Automobiles, National Parks, and the Origins of Modern Wilderness Advocacy

Paul Sutter, Ph. D.
2016 Carson Fellow, Rachel Carson Center for Environment & Society
Professor of History,University of Colorado – Boulder
Boulder, Colorado

Author Wallace Stegner famously called the National Parks “the best idea America ever had,” a sentiment emphasized during the 2016 centennial of the National Park Service. In the same sentence Stegner also noted that “wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that idea.” However, when conservationists came together in 1935 to form The Wilderness Society, the first national environmental organization dedicated to the preservation of wilderness, they did so partly as a challenge to the early Park Service’s enthusiastic accommodation of roads, automobiles, and modern forms of nature tourism within the parks. Sutter explores the complex relationship between the rise of automobility and the origins of wilderness advocacy, with a particular emphasis on the historical tensions between national park and wilderness preservation.