on dog-like qualities right down to the dog's slightly naughty habit of "shaking." This is actually amusing on one level (as it is supposed to be), but on another level it implies that people have an effective replacement for dogs in a hunk of brightly painted machinery; instead of interacting with an independent organism that lives and breathes and needs to be fed and sometimes gets sick, we can simply purchase a vehicle. The producers of the ad seem to have been aware of these undertones, which would quickly lead to the disturbing vision of people living in a postmodern simulation of nature. Deep down, real nature is important to purchasers of SUVs, and so the ad makers included an actual dog in the family to serve as an identifier.

But it is the mud that is truly significant in this ad, because here the four-wheel drive and its postmodern culture engage the earth directly. The SUV is a quintessentially postmodern vehicle because it promises to undermine the dichotomies and overcome the prohibitions of modernity. At least in theory, the SUV does not need the sophisticated infrastructure and constant maintenance that allow ordinary passenger cars to function; it does not need anyone's planning or permission to strike off through the countryside; indeed, it seems to render every kind of restraint obsolete. Even if most drivers stay (or indeed are forced to stay) on the pavement, the SUV completes the historical trajectory of vehicular access in the realm of values. That trajectory ends in an absurd logic: The entire world is a road, a means for humans to get somewhere, and yet there is nowhere for us to go. In the age of modernity environmentalists were able to make people aware of the contradictions that such unrestricted appropriation implied: the culture was shot through with an insecure, questioning tension between extremes of civilization and nature, and it made sense to set aside some areas before they could be sliced up by road builders and auto-borne adventurers. In postmodernity, though, there is the acute danger that any such substantive, underlying contradictions no longer will be recognized. Delivered by networks of global transportation and high-resolution imaging, fragments of nature seem to be more at our disposal than ever before, whether as virtual holiday, exurban enclave, or just as food on our table.

Part of postmodern culture—the environmentalist part—resists this decontextualization of nature, and tries to temper consumption with wisdom. But in much of our deregulated postmodern culture there is a new slackness around the idea of nature, a culture of permissive juxtapositions that does not seem to know when, or even why, to stop. De-differentiation rules the day, and the spatial order set up by modernity—imperfect as it was—has long since yielded to a fragmented, unprincipled geography of exurbs, edge cities, and suburban strip-mall sprawl. The mud splattered about so liberally in SUV ads would seem to be a fitting symbol for what can become of nature under these conditions: a reduced and atomized soup, the featureless substrate of a world in which there is no longer any concept of an independently existing nature, and thus no concept of any responsibility toward it.

This brutal, dystopian reading of the situation captures an important aspect of the SUV, but fortunately, perhaps, it probably underestimates the amount of genuine environmental content in the exurban SUV ideal. For it seems entirely possible that some SUV drivers, in a percentage perhaps even greater than the general population, do want to maintain a close relationship with nature. An Australian study published in 2005 compared city-based drivers of large 4WDs to the general population, and found that the sport-utility drivers showed a significantly stronger preference for holidays "where they can see nature or be in a natural setting" (84 percent of SUV owners versus 71 percent of the general population)."⁶⁶

Spare-tire covers in use in Australia and New Zealand appear to confirm such findings. "My Goal Is To Experience the Natural Beauty of the Earth" it says on the back of some Toyota Landcruisers. The driver might just as well have purchased a Mitsubishi Challenger, for as the cover there will tell you, "This Car Was Created to Bring You Closer with Nature." On another Landcruiser we are assured in somewhat redundant terms that "A trip with nature is always a special environmental adventure." By this point suspicion might begin to arise that the writers employed to turn out these covers have only a tenuous command of English. This is confirmed when a Nissan Terrano comes into view sporting a cover which enjoins us as follows: "Whenever and Everywhere, We Can Meet Our Best Friend—Nature. Take a Grip of Steering!" The enthusiasm of these proclamations must of course be balanced against the reality of the product. What will be left of nature once people have torn up hillsides and accelerated global warming in order to get at it? This central contradiction is one of the defining features of the SUV: It actively destroys the environment that it purports to celebrate.

