With a lively style and striking illustrations, Louter traces the history of Washington State's national parks -- Mount Rainier, Olympic, and North Cascades -- to illustrate shifting ideas of wilderness as scenic, as roadless, and as ecological reserve. He reminds us that we cannot understand national parks without recognizing that cars have been central to how people experience and interpret their meaning, and especially how they perceive them as wild places.
Windshield Wilderness explores what few histories of national parks address: what it means to view parks from the road and through a windshield. Building upon recent interpretations of wilderness as a cultural construct rather than as a pure state of nature, the story of autos in parks presents the preservation of wilderness as a dynamic and nuanced process.Windshield Wilderness illuminates the difficulty of separating human-modified landscapes from natural ones, encouraging us to recognize our connections with nature in national parks.
David Louter is a historian with the National Park Service in Seattle, Washington.
"What Windshield Wilderness has to say about the changing role of automobiles in the twentieth-century American experience of wild nature will be of interest to anyone who cares not just about the three parks whose histories it explores-Mount Rainier, Olympic, and North Cascades-but parks and wild places all across the nation."-from the Foreword by William Cronon
"In this compelling book David Louter takes a seeming oxymoron-a windshield wilderness, a wild area seen from a car on an expensive and carefully engineered road-and uses it as an avenue for understanding the evolution of national parks."-Richard White, Margaret Byrne Professor of American History, Stanford University
"David Louter's Windshield Wilderness considerably advances our understanding of the relationship between the coming of modernity in the shape of the automobile and the idea of wilderness. Gracefully crafted and exquisitely argued, it is a marvelous addition to the literature of Western, environmental, and national park history."-Hal Rothman, Distinguished Professor of History, University of Nevada at Las Vegas
"Windshield Wilderness tackles an issue of great significance, both in terms of historical inquiry and contemporary public policy. If adopted by managers of reserves, its ideas and proposals could influence the direction of current park policy."-Peter Blodgett, Curator of Western Historical Manuscripts, Huntington Library
"David Louter is the beginning of a new generation of national park historians. His lively style draws me from page to page." - John Reynolds, former Deputy Director, National Park Service