Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet

by Ben Goldfarb

The automobile struck critics as not only dangerous but depraved. The moment that “the foot touches the accelerator and the hand grasps the wheel,” chided one reporter, law-abiding citizens “become afflicted with the gas rabies.”

Utter extinction, the fate that befell the passenger pigeon and the Carolina parakeet, is a concept universally understood, as clean as a broken bone. A species existed; now it’s gone. But the gradual ebbing of abundance strains language. Some researchers have called such losses defaunation; others know it as biological annihilation. The biologist E. O. Wilson favored Eremocene: the age of loneliness, a near and desolate future in which humankind bestrides an empty world, or perhaps drives over it.

The chief irony of biological annihilation is this: we are both its cause and its solution. We so thoroughly dominate the earth that our conservation interventions, too, are necessarily heavy-handed.

Decommissioning just 1 percent of Forest Service roads each year for a quarter-century, scientists have calculated, would increase wildlife habitat by around 25 percent.

I thought of all those tourists resenting other tourists for contaminating their solitude and remembered the rush-hour cliché: You don’t get stuck in traffic. You are traffic.

Fossil fuels consume the roads on which we burn them, a global-warming ouroboros.

Conservationists and construction companies made for axiomatic enemies. Yet the imperative of climate adaptation had forced environmentalists into an unfamiliar position—advocates of building things, not just of stopping them from being built.

Historically, animal-rights advocates have focused on “negative rights,” like the right not to be killed, tortured, or confined: basically, the things we shouldn’t do to animals. But what about our positive obligations, the actions we should take on animals’ behalf? To some scholars those may include “design[ing] our buildings, roads, and neighborhoods in a way that takes into account animals’ needs.”

Most Belt and Road projects are funded by Chinese state banks that, unlike international lenders such as the World Bank, don’t require recipients to protect biodiversity.

When I-94 punched through St. Paul in the 1960s, it cost the community of Rondo $157 million in home equity—enough missing wealth to purchase a college degree for every Black child in the county.