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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.
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| 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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Windshield Wilderness is a three-part case study of Washington State's big national parks—Mount Rainer, Olympic, and North Cascades. Mount Rainer, founded in 1899, represents the first phase of park construction. Rainer's master plan included plentiful roadways designed to accommodate the masses of ordinary Americans who, in their ordinary Buicks, came to witness unspoiled nature. The budding wilderness movement of the late 1930s and 1940s, however, prompted changes in nature's significance that were evident in park design and layout. By the time Olympic opened, roads were pushed to the periphery of the park where visitors, still in their cars but relegated to strategically placed scenic overlooks, could see nature but not despoil it. North Cascades, by contrast, did not open until 1968. In the wake of the Wilderness Act, park roads in North Cascades weren't even in the park. Surrounding national forest lands and recreation areas provided automobile access, but the park remained virtually roadless. |
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While recognizing the negative impact associated with the clang and clatter of the automobile, Louter does not simply or automatically condemn the car. In Windshield Wilderness, cars mean access and it is access that enables national parks to fulfill their "democratic promise." More substantially, however, Louter sees parks as constructed places where the machine doesn't necessarily ruin the garden. Given the centrality of the car to the park experience, he argues, we must reconsider the separation of the natural from the modern. From this vantage point, Louter highlights one of the enduring misconceptions about nature in America. Urban Americans did not build parks as an antidote to their overly industrial lives. Rather, disciplined by life in the city, Americans turned to nature, in this case the kind of nature seen through the windshield of their automobile, as a means to buttress the structures of urban life. |
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John Herron is assistant professor of environmental history at the University of Missouri in Kansas City. |
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