Author Interview: Ben Goldfarb on Road Ecology
Author Ben Goldfarb Author Photo: Terray Sylvester
Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of our Planet, Ben Goldfarb, W.W. Norton, 2023, 384 pages.
Finalist: Reading the West Book Award in Nonfiction, Shortlisted for the New York Public Library's 2024 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, New York Times Notable Book of 2023, and an Editors' Choice, Booklist Top 10 Book on the Environment & Sustainability for 2024
Ben, it is an honor to visit with you about Crossings! Thank you for sharing your thoughts with our readers.
You cite quite a few community science projects that have resulted in a greater understanding of animals, road ecology, and infrastructure solutions. They sound like fun experiences for volunteers--projects supporting toad and salamander tunnels, Project Splatter, the Otter Project, Wildlife Connectivity Project, Monarch Watch, and the Harborton Frog Shuttle. What were some of your favorite volunteer projects? Do you have any advice for readers who want to find a project near them? How can volunteers get involved?
You named many of the great ones! More than perhaps any other field, road ecology is ripe for participatory science. As drivers, we’re all part of the problem, both by killing animals and by exacerbating the highway’s barrier effect. But we’re also potentially part of the solution. Every dead animal, however tragic, is a data point, and, by recording the species and location of the carcasses we pass, we can help government agencies identify roadkill hotspots and ideally address them. Many states, from Maine to Utah to Idaho, have volunteer roadkill data collection programs, and in California, the state has drawn upon UC Davis’s Roadkill Observation System to locate some wildlife crossings. And even if kneeling over corpses isn’t your thing, you can still participate in this issue by contacting your elected representatives and supporting those groups, like the Wildlands Network and the Center for Large Landscape Conservation, that advocate for habitat connectivity. Roadkill prevention is a fundamentally nonpartisan issue that’s easy for politicians of all stripes to support, but they always need a push from their constituents.
A key point in Crossings is the presence of roads interrupting migration and the ability of animals to wander freely. Road speeds and the density of traffic affects species differently, so a solution for one species won’t necessarily work for another, making a single solution for all species impossible. You write that pedestrian studies are the sister science to road ecology and note Sandra Jacobson’s insightful work on animals’ reactions to roads. Citing Jacobson’s work, as a pedestrian, are you a non-responder (like a leopard frog, who hops across no matter the traffic), a pauser (like a porcupine or skunk), an avoider (grizzly bear), or a speeder (deer)?
Ha! I think most humans, like deer, are speeders — we wait for gaps in traffic, then quickly scurry across. (Of course, on a car-dominated planet, this strategy isn’t always effective, whether you’re a hominid or an ungulate: More than seven thousand American pedestrians, and upwards of a million deer, are killed by cars every year.) But there’s a key difference between our two speeder species. Humans have excellent depth perception and an intimate familiarity with cars; therefore, we’re comfortable darting through gaps between vehicles that last only a few seconds. Deer, by contrast, are poor judges of speed with little comprehension of cars; as a result, the ecologist Corinna Riginos has found, they need gaps of more than a minute to safely and reliably cross. Few U.S. highways have such sparse traffic and when vehicular walls are too dense for deer to reliably penetrate, they can lose access to their winter range and other valuable habitats, and even starve as a result. Being a speeder is therefore dangerous in two respects: It’s perilous both to race through traffic, and to avoid crossing altogether. It’s tough out there for us speeders!
At the end of the introduction, you write Crossings “also considers how our own lives have been captured by pavement and how we can reclaim them.” How has this book altered your own life and your relationship to roads and vehicles?
Well, that’s difficult to say. I’ve tried to be a better citizen of our paved planet: forgoing my car in favor of transit and bicycle more often, driving slower and more cautiously, shepherding tarantulas and rattlesnakes off highways. Yet I’m still overly reliant on my car; I’ve probably driven 10,000 miles in the last seven months to promote my book about, uh, the ills of driving. I think one of this book’s chief lessons is that it’s extremely difficult to get people to voluntarily change their behavior; we can no more solve roadkill by insisting that Americans stop driving than we can prevent climate change by swapping out our lightbulbs. Instead, the solution is to modify our infrastructure itself: Let’s dramatically improve our public transit options, remove obsolete roads on public lands where we can, and build more wildlife crossings everywhere. The task and opportunity before us is to remake our built environment to save biodiversity — no pressure, right?
Sound also affects animals, and road noise equals habitat loss. You write that the Phantom Road Experiment became a landmark road study, playing freeway sounds on the remote Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park revealed a “shadow” three miles wide. Being a closed system, national parks can experiment with vehicle plans to reduce the impact of sound on animals--fighting noise pollution while preserving the wilderness experience. Do we, as park visitors, need to reframe our experiences to better accommodate the needs of wildlife?
Nearly since their inception, national parks have been fundamentally automotive spaces — “windshield wildernesses,” in the memorable phrasing of the historian David Louter. (One of the Park Service’s earliest boosters was the American Automobile Association, which wanted to give people more iconic places to drive.) Today the road trip to a national park — Glacier or Grand Canyon, Yellowstone or Yosemite, North Cascades or Crater Lake — is an archetypal experience, as American as a certain fruit-based pastry. But, as the Phantom Road experiment and other research have revealed, our vehicular approach to tourism also wreaks havoc on the very wildlife parks were created, at least in part, to protect. I’d love to see more parks — heck, every western park — transition to a shuttle system, a la Denali and Zion. Why not abandon our personal cars at park entrances and let these scenic sanctuaries remain free from the plague of traffic? One of the lovely things about Denali National Park’s famous bus system is that it provides a communal experience, in which riders are engaged in the common quest of scanning the hillsides for wildlife. Let’s allow parks to be those rare places that we visit together, rather than sealed in our metallic shells.
You write that at the beginning of your work on Crossings, you carried “a sort of scientific imperialism” that more developed nations could export their ecological engineering to the developing world. Through your research, you’ve found “less-developed” countries with innovative approaches to both infrastructure and the use of roads, that may be a source of hope. Can you share some of your favorites?
Here in the U.S., we built our major highways in the mid-twentieth century, before we properly understood their ecological harms. Fortunately, other countries can learn from our mistakes and construct their infrastructure properly from the get-go. Nepal, Kenya, and Myanmar are among the countries that are actively including wildlife over- and underpasses in new highways. India elevated one highway on concrete pillars for about ten miles, allowing tigers and other animals to wander the forest floor unimpeded. In Brazil, I visited a road that was deliberately built with lots of hairpin turns and dips, forcing motorists to drive slowly for animals’ sake. Although these and other case studies are promising signs of progress, I’d hasten to add that many countries — the U.S. certainly included — are racing to build new roads with little environmental review and few safeguards. As the ecologist William Laurance has observed, our planet is being swept by an “Infrastructure Tsunami” that threatens to scour away biodiversity. The fate of wildlife on this planet may depend on whether we learn to construct roads smarter, slower, and, most importantly, less frequently.
Visit Ben Goldfarb’s website: www.bengoldfarb.com
Ben Goldfarb is an independent conservation journalist. He’s the author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future of Our Planet, named one of the best books of 2023 by the New York Times, and Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, winner of the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.