Car Country: An Environmental History

Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books

by Christopher W. Wells

For most people in the United States, going almost anywhere begins with reaching for the car keys. This is true, Christopher Wells argues, because the United States is Car Country―a nation dominated by landscapes that are difficult, inconvenient, and often unsafe to navigate by those who are not sitting behind the wheel of a car.

The prevalence of car-dependent landscapes seems perfectly natural to us today, but it is, in fact, a relatively new historical development. In Car Country , Wells rejects the idea that the nation's automotive status quo can be explained as a simple byproduct of an ardent love affair with the automobile. Instead, he takes readers on a tour of the evolving American landscape, charting the ways that transportation policies and land-use practices have combined to reshape nearly every element of the built environment around the easy movement of automobiles. Wells untangles the complicated relationships between automobiles and the environment, allowing readers to see the everyday world in a completely new way. The result is a history that is essential for understanding American transportation and land-use issues today.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Environment, Geography, Urban Planning, American History, Microhistory

464 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2012

Reviews

[ambyr · Rating 3 out of 5]

As an introduction to its concepts, there's nothing wrong with this book. The problem is, I've read most of the sources Wells is working from, and I'm not convinced (for all that he claims to be overthrowing the orthodoxy) that he has anything much to add. You could read this book, yes--or you could read Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 and Getting There: The Epic Struggle between Road and Rail in the American Century and hit 90% of the same content, with (to my eye) considerably more compelling prose and a broader contextual sweep.

I was hoping that this book might delve deeper into the ecological consequences, something neither Hayden nor Goddard is deeply invested in--but while it repeatedly asserts they exist, it's not interested in providing so much as a specific case study or two. I suspect I'd have to dig into Wells' bibliography for answers. I might do so; it's a good bibliography, and I've already added several books to my to-read list after consulting it. But I wanted more from this book than a good bibliography; I wanted synthesis and analysis, not literature review.

[Jacob Simonson · Rating 4 out of 5]

it's a text book

[Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thorough and fascinating examination of the structural conditions of car dependence in the U.S. I consider myself a "car-guy" (and I mean guy in the general person sense as I'm a woman, we can all be car-guys!), but I am very aware of the affects that cars have on the environment, which is the focus of this book. But not necessarily cars themselves, but everything that goes into cars and driving. So, pre-production, land use, roads, oil, etc. I was surprised that there was very little mention of car emissions. But this is what makes this book so important and informative. We often think of car emissions as car pollution. This book shows how there's so much more to that picture.

This book dives deep into a fairly narrow issue in that it really does focus on the environmental effects of cars and driving, and what it takes to enable that. And most of it addresses the mid-1960s and earlier, so really how these conditions were established. It doesn't get into the social aspects too much, so bear in mind that no book can adequately cover a topic from all angles. It is an environmental history, don't ask it to be something it's not.

Very well researched and engagingly written. I highly recommend it to anyone interested even remotely in the topic.

[Steve Gjerdingen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very good summary of the policies and funding decisions that facilitated the vast usage of the automobile and the creation of the automobile landscape today. For someone who has been interested in this topic for 5 years I can say that I definitely learned some new things by reading this book. I recommend this to anyone who has any curiosity in how we ended up in the auto dominated environment we are in today and is open-minded to another theory on how this happened.

[Travis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting material, but a very dry, boring read.

[Chelsea Henry · Rating 3 out of 5]

This again was week sevens book in grad school for a class on environmental history of the U.S. This book was okay. It was not great but it was not terrible. I did learn a little bit about road building in the U.S. but very little about the environmental impact the automobile had on the U.S.

The title of this book is very misleading, when assigned the book i thought this was going to be the stand out book of the semester since I love cars. But this book is not really about cars or the environmental impact cars had on the U.S. This book is really about the building of roads in the United States, Wells covers what it took to go from poor rural roads to the modern highway system of today. He covers the various clubs and organizations that helped get roads/ better roads built. Everything from the bicycle craze to auto racing.

Wells Car Country falls short in explaining the environmental impact or cars, the history of cars, he fails to mention the agricultural boom of tractors, he spend only a few pages on the invention of the highway system. He stays focused on what he does which is road building and a very lengthy section on commerce and the creation of strip malls, shopping centers, roadside attractions, and shopping malls.

All in all it was okay, I would not recommend this book to anyone. There are much better books out there that cover these same subjects in greater detail.

[Andy Dorsey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having recently become interested in the topics of urban planning and car dependency via various YouTube channels, I wanted to deepen my knowledge with an academic study. This book's main contribution was: though most people oversimplify by saying that car dependency sprouted up after World War Two, the seeds were actually sewn from the 1890s to the 1940s.

The book sort of ends in the 1960s, and while a historical overview is nice, I had rather been hoping for a greater focus on how this foundation directly affects the present state of affairs -- the author tantalizingly hints at this in the prologue but never returns to the topic in depth. And surely Car Country has developed in new ways over the last 50 years.

I also had difficulty seeing this as "An Environmental History." While Wells certainly discusses the impact of cars on nature and carefully charts Americans' changing interactions with space and community over time, the two main characters in the book seem to me to be roads and engineers. "A Spatial History" might be a better subtitle.

