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| (photo: Terray Sylvester) | |
Ben Goldfarb is a conservation journalist whose work has appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times, Orion, and National Geographic, among others. After winning the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Science Writing Award for Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, Goldfarb has turned to another fascinating field with Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet--a landmark book in environmental writing--coming September 12, 2023, from W.W. Norton.
Road ecology is a fairly new field, but the impact from roads dates back to their earliest days. What makes now the right time for this book?
In the book, I talk about this infrastructure tsunami, a new wave of highways and rail lines and ports slated for places around the world that haven't previously had significant infrastructure development. We have to be ready for that from a biodiversity, conservation standpoint. We have to know what effects those roads are going to have, and we have to be ready to mitigate those effects.
There's a lot of interest in infrastructure in the U.S. as well. We're starting to pay attention to the legacy and impact of infrastructure in new ways, and this book is part of that, accounting for the full social and ecological cost of these invisible systems that underpin our world.
You call road ecology "an act of interspecies imagination." Is that perspective shift enough for people to consider giving up what roads offer them in exchange for the needs of animals?
We all drive on roads, many of us every single day, and thus, we fail to notice them. The purpose of my book is to shake off that road blindness, to make us see these structures in a different way. We have our human standpoint, of course, but roads mean something so different to a deer or a bear or a butterfly or a songbird. And for most of those species, roads are catastrophic forces of fragmentation and death. They are dividing animals from each other, and from the places they need to go. So considering other species' perspectives is one way to see roads in a different light.
I've become painfully aware of the toll that roads take, but I still use them. I live in a place where it's hard to get anywhere without a car, and it's hard to imagine the transit system that's ever going to replace cars in rural America. And that's where many of the big road ecology conflicts are based. For example, here in central Colorado, we have this somewhat unavoidable car culture, and we have big herds of pronghorn and elk and deer that cross the roads. That's one of the challenges: the wildlife tends to be concentrated in places that are hard to get around without cars.
One of the ways forward is to build a lot more wildlife crossings, these bridges and tunnels and underpasses that animals use to cross highways safely and to reach the habitats that they need.
And those crossings aren't free. You outline all the ways policymakers have to deal with balancing budgetary needs, and maybe that's the compromise--fund a wildlife crossing project rather than give up our cars?
Obviously, I believe strongly in wildlife crossings, but they don't solve every problem. For instance, they can't solve the problem of road noise, which is a huge form of habitat loss. They don't solve the problem of tire particles trickling into watersheds and causing salmon die-offs. So, yes, wildlife crossings are useful, but if we're going to address the sum total of problems that roads create, we really do need to move away from a car-oriented culture.
Ideally, we would dramatically contract our road network, and some of that is happening, like the deconstruction of Forest Service roads and the demolition of urban highways that harmed Black communities in cities like Syracuse. But at the same time, we're also building new roads. Wildlife crossings and those sorts of retrofits are one way forward, but in touting them as a solution, I sometimes have felt uncomfortable, like I was accepting as inevitable the continuation of car culture.
After reading about P-22, the cougar managing to survive on the outskirts of Los Angeles, I was saddened to learn of his death by vehicle strike. How did that news affect you and your book?
P-22 is ultimately going to become one of the most influential wild animals that ever existed. It's just incredible how much attention he garnered, thanks in large part to Beth Pratt, the human who advocated for him, basically acting as his PR person. He did so much to inspire the crossing at Liberty Canyon that's going to help genetically fragmented cougar populations find each other and hopefully save them from long-term inbreeding. And because the Liberty Canyon overpass is so high-profile, it has done a lot for wildlife crossings all over the country. As Beth told me, if you can build a giant overpass over a 12-lane freeway with the highest traffic rate in America, you can basically do anything, from a road ecology standpoint. It's true that P-22 suffered a horrific fate, but his life is going to end up transforming U.S. infrastructure.
Despite our current relative stability, historians know that human migration has always been part of our story. As we consider the effects of climate change, should we be considering human migration and the ways roads will help or hinder that process?
For both humans and animals, the future is going to require a lot more mobility. From wildlife's perspective, climate change is already a huge driver of range shifts. We see that with moose that are moving north onto the tundra because of tick overpopulation in places like Vermont. So animals are already shifting their range, and humans are going to have to do the same thing.
There's an obvious parallel between humans and wildlife, when it comes to climate migration, but roads--as always--facilitate human movement and deny animal movement. That's a big part of why wildlife crossings are important. They help animals get from one habitat to another as needed.
You cite E.O. Wilson's concept of the Eremocene, "the age of loneliness, a near and desolate future in which humankind bestrides an empty world, or perhaps drives over it." Will we care if wildlife disappears?
Your question is really getting to one of the paradoxes of cars and roads, which is that they're both a way of accessing nature. There's a fascinating tension in the way the car has historically facilitated both conservation and destruction. All of our national parks are fundamentally spaces for car camping and auto tourism and road trips, and in that sense, the car has been a force of conservation. Cars are a way that we enter natural spaces. And yet, they are destroying those same natural spaces in really profound ways. Ultimately, they are one of the things separating us from nature. You're sitting in your little sealed compartment, racing along at 70 miles an hour, and you often don't notice the world around you.
That's another one of the ironies of cars. The unnatural speed of the car both obliterates animal life and then conceals that same obliteration by preventing us from noticing all the lives we're taking. Maybe that's one answer to your questions--one way to reconnect with nature is just to get out of our cars. --Sara Beth West