One part of the explanation for this crass disjuncture would focus on the larger cultural and economic conditions of the last several decades. Environmental awareness may have gone up, but people are increasingly saturated with the powerful visual images and slogans of capitalist advertising. There is a purely technological dimension to this argument. Under the profound influence of television and digital technologies, we are becoming more used to dealing with images than with actual objects, places, or creatures. Increasingly, things are not connected for us by their real-world physical proximity or causality, but rather by the ordering that is imposed through the sequencing or presentation of their images. The cultural critic and theorist Walter Benjamin observed this power of media already in the photographs and films of the modern era, but he took for granted the idea that every picture had an indisputable connection with reality. As a result he was able to celebrate the power of media to help us analyze and change the world.⁶⁷ But here again, postmodernity is a working-out of the contradictions of modernity. The reproducibility of images that Benjamin embraced unleashed a flood of images in our lives; in the postmodern TV era, this skyrocketing quantity "tipped over" into a new quality. Increasingly, now, people think and corporations communicate in pictures. This has put corporations in a powerful position to influence individual consumers, as the pictures that they furnish through advertising become, more than ever before, "the principal public language of commodities."⁶⁸ The automobile industry is the heaviest advertiser in the United States by a large margin; it spent close to a billion dollars advertising SUVs each year through the 1990s.⁶⁹

The generic power of advertising, though, can only make itself felt through specific contents and contexts. SUV sales are widely recognized to be "driven by advertising that links them to back-to-nature adventures."⁷⁰ But it is necessary to pin down what sort of nature is behind this appeal. Shane Gunster and media scholar Robin Andersen argue that most advertisements depict "nature as a pure Other, a potent Utopian signifier"; these are "mysterious" and "sanctified" visions of pure nature."⁷¹ The ever-popular mountain-top shots are a good example of this tendency as they revert explicitly to Romantic tropes of transcendent experience. By contrast, scholars have underestimated the significance in advertising of non-utopian, pragmatic, or radically integrated invocations of nature together with technology. Two magazine ads that feature animals seem to epitomize this new tendency. One is an ad for Land Rover, which shows the vehicle in close proximity to a stereotyped collection of large mammals in Africa. The scene draws authenticity from Land Rover's status as the four-wheel drive of choice for safaris in British-influenced Africa—and yet it involves a playful, specifically postmodern kind of leveling. This Land Rover is not being used in order to approach skittish game. Instead, it is seen cavorting and fawning with animals in an imaginary world where automobiles are able to coexist effortlessly with furry creatures.⁷² The marketing experts for Saturn came up with a nearly identical theme in large, two-page ads that consisted largely of a scene with many numbered outlines that immediately recall a child's exercise for placing animals in their typical habitat. But these were habitats with a difference, for among the denizens of an evergreen forest or an Arctic ecosystem there was also a Saturn Vue four-wheel drive, seemingly "naturalized within the landscape" and given its own outline as one of the "creatures" of the area.⁷³ This ad in its Arctic version was enough to raise the ire of the Sierra Club, which noted that internal-combustion vehicles would certainly "not be welcome" in the area pictured, which bore a close resemblance to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.⁷⁴

Figure 5. "Creatures of the Evergreen Forest."

Image provided by author.

