Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement

Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement. By Paul S. Sutter. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002. xvi, 343 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-295-98219-5.)

Paul S. Sutler's Driven Wild is critical for understanding the evolution of wilderness advocacy. Studies such as Roderick Nash's Wilderness and the American Mind (1967) and Stephen Fox's John Muir and His Legacy (1981) portray a linear intellectual genealogy from nineteenth-century preservationists to green warriors, but Driven Wild's analysis of four Wilderness Society founders reveals instead a tortuous path toward the modern wilderness movement with important political implications.

As the title suggests, automobiles propelled wilderness. By the interwar years many conservationists worried that consumer-based leisure, widespread car ownership, and rapid road building posed ominous threats to unspoiled nature. To illustrate how such issues inspired the Wilderness Society,...