Route 66 and American “Car Country”: Transportation, Roadways and the American Landscape

Route 66 and “Car Country”:

The environmental significance of roadways such as Route 66 in the United States continue to influence the way Americans value and interpret the natural environment around them. Since the creation of automobiles and highways, the use of cars as the primary mode of transportation within the United States has become an integral part of the daily American routine.  Designated by historian, Christopher Wells, as “Car country”, the American transportation infrastructure facilitated an environment in which car dependent landscapes were encouraged.1 As a result of both the financial and political regulations that were created to stimulate growth within the transportation industry, Americans were now faced with redefining the natural environment and the way they move and navigate themselves within car-dependent landscapes.

Fossil Fuel Industries and Their Impact:

Synonymous with the very cars that use them, the use of fossil fuels within the automobile and transportation industries directly impacted the natural landscapes. Ranging from the production of cars to overall fuel consumption through transportation mediums, fossil fuels became a necessity for the ever growing car dependent nation.2 Of course through the burning en masse of fossil fuels, large quantities of air and water pollution was inevitable. From 1920 to 1941, the Ford Motor Company alone would burn 384 million tons of coal over the course of 21 years. In terms of gasoline consumed in 1939, automobile companies used nearly 21 billion gallons in order to produce the vehicles desired by the American consumer.3

Route 66 and Ecology:

As a car dependent society, the United States roadway systems touch nearly every form of geography across the country. The ecological effects of the construction of roadways such as Route 66 speaks directly to how such infrastructure succeeds in bringing accessibility to remote parts of the country while also dividing and dictating the geography across the landscape.4 Dating back to the interwar period, the maintenance and construction of highway systems restructured the land that such roads were built on as well as forever altered immediate ecosystems that surrounded the road itself. Highways, including Route 66, introduced environmental changes to the surrounding land that involved erosion, displacement of water sources, interruptions in biodiversity and the decline of naturally occurring wildlife.5  

  1. Christopher  W. Wells, Car Country: An Environmental History (Seattle, WA: University of Washington, 2012), XXX-XXXIV. ↩︎
  2. Christopher Wells, “Fueling the Boom: Gasoline Taxes, Invisibility, and the Growth of the American Highway Infrastructure, 1919-1956,” The Journal of American History 99, no. 1 (2012): 72–81. ↩︎
  3. Wells, Car Country, 204-207. ↩︎
  4. Thomas Zeller, Consuming Landscapes What We See When We Drive and Why It Matters (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2022), 36. ↩︎
  5. Wells, Car Country, 213-217 ↩︎