This objection is a sensible one, and yet it is clearly inspired by a strict, modernist-era philosophy that considers technological artifacts as separate from non-human nature. From this point of view the ad would have to seem particularly offensive—or subversive—because it mocks an established form of ecological learning, and indeed challenges the authority of the biological expert to determine what "belongs" in a given part of the world, and what does not. That authority seems shaky in a de-differentiated, explicitly constructed postmodern world that rejects "Edenic naturalism" just as firmly as it does any "vaulting culture of technology.⁷⁵ Even on these terms, though, the Saturn ads can be considered objectionable. As the geographer Robert David Sack has noted, advertising tends to strip things out of context, to elide real-world connections and contradictions. True to his dictum, the Saturn Vue in the ad appears in a forest right out of pixel-space: What is missing is any indication of the bits of the environment that the vehicle went over or through to get there, and any of the further-reaching effects that its operation might have—up to and including the demise of some of its pictured companions. The ad layout suggests that Saturn's automotive technology is comparable and com-patible with nature; it hides the dynamic quality of the newcomer. The title of the ad notwithstanding, the Saturn Vue has not achieved a stabilizing role within the community, and thus is not "a creature of the evergreen forest" like any other.

The animal ads dis-cussed here may be relatively crude attempts to bring the SUV into a direct rela-tionship (pictorially, at least) with the environment, but they are good evidence of a characteristic desire to see SUVs achieve a kind of synthesis with nature. This tendency emerges even more clearly from situations where SUVs are being advertised (and willingly purchased) as consumer items that consciously express concern for the environment.⁷⁶ The sheer size of this phenomenon would moreover seem to be an indication of its importance: in the United States, for example, automakers sponsor huge outdoor sporting events, and tout their environmental records in lavish multi-page spreads in mass-circulation magazines.⁷⁷ Skeptics, of course, can find good evidence for characterizing such intense public-relations efforts as nothing more than corporate "greenwashing" or, in other words, "environmental advertising without environmental substance" in the manufacturer's operations.⁷⁸ But the curious amalgam of four-wheel drives and environmental concern is probably best appreciated as an ambiguous phenomenon in which purchasers' personal convictions have to be weighed up against corporate intentions, symbolic meanings, and practical effects.

One path by which to approach this issue is to consider the "green" messages on the spare-tire covers that frequently adorn the back of sport utility vehicles in New Zealand.⁷⁹ A small Mitsubishi, for example, features a stylized kingfisher, and advises us to "Be Kind to Animals." Mitsubishi's larger Pajeros also come equipped with various birds and brief commandments to "Keep Green" or "Keep Our Nature." "The Protection of the Environment" figures prominently on another kingfishered Pajero—whether the driver is for it or against it is a question left for other road users to ponder. Toyota Rav4s encourage us on a popular cover to "Preserve Nature"—a warm and fuzzy message that is supposed to be brought home by an accompanying graphic of a whale's tail (see Figure 6). It clearly takes full advantage of the whale's status as a one-size-fits-all icon of environmental concern. Very much like the toy animal that Jennifer Price analyzed in her essay on the Nature Company, this "plastic whale reduces easily to a motif, a feeling, an association"—something devoid of real content.⁸⁰ It seems doubtful, at any rate, that Toyota will be pushing the Japanese government to accept whaling restrictions. It should be said in Toyota's defense that the company has at least put more effort into producing efficient, hybrid-engined cars than the U.S. man-ufacturers—a practical undertaking that is well matched on the public-relations front by a cam-paign to convince people that Toyota's "on-going corporate goal" is "find-ing harmony between automobiles, people and the environment."⁸¹

Figure 6. "Preserve Nature."

Photo courtesy of the author.

Mitsubishi makes a far more specific gesture of environmental concern on its small RVR. The cover features a heart-tugging family trio of penguins, above whom we read this statement: "As environmentally conscious people, we are striving to preserve the antarctic region and all of it's [sic] creatures" (see Figure 7). This cover appears to make unsubstantiated claims about the company's activities. A cursory search of available sources revealed only two instances of Mitsubishi having anything to do with the Antarctic: One is an allegation of abetting illegal overfishing of the Southern Ocean, and the other is its interest in commercializing rare biological resources of the frozen continent.⁸² If this is the extent of Mitsubishi's real connections with the Antarctic, it merely magnifies the rhetorical obfuscation in this eco-friendly cover. It is the kind of greenwashing that would gain respect even at Land Rover, whose sales centers in the United States had a makeover a while ago to feature "rustic beamed ceilings and staff clad in safari gear"; according to the company's Cincinnati advertising agency, customers are supposed to be put in a "conservation mindset."⁸³

