Left, a hiker in the Adirondacks examines damage left from off-road vehicles. Photo © George Wuerthner.
“There is a fixed idea in the American mind, inherited from a pioneer ancestry which suffered from having no roads at all, that any additional road must be good.” So writes Rosalie Edge in one of the opening essays in A Road Runs Through It: Reviving Wild Places (Johnson Books, Boulder, 2006). Edge, a pioneer of the women’s suffrage movement who became a leading figure in the conservation movement in the 1930s, argued this mentality would result in “…a madness of roads, too many of which will be left untended to fall into disrepair and disrepute.” Yet even this visionary, who recorded her prediction more than seventy years ago, likely couldn’t have imagined the vast network of roads cutting through America’s public lands today.
There are almost 450,000 miles of roads weaving through U.S. Forest Service lands—and some 100,000 more exist on other federally managed lands. Compare these numbers to the 46,000 miles of interstate highways. Of course, most of those forest roads are not engineering marvels or heavily relied upon for daily commerce. Many were hastily constructed for the conveyance of timber products and then left idle, either outright abandoned or preserved for future management and fire suppression access. The reader is left to wonder what Edge, whose influence peaked in an America still reeling from the Great Depression, would think of the roughly $10 billion backlog of road maintenance accumulated on Forest Service lands over the decades.
Today we’re too far removed from our pioneer ancestry to recall much suffering over the lack of a road. Still, fixed in many minds are the ideas that removing a road is wasteful and that creating a new one does no harm. In reality, it’s very hard to argue that public lands are not suffering from a surplus of roads. A great deal of science backs up claims that roads cause ecological harm—they are vectors for weeds and disease, sources of erosion and causes of wildlife habitat fragmentation.
A Road Runs Through It is a project of Wildlands CPR, a Missoula, Montana–based environmental nonprofit focused on restoring roaded landscapes and preventing the building of new roads. The challenge that group has taken up is a daunting one. While building roads for timber acquisition has ebbed on federal lands, fossil-fuel energy production is booming. A growing contingent of recreationists wedded to their motors are outspoken in their perception that removing roads is not just wasteful, but akin to removing freedom. Wildlands CPR’s struggle, one would imagine, is rewarded by humble victories.
This book is much more than an argument for the goals of this organization, however well it achieves that function. Thomas Petersen, the editor and a contributing author, explains in the introduction that “while there are other fine, more academically oriented books about roads, this one tells stories.” Indeed, this is a bright collection of nonfiction from some of the country’s most respected writers, including Barry Lopez, William Kittredge and David Quammen.
Some years ago, former Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth called “unmanaged recreation” one of the four main threats to the public forests. Off-road vehicle users are one of the fastest-growing factions in the world of outdoor recreation. Sales of their machines are booming—up almost 200 percent in the last ten years—and the damage some of these vehicles and their riders inflict on the landscape is well documented. But, as with so many environmental conundrums, statistics only tell part of the story, and fail to get at the heart of the issue. Ultimately, people who like to drive around in the woods feel entitled to do so—regardless of, and perhaps oblivious to, the potential consequences to habitat and solitude.
Katie Alvord explores these feelings with her retelling of an experience with an off-road enthusiast she stopped at the gate of a nature preserve in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In her essay “The Entitled,” what begins as a clash of wills over access turns into a discussion with a fellow named Dave, which leads to some shared understanding. “If we can reach this point in small ways,” she writes, “then ultimately we can reach it in big ones—as a culture, and on our public lands.”
Given the growth in popularity of off-road vehicles and the intensive road building requirements of the fossil fuel boom, the optimism Alvord expresses can seem almost too hopeful at first—until you realize the power of slowing things down to a human speed.
In “Apologia,” Lopez writes of stopping to pay respect to roadkill, something he calls a technique of awareness. “We treat the attrition of lives on roads like the attrition of lives in war: horrifying, unavoidable, justified,” he observes. The act of atonement Lopez exemplifies by cradling a small nighthawk in his hands becomes a penitential act of encouragement. It’s a call to slow down and take notice.
In the book’s closing essay, Phil Condon asks, why not step back from road building and take a deep breath for fifty years? “This kind of a moratorium would simply say that patience is a virtue—and mean it,” he writes. “It would exercise our ability to forgo and forbear, an ability that many of us tell our children distinguishes us from them.”
One of the joys of such a well-crafted set of essays is that it allows readers to slacken their own pace a bit. Ultimately, a culture-wide slow-down-and-take-notice movement may be the best hope for preserving at least part of the land road-free.