Highway heritage vs. the fossil fuel industry

As a counter-balance to the purely celebratory uses of automotive heritage that I wrote about in my last post, here's an example of using heritage designation in much more activist and critical ways. Calling themselves "The Rural People of Highway 12," a coalition centered in Idaho is using Route 12's various scenic and historic designations as key tools in their fight against the growing numbers of oil companies using the road to haul half-million pound "megaloads" of drilling equipment north to the expanding tar sands oil fields in Alberta.

Started in the 1920s, Route 12 was originally intended as a freeway running between downtown Detroit and Madison, Wisconsin. It was extended to Yellowstone National Park in 1939, and then absorbed into the Interstate system starting in the 1950s. By 1969, it reached its terminus on the coast of Washington state. 

Like Mass. Route 2, the road I'm currently studying, it's one of those highways that's been overlaid with various heritage designations in recent years.  It's the paved spine of a number of scenic, historic, and recreational routes:  the Northwest Passage Scenic Byway (designated as a byway in 2002 and as an All-American Road in 2005), part of the TransAmerica Bicycle Route (itself something of a historic site, having been created as part of the "Bikecentennial" in the 1970s), a couple of Wild and Scenic River corridors, and parts of the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail and the Nez Perce National Historic Trail.  According to the Rural People website, Motorcycle Magazine called it the best recreational motorcycle route in the nation ("many curves, much beauty" notes the website).

The Rural People of Route 12 see themselves as David fighting Goliath, and when you go up against the fossil fuel industry, that's pretty much the size of it (as Tim DeChristopher just discovered in Utah after disrupting a federal auction of oil and gas leases in that state).  Heritage designations, like historic preservation laws, can seem like very puny weapons in that kind of fight, as the same urgent drive toward automobility that created Route 12 in the first place continues to push us to keep feeding our petroleum habit despite the increasing evidence of how ultimately suicidal this is. Most of these designations themselves are intended to draw visitors to the region, and nearly all of those visitors are going to be arriving in some kind of two- or four-wheeled vehicle.

So it's a paradoxical strategy at best.  But it's a strategy, and it seems much more intelligent than celebrating automobility in a more simple-minded way.  Tar Sands Action's planned late-summer civil disobedience campaign in Washington, DC is a more direct and potentially consequential kind of action, and I hope we start to see more and more serious protests (including from my surprisingly quiescent Canadian compatriots) against this environmentally ruinous plan of extracting the oil in the Alberta tar sands.  If highway heritage can play any role in all of that, it's all to the good.

Roads scholarship

Is it just me, or are people actually beginning to pay more attention to the histories of roads?  Road history is something I'm exploring in my own (fairly slow-moving) research at the moment, relating to Massachusetts' Route 2, the road I spend a good deal of my time on.  But a couple of interesting pieces of work also came to my attention this summer, focusing on both the distant and recent past of one of the east coast's most-traveled corridors.

I've been reading (also slowly) Eric Jaffe's new book The King's Best Highway: The Lost History of the Boston Post Road, the Route That Made America (Scribner, 2010), which follows the first organized postal route in colonial America (Ben Franklin, anyone?).  The book isn't terribly weighty, but it does give a sense of some of the political, military, and other factors that went into creating the road, which has now morphed into coastal Route 1 and inland Route 91 in central New England.

There's a bit more critical depth  in parts of National Public Radio's series about everyone's least favorite road, I 95.  I'm looking forward to going through the segments in detail one of these fine days, although some things about the mix are a little jarring--for example, the juxtaposition of a segment on the hardships of migrant workers traveling up and down the coast with one called "Eat Your Way Down I-95." I guess that's how it is with highways, though--love 'em, hate 'em, can't hardly avoid 'em.