Despite its transparent motivations, we should acknowledge that this sales strategy is not far-fetched. The messages reviewed here on spare-tire covers may be poorly formulated and sometimes downright comical, but they are there, on the rear of four-wheel drive vehicles. No other vehicle type has such overtly nature-friendly accessories designed for it. Consider again the "Suzuki likes nature" eco-cover mentioned at the outset. One can doubt that the Suzuki company has a close relationship to nature, but this does not preclude the possibility that quite a few drivers of Suzuki vehicles are, at some level, concerned about the environment. It might not disturb them that the leaping orca on the cover is like the Sea World encounters that Susan G. Davis has described, offering an approach to nature that is stylized and decontextualized; further, drivers who themselves "like nature" might well not object to a cover that allows Suzuki to portray itself as "rising to the conservation occasion with spontaneous good will."⁸⁴

Figure 7. Mitsubishi RVR.

Photo courtesy of the author.

The small text on the wheel covers says, "As environmentally conscious people, we are striving to preserve the antarctic region and all of it's [sic] creatures."

Thus it seems that the corporate origins of the message are not its entire truth. The individual owner has also invested something of him- or herself in the eco-friendly cover, which is like a large bumper sticker. In Western industrial culture one's car is often taken to be the empty canvas of one's lifestyle or personality; given that this "third skin for ambient industrial man" accompanies one on every conceivable sort of errand, there are probably few ways to make a more public statement of one's beliefs.⁸⁵ Public statements are not always to be trusted, of course, but it would seem to be foolish to discount the idea that these vehicle owners are being truthful about their interests. In a purely demographic sense it seems quite likely that the people who started buying SUVs in the 1980s and 1990s also could have harbored ecological concerns. For as Keith Bradsher has observed, "affluent baby boomer families who loved nature were the core of the environmental movement, and they were also the main market for SUVs." Business Week found a similar overlap in surveys of truck buyers, who considered themselves to be environmentally conscious.⁸⁶ More than a few of these eco-conscious buyers must have purchased a Ford Explorer, the biggest-selling SUV in the United States, and one of the most profitable vehicles in the history of manufacturing despite its poor gas mileage. The Ford Corporation, moreover, seems to mirror the ambiguities of its customers. It churned out hundreds of thousands of Explorers alongside even bigger models such as the Ford Excursion/Lincoln Navigator—a 6,000-pound leviathan that only an advertising executive could claim "treads lightly" on the earth.⁸⁷ Yet Ford also presents us with a case of a corporation that seemed to want to do more than greenwash its vehicles. Under board chairman William Clay Ford, the company has striven to improve its image, and notably announced a general commitment to environmental principles. Ford even pledged a more specific program to improve the gas mileage of its SUVs, and has made good on this pledge at least in part by equipping the small Ford Escape with an optional hybrid engine.⁸⁸ A green leaf badge on the nameplate distinguishes this more efficient Escape from its stablemates—and additionally constitutes a small but significant source of distinction for the car's owner.

