Author: Chris Wells

Chris Wells

Chris Wells

Chris Wells is associate professor of environmental history at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. His research and teaching focus on the ways that technology—and especially technological systems—have reshaped the American environment, mediating and structuring people’s relationships with the natural world. He is the author of Car Country: An Environmental History (2012), which focuses on the proliferation of car-dependent landscapes in the United States before 1956.

Living in Car Country

• April 23, 2013

For most Americans, driving is routine. This isn’t to say that it’s impossible to get around by other means—by bus, say, or by bicycle—but in most places, compared to driving, such alternatives tend to be inconvenient, uncomfortable, inefficient, and sometimes even unsafe. As a result, when most Americans need to go somewhere, they reflexively reach for […]