| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 34.2

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 34.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement. By Paul S. Sutter. Foreword by William Cronon. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002. xvi + 343 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00.)

Controversy followed publication of William Cronon's "The Trouble with Wilderness," which originally appeared in the collection Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (New York, 1996). Alas, the ensuing Great Wilderness Debate soon grew stale, relying as it did on politicking. Now, Paul Sutter has regrounded the discussion with his archivally-based study of a neglected phase of wilderness history. Driven Wild offers intellectual biographies of four key founders of the Wilderness Society. Even better, it helps explain how and why in America the idea of wilderness evolved into the legal reality of wilderness areas. 1

As enshrined in the Wilderness Act of 1964, the fundamental marker of American wilderness is the absence of automobile roads. Sutter demonstrates that this obsession with roadlessness is a legacy of the "interwar period" (1916–1941). Surprisingly, the original Wilderness Society (1935) worried more about motorists than loggers or miners. Given the unprecedented proliferation of cars and roads, this worry had cause. After an initial free-for-all (frontier!) stage of auto-camping, when motorists naively trespassed on any "open land," the government entered the business of recreation. The spread of vehicles in the national forests led to dual zones of public land—one for (hiking) trails and one for (automobile) roads. . . .

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