The extent of this campaign at Ford suggests that carmakers are keenly aware of how closely SUVs are watched in relation to environmental issues. That hyper-awareness can be seen in Jeep's purposely ambiguous "Seal Pup" television spot. The ad cuts repeatedly from a lone seal, apparently stranded on ice, to a man (see Figure 8). His four-wheel drive crunches to a stop, and he removes a long, dangerous-looking, spear-like pole. The voice-over narration tells us the Jeep "gives you the power to conquer nature." The seal's big eyes look up into the camera. The man stalks closer, and raises the deadly instrument ... The drama up to this point has succeeded in bundling two environmentalist no-nos into the specter of one thoroughly evil event: A big, mean man who drives an SUV seems about to take the life of a defenseless seal pup. But DaimlerChrysler knows about these stereotypical expectations and wants to play with them by constructing what it would later call a "tongue in cheek" story.⁸⁹ With a quick downstroke the man breaks a hole in the ice for the stranded seal, and the narration, too, takes an unexpected turn. The Jeep "gives you the power to conquer nature, as well as the ability to protect it." The ad is a small masterpiece of propaganda, as it "shows," in contradiction to every assumption, how husky four-wheel drives actually assist people in taking a compassionate approach to nature. Our skepticism can only be turned around so far, though. This fictional man may well have come to the aid of a seal, but the manner of his helpfulness does not justify the millions of SUVs being driven around in the suburbs each day. Far removed from any big-eyed seal pups, these overweight machines will continue to spew out harmful emissions, and arouse the ire of environmentalists.

Figure 8. "Seal Pup Ad."

http://www.jeep.com/jeep_life/news/jeep/tv_ads.html.

This still from a Jeep Grand Cherokee ad shows the vehicle approaching a stranded seal pup. The complete advertisement can be seen at the website above.

Even if the "Seal Pup" ad does not square the environmental circle for Jeep, it does show how hard the manufacturers are trying to market their SUVs within an environmentally aware public arena. Indeed, their efforts indicate that they know they are not just playing to hostile outsiders, but rather to a genuine market of drivers who—subjectively—do care about nature. Two particularly straightforward spare-tire covers on Toyota Landcruisers seem designed to cater to this audience. One version with stylized tire tracks in the middle has a long, visually muddled message around the rim that, if studied closely, reads as follows: "It's Up to Us to Protect and Care for the Environment." As if to add some sort of incentive to this stern injunction, it continues with a quid pro quo: "In Turn Nature's Greatness Will Take Care of Us." Graphically more successful is the second cover, with its picture of a whitewater kayaker. The message here also takes on the more direct form of an ethical obligation: "Society Should Reflect on the Earth's Tender Environment" (see Figure 9). At first reading one is impressed with the succinct and entirely laudable expression of green convictions. Society truly should reflect on the earth's fragile ecosystems. But "society" should also, upon reflection, do certain things and refrain from doing some others—and in view of the Landcruiser's disproportional size, one wonders if the owner has exempted him- or herself from participating in that task.

CONSUMPTION, CULTURE, AND POLITICS

THE ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS of SUVs are by now no secret. Mainstream environmental protection organizations such as the Sierra Club have publicly condemned the vehicles; and some Christian groups have even challenged their members to ask "What Would Jesus Drive?"⁹⁰ Moreover, a dedicated and active anti-SUV movement articulates the ecological truth about these machines in ways that are creative and hard-hitting. Websites—arguably a postmodern, infiltrating technology—form an important part of their arsenal. In Britain the Alliance Against Urban 4x4s uses its website to disseminate solid information for comparing the relative performance of vehicles. Edgier is the U.S. website "I Don't Care about the Air," which combines links to a range of information with original bumper sticker messages that can be used in guerrilla "tagging" campaigns (my personal favorite: "I'm Changing the Climate. Ask Me How!").⁹¹ Groups such as Massachusetts Climate Action take this truth to the streets with roadside "shaming" campaigns. The Toronto Environmental Alliance has detailed the misleading environmental claims of SUV makers and awarded them its "Ecobunk" award.⁹² Newspaper columnists across the developed world lament the "super-size" mentality and document the frustrations and anxieties of conventional drivers hemmed in by "Senseless Urban Vulgarity," or perhaps "Something Utterly Vile."⁹³ All in all, it has become fashionable, and indeed even worryingly "politically correct" to castigate the buyers and drivers of SUVs.⁹⁴ What is troubling is that all of these efforts have had so little effect; not since the cellular phone, it seems, has so much condemnation spawned such healthy sales.⁹⁵ It is certainly a good sign that four-wheel fans have been forced to set up their own counterlobby in the form of groups like the Sport Utility Vehicle Owners of America. Like industry, they argue that driving a SUV is the consumer's "choice" and an exercise of sacred "freedom"; indeed, they are not above implying that their opponents are unpatriotic in an attempt to quell the "anti-SUV buzz that is just now bubbling up from the cesspool of malcontents and making its way into the mainstream."⁹⁶ Again, that environmentalists have been able to provoke this kind of reaction means that they are doing something right. Despite this, real change seems to be slow in coming. There are structural reasons for this, to be sure: In the United States, at least, SUVs as a particular vehicle type cannot simply be banned, and the automobile industry enjoys a high level of political protection, which means that legislative restrictions against SUVs are also unlikely.