[Michael Peretti · Rating 5 out of 5]

As Americans, grabbing our car keys is the first thing we usually do when going somewhere. Not only is this commonplace, it’s likely our only option. Why is this? What made America so car-dependent? Enter Chris’ book, Car Country: An Environmental History. This book is an all-access pass into our motoring past weaving a detailed story of how the car and our roads came to be. Chris has divided the book into four overarching themes: The pre-automobile era, the motor age, building roads/infrastructure and creating fully car-centric landscapes.

In the pre-automobile age, America had one of the most extensive railway transportation systems in the world. This included trains, horse-drawn or electric streetcars and trolly networks. This network was working well until the rise of the automobile started to choke them out. This was one area where I thought the book was light on covering. I understand it’s not the main focus of this book so I won’t doc many points for it.

The motor age was highly dominated by one man…Henry Ford. His model T was a smash hit and help create one of the most fascinating metrics of the book-the automobile adoption rate. In the early 1900s car ownership skyrocketed from 618,727 in 1911 to 8.1 million in 1920. That’s stupid fast growth for such a short period of time. This created a domino effect that helped propel the nation into its next two phases, building roads and creating infrastructure. These two topics Chris dives deep into the policies, politics, economics, and power that created our modern car-centric lifestyle.

With about a decade of study, Chris brilliantly lays out the progression of our car & road history beautifully. While it can be very dense, detailed and academic at times, Chris does a great job of keeping the information light and accessible. Anyone with an interest in this topic will would be hard pressed to find a more detailed, engaging book.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this book for a research paper I had to do for school. Car dependency and urban sprawl have always interested me, so I thought this book was the perfect choice. Car Country helped tremendously with gathering information for my paper, and I love how the book is organized. Each chapter has a summary at the end that helps readers to refresh on what they’ve been reading. There’s also various pictures that help to visualize the state of the US & automobiles throughout history. Overall I found this book very interesting, and would recommend it to anyone- research paper required or not.

[Eric Bias · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had to read it for a history class and I enjoyed it.

[Gregory · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you want to know the environmental history of the car this is the book for you.

[Bitsy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book covered a lot of ground about the building of things oriented towards cars in the first half of the 20th century. While much of it felt duplicative of things I've read before, it would be a good place for someone just learning about these topics to start.

See @ambyr's review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Ro Morehead · Rating 5 out of 5]

for class, twas interesting

[Nathan Albright · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to have a grudging degree of respect for an author like this one, who seeks to split the difference between the thesis that America's transportation infrastructure is so car-oriented because Americans like it that way and the many writers from an environmental perspective who view it as something that was forced on the American people by car companies and oil companies and the like.  The author does a good job at demonstrating the slow acceptance of the desirability of new roads and centrally controlled transportation planning on the part of rural American in the late 19th and early 20th century.  However, the author is honest enough to point out that the decisive move towards a car culture was heavily influenced by the fact that cars were already massively popular at the time, and that politicians were simply acting according to the wishes of their constituents, to say nothing of corporate conspiracies against light-rail.  Quite bluntly, a high degree of car ownership led to a strong degree of public pressure on government agencies to provide good roads (if not necessarily maintain them well) and simultaneously allowed for low-density construction that made light rail inefficient and that made people in large areas very car-dependent.

This particular book of about 300 pages is divided into 4 parts and 7 chapters with other material.  The book begins with a foreword by William Cronon and then moves on to an acknowledgments section.  After that there is a prologue about what it means to be an American and to want and expect a car of one's own.  After this the author looks at America before the automobiles (I) and the state of roads and road reformers from 1880-1905 (1). This leads into a look at the dawn of the motor age (II), with chapters on automotive pioneers like Ford and Oldsmobile (2) as well as what it meant to build for traffic (3).  The first photo gallery follows after this, and then Part Three looks at the creation of car country between 1919 and 1941 (III), with chapters on motor-age geography (4), the importance of gasoline (5), and the paths out of town (6).  This leads to the second photo gallery as well as the final part of the book, which discusses the new patterns, standards, and landscapes in America from 1940 to 1960 (IV), when America was turned into a suburban nation (7).  The book then conclude with an epilogue about reaching for the car keys as well as notes, a bibliography, and an index.

What is it that makes the United States such a car country?  It is more than the fact that the United States has a lot of cars, but also the way that instead of high-density settlements that the United States has a rather dispersed sort of development, not only with suburbs being more desirable than inner city cores (the reverse of most of the world), but also with regards to cities being in many cases (especially in the West) quite far from each other.  To be sure, American transportation and housing patterns could not have developed as they did without official sanction, at least in the formal way that they happened, but these trends were not merely pushed by companies involved in selling cars and their fuel, but also came from people who themselves enjoyed the freedom and mobility that cars allowed.  As someone whose mobility is not always as good as I would like it to be, I can definitely appreciate the desire on the part of people to be free from the forced intimacy of high-density housing and transportation planning involving subways or surface rail.  All too often books are written by people who have an ax to grind against cars and car culture and it shows.  If this author wishes things were another way, at least he is honest enough to show what the facts are as well.