By Paul R. Josephson
Reviewed by Caroline Pufalt
Ah, summer. The season brings anticipations of summer vacations, summer reading, float trips, gardening, picnics and also unfortunately, lawnmowers, leaf blowers, weed wackers , jet skis, and ATVs. We Americans love our engines and, for better or worse, we have invented many uses for them.
Paul Josephson, a history and international relations professor, has written previously about technology, nature and about Russian nuclear policy. He reports how as a new homeowner he started in typical fashion with a gas lawnmower and determination to maintain the proper lawn with all the motorized equipment. But then, perhaps because of his interest in nature and technology, he began to think about alternatives. His lawn went natural and he presumably had more time to get out in the Maine woods and encounter All Terrain Vehicles and other forms of motorized recreation. Thus he had an interest to start a book that examines our obsession with motors and gadgets, big and small.
Background for this book requires a brief detour into mechanics. A small bore engine refers to an engine with small cylinder holes (bores). Such engines are often two stroke engines (a stroke is the action of the piston traveling the full cylinder length). Small bore two stroke engines are less efficient and pollute more than four stroke engines. Most motorized recreational vehicles and lawn care machinery operate with small two stroke engines. However, some manufactures, responding to pollution control regulation and public concerns, have recently started producing vehicles and machinery with four stroke engines and other pollution controls.
Josephson uses the term ATV to include Off Highway Vehicles and Off Road Vehicles. His consideration of land based motorized recreation also encompasses also dirt bikes, motorcycles, jeeps and dune buggies. He describes the early development of such vehicles and of snowmobiles. Originally these vehicles were invented with utility in mind. ATVs could be used on the farm, the ranch or in the forest. Snowmobiles provided needed transportation in the winter.
In 1934 one early developer of snowmobiles, J. A. Bombardier, was motivated by the death of his son due to appendicitis, who was denied medical care because of snow covered roads. Early versions of snowmobiles were larger, slower, utilitarian vehicles used mostly in rural settings. But growth in the early versions of what would eventually become today’s snowmobiles, stalled in the late 1940s when both the US and Canada began plowing country roads, thus reducing the need for alternative winter transportation.
Increased improvements in both ATVs and snowmobile technology, increased affluence among average Americans and marketing diverted interest from utility to recreation. By the late 1960s motorized recreation was an all season occasion. Much of that recreation took place on public lands and federal state and local and officials were not prepared for the impacts and conflicts that would bring.
In 1972, President Nixon issued an executive order requiring federal land managers to in effect, manage motorized recreation so as to avoid irreparable damage. President Carter reissued and updated that executive order during his term and since then land managers have continually struggled and mostly failed to fulfill the executive order requirements.
Josephson describes the variety of environmental damage that result from ATV recreation. Across all types of landscapes, forest, prairie, desert, and shoreline, ATVs cause soil erosion, disrupt wildlife, damage riparian zones, spread exotics and increase fire risk. These impacts occur even if riders stay on designated trails. When riders go off trail, which is common, the damage is more severe.
Josephson also discusses the growth of personal watercraft (PWC) which includes jet skis and other brands of PWCs. These vehicles can travel in shallow water and thus enable riders to move along close to shore, where they can have negative impacts on nesting birds, turtles, fish, and other life that flourishes in such areas.
In addition to damage to the environment, Josephson considers injuries to people, to the drivers and passengers of ATVs and PWC. The results are sad and shocking. This spring the greater St Louis area suffered three ATV related fatalities. These led to a Post-Dispatch cover story on ATV hazards. Unfortunately such stories are all too common. ATV and snowmobile accidents and fatalities are increasing in actual number, although the accident rate based on increased usage has slightly decreased.
Some safety steps have been taken, the most important being an end to the production of highly unstable three-wheeled ATVs. Still the four-wheel model, with its high center of gravity, challenging steering and potential speeds, is also unsafe. In fact lawnmowers have more safety requirements in center of gravity and steering mechanisms than do ATVs. As a recreational vehicle, ATVs are attractive to children. But their steering, especially over rough terrain requires adult strength. Thus, sadly, many ATV accidents involve children.
PWC are also dangerous. Josephson’s discussion of operator injury resulting from some PWC accidents ought to give pause to anyone choosing to ride one. Yet the injuries continue.
Josephson devotes a good deal of his book to describing the many efforts of local governments, states and federal agencies to control ATV, snowmobile and PWC use. Only vigorous efforts such as mandatory safety and environmental impact education, licensing, even liability insurance requirements and enforcement seem to have an effect. Josephson also recommends that in terms of safety we treat ATVs like automobiles, thus requiring roll bars, seatbelts and prohibition against use by children. He also thinks we should question the assumption that motorized recreation should have a place on all public lands. He argues that some areas, beyond just designated wilderness, should be protected from motorized recreation.
Josephson closes his book with a chapter on motorized equipment for the lawn and garden. Here, Missouri has a special link. In 2003 Missouri’s Senator Bond helped stall standards set by and for the state of California requiring catalytic converters on some lawn equipment in order to reduce pollution. Missouri was the home of Briggs and Stratton Corporation, the nation’s largest lawn and garden equipment manufacturers and Bond feared an impact on that company. He later argued that catalytic converters were a fire risk, a charge refuted by the EPA. And another small link to MO, the weed wacker was first produced in 1977 by Emerson Electric in St Louis.
Josephson’s book is a worthy treatment of this timely topic. Although I approached this book with a concern mostly in regard to environmental impacts I found the history and the discussion of safety issues very interesting. Josephson helps the reader understand the multiple impacts of our inventiveness with the small bore engine. The book is copyrighted 2007 so that most of the research cited is no later than 2005. One thing the author did not cover is how $4.00 - $5.00 gallon gas will effect motorized recreation. Let’s hope it encourages some people to walk, or at least to slow down.