Figure 9. "Society Should Reflect ... ."

Photo courtesy of the author.

But in the end it is not a matter of trying to convince a few recalcitrant law-makers, nor of trying to contain a small group of self-indulgent yuppies. SUVs are truly popular. One striking statistic is that 40 percent of all households in the United States have at least one of these vehicles.⁹⁷ They are popular because they answer a generic need for transportation culti-vated into the form of specific desires by postmodern social, econ-omic, spatial, and cultural forces. Private exposure to these vehicles through family and friends has no doubt played a role in their popularity, but one cannot easily separate such effects from the billions of dollars' worth of advertising that have intersected with wider forces to present SUVs to us on a public scale as the ideal vehicle for our times. A cornerstone of these vehicles' appeal is their association with experiences of nature, an association made plausible by traction and other off-road features. The tremendous success of the SUV may well be because it is the only vehicle type on the market that has the audacity to promise people a direct connection to their environment, a connection symbolized in the leaves and twigs which brush the vehicle in many ads—even in the mud which must, according to convention, cake it.

In historical perspective it is interesting to note that people's enthusiasm for the SUV can thus be seen as an attempt to get back the experience denied to them in the mature stages of modernist society, which had to sharply separate people in their cars from nature. As an ideal the SUV promises to abolish this separation and to recreate, even to intensify, the up-close sense of immersion felt by the first generation of automobile travelers. If we grant that this feeling had significant value as a wellspring of green conviction previously, then we should be prepared to concede that there is a similar—but in most cases inarticulate—environmental dimension to the attraction people feel toward the SUV. It bears remembering that more than a few SUV drivers are bona fide outdoorspeople, sportsmen and anglers; quite a few others are possibly people who do not spend much time actively thinking about the environment, but who subconsciously yearn for a life closer to nature all the same. This is hardly surprising. We are living in an age of communication, with an unparalleled amount of information about scarce open space and widespread environmental concern. Nature is not the only thing on our minds, to be sure, but the presence of environmental issues is undeniable, and many people are looking for ways to respond to nature even as they go about their daily lives. Since these lives involve motor vehicles, cars can often reflect a confusing mixture of environmental interest and other motivations and habits. People who purchase an SUV are an extreme example of this heterogeneous behavior, but they are on the same continuum with people who would not dream of reducing their car mileage, even though they are willing to pay out an extra $25 for a conservation plate on their motor vehicle.⁹⁸ Although one must agree that the conservation plate purchaser is a far more conscientious and effective defender of the environment, the cases are similar in that we seem to want our cars, but we want nature, too—and to some extent we are all aware that the modern doctrine of separate, parallel spheres is unsatisfactory.

In its fundamentals, of course, the problem of SUVs is not unique to the postmodern age. Some destruction is inherent in any transportation technology, and in the case of passenger automobiles and the transformations they inspire, we can say that they have been causing havoc for more than one hundred years. Modern-age environmentalists drew a line in the sand and defended the extreme end of the nature spectrum, but largely failed to prevent the massive, transport-driven and environmentally misguided transformation of non-wilderness areas due to suburban sprawl and globalization. "De-centered" and "de-differentiated"—or in other words, postmodern—approaches in environmental thinking are vitally important as we try to correct these problems of the middle ground.

Aldo Leopold anticipated this next step when he spoke of the need to reintegrate "wildness" into the domesticated landscape. The most literal realization of this ideal can be found in increasingly popular native planting regimens, and in the fascination of projects that get people to recognize bits of "primeval forest in the city."⁹⁹ It might also turn out that the characteristic vehicle of the age is not the SUV, but rather the mountain bike, another knobby-tired threat to nature under some circumstances, but mostly a real advance in all-purpose, environmentally benign local transportation. These different transport options show that environmentalism in an age of de-differentiation, in basketball terms, is more like a full-court press than a zone defense. Not content with nature preserves or even with resource conservation, environmentalists are critiquing product lifecycles, trying to roll back emissions, and indeed pursuing a whole range of other measures that must be woven into our entire workaday-consumer world. In all of these areas the postmodern defense of nature can go beyond the modern one only if it recognizes the unique cultural situation that now obtains, and the SUV is a good test case for that understanding.

In concrete ecological terms the SUV is objectionable chiefly because of its unnecessarily high emissions. It represents a serious harm to the natural world, but this harm is far less tangible than that inflicted by automobiles of an earlier age: Without a new wilderness to set aside (and admire), the whole point of making changes and enforcing prohibitions is more difficult to make. The threat of the SUV is, moreover, exacerbated by the cultural tendencies of postmodernism. In jurisprudence there is a rule of thumb that possession is nine tenths of the law; in the same way it could be said that, in the postmodern, media-saturated age, representation is nine tenths of the truth.

Put bluntly, the SUV is dangerous because its representations are dangerous, and because its truths are untruths. It purports to get people closer to nature, when in actuality the likelihood of this happening is slim (and possibly undesirable); worse, this pseudo-capability is purchased at the price of wasting scarce resources and unduly hastening the destruction of the global atmospheric ecosystem. This puts it into a special category of offensiveness, even though there are many other practices and products that are wasteful and harmful: rampant, unnecessary consumerism, poor infrastructure, and globalized systems of exploitation come to mind. It should be said that SUVs are not even the only environmental specter haunting suburbia. If we consider long-term energy use and physical footprint, excessively large private homes with individual sports and play facilities are probably worse, especially when these houses are sited in distant, non-sidewalked tracts that make driving everywhere a necessity. This is an enormous problem that is deeply entrenched in the physical structures and social values of our society, and it should remind us not to obsess too much about Jeeps. But these other practices of a radically privatized and constitutionally improvident capitalist society are at least not given out as the exact opposite of what they ecologically are.

As we have repeatedly seen, the cultural envelope that surrounds the SUV is painted in compelling shades of green. It appeals to many consumers' deeply felt desire to engage with their natural world, and to a certain extent gives evidence of the greatly increased environmental awareness that is characteristic of the postmodern age. What makes the SUV so outrageous is that it is a twisted expression of that developing environmental consciousness, a perversion of energies that might, collectively, have built something far more sustainable by now.

William Rollins has published on the Heimatschutz movement and other aspects of early German environmentalism, including the Nazi-era autobahn. He taught German Studies for a number of years at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, and is now located in Princeton, New Jersey. His current research centers on anti-Semitic dimensions of environmental concern in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany.

NOTES

The arguments in this article were first aired at the meeting of the ASEH in Denver in 2002. Thanks are extended here to Tom McCarthy and to the second, anonymous reviewer for Environmental History for their thoughtful critiques of the manuscript on its first submission.

^1. Light trucks—a category dominated by SUVs, but which also includes minivans and pickup trucks—accounted for 49.3 percent of all U.S. passenger vehicle sales for the year through August 2003; this climbed to 54 percent in 2004. High oil prices in 2005 appear to have halted the growth of sales for SUVs, but light trucks still accounted for approximately 52 percent of sales in mid-2005. See Jean Halliday, "Suvs Thrive Despite Bad Rap," Advertising Age (Midwest edition) 74 (2003): 4; Paul A. Eisenstein, "SUV Sales Slump; Detroit Suffering: Has Detroit's Joyride Come to an End?" in webzine carconnection.com, posting from June 6, 2005, http://www.thecarconnection.com/Industry/Industry_News/SUV_Sales_Slump_Detroit_Suffering.S175.A8726.html.
    Canadian data show that SUVs accounted for 17 percent of all light-duty vehicle sales in 2003, with further strong increases through 2004 and the first half of 2005. See Statistics Canada—The Daily, "Study: Sport Utility Vehicles," February 16, 2005, accessed November 4, 2005, at http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/050216/d050216c.htm.
    Approximately 1.2 million SUVs crowded the narrow roads of Britain in 2004; SUV sales rose 13 percent in the year to 179,000 units, or one out of every fourteen vehicles sold in the UK—see Robert Lester, "Driving SUVs Off the Road: Concern about Pollution Levels and the Excessive Harm They Cause in Road Accidents is Sparking a Revolt against SUVs," Marketing Week, September 9, 2004, 24–27; Denis Campbell, "Terminator Guns for the Chelsea Tractor," The Observer, September 26, 2004; Peter Hetherington and Sam Jones, "Walkers Battle with 4x4s over Rights of Way," The Guardian, April 10, 2004; Andrew Clark, "Four-Wheel Drive Vehicles Threaten Air Pollution Targets," The Guardian Weekly, April 22–28, 2005, 12. In Australia, SUVs comprise nearly 20 percent of all new purchases. See John van Tiggelen, "Big Mothers; Road Rage," Sydney Morning Herald, November 6, 2004,18; ANZ Motor Vehicle Outlook, May 30, 2005.
    In 2002, a surprising 100,000 SUVs were sold in Germany, a market much more oriented to traditional cars and fuel efficiency; subsequently the trend continued to accelerate, with 93,000 registrations in the first half of 2005 alone. More than a few belong in the category of very large vehicles over 2.8 tons, with tax experts putting their accumulated number at 212,000 in late 2004. Industry analysts expected SUVs to comprise more than 7 percent of the new car market right across Western Europe by 2006; see Rezzo Schlauch, "Unsägliche Vehikel. Die deutsche Autoindustrie setzt mit Geländewagen nach US-Muster ihren Ruf aufs Spiel," Die Zeit, February 13, 2003. Accessed at <http://www.zeit.de/2003/08/Forum_Schlauch>; "Höhere Kfz-Steuer für geländewagen ab 2,8 t," Handelskammer Hamburg—Steuerinformationen December 2004, accessed at http://www.hk24.de/HK24/HK24/produktmarken/index.jsp?url=http%3A//www.hk24.de/HK24/HK24/produktmarken/standortpolitik/steuer_finanz_politik/steuertipps/steuerinformationen_2004/dezember.jsp; Jörg Auf dem Hovel, "SUV-Köpfe in Kampflaune—Die gepanzerten Gesellschaftssegmente setzen auf die Fahrzeugklasse der 'Sport Utility Vehicles,'" Telepolis web pages, September 15, 2005.
    In New Zealand registrations of SUVs have doubled in the last four years: they comprise about 11 percent of the total passenger fleet, and as late as October 2005 represented 22 percent of new car purchases; see Transport Minister Harry Duynhoven, radio interview with Linda Clark, Nine to Noon, July 13, 2004; John de Bueger, "The Simple Truth Is—SUVs Are Unsafe and a Danger to All," New Zealand Herald, October 15, 2004, accessible at http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?ObjectID=3600267; National Radio Morning Report, interview with New Zealand Motor Trade Association representative, October 5, 2005. In a statement that suggests many interesting parallels between SUVs and other consumer products, a dealer pooh-poohed the impact of markedly higher gasoline prices on SUV sales, sayin