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

by Ben Goldfarb

Roads pose the same queasy conundrum as climate change: having profited wildly from growth, can wealthy nations deny less-developed countries the benefits of connectivity?

Wildlife crossings, with rare exceptions, have become one of the country’s few truly bipartisan environmental interventions, equally beloved by hunters and the Humane Society.

They hadn’t been hunted into oblivion or squeezed out by development; they simply needed more room than protected areas afforded.

By 2030 cities will surface nearly 10 percent of the planet; if wild animals are to survive, they and humans must learn to cohabitate.

“The idea that roads actually have effects on populations, I don’t think that was on anybody’s radar at all.”

Sure enough, the busiest roads had the poorest remnant amphibian communities. Given enough time and traffic, roadkill could indeed diminish a population, even extirpate it.

Eremocene: the age of loneliness, a near and desolate future in which humankind bestrides an empty world, or perhaps drives over

chelonophiles

EcoPassage’s completion, sightings trickled in—saw number 137 nesting in the neighborhood—like postcards from forgotten friends. When a trapper found a tag in an alligator’s stomach, even that was a comfort: proof that turtles were again playing every part in Lake Jackson’s ecological drama.

“I never sought to be a frog rescuer—I never even had a particular affinity for frogs,” a frog-mover named Shawn Looney told me. “I just couldn’t … not do 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. We introduce exotic species, then stamp them out; we poison California condors and breed them in captivity; we drain the planet’s wetlands and excavate ersatz ones.

Although the Forest Service refers to its holdings as “Lands of Many Uses,” it might be more accurate to call them Lands of Many Roads.

Decades after their haphazard construction, America’s forest roads have become proxy battlegrounds in a cultural war: What are public lands for, and who gets to decide?

Is the highest purpose of a forest to be wilderness or a source of timber?

Should federal agencies determine how forests are managed, or should local governments—which usually favor industry over preservation and...

The Forest Service’s quasi-military approach to firefighting

Often, the Forest Service paid timber companies to build roads on its behalf, “essentially trad[ing] national forest trees for a forest transportation system,” as the geographer David Havlick put it. “Some loggers admit that they make their profits only on building roads, losing money on the trees,” one ex–Forest Service employee charged.

any roadless block of public land that measured at least five thousand contiguous acres. For all the lofty rhetoric that attended it, wilderness was defined by a material absence—the absence of roads.

What was true for elk also held for bears, wolves, and bull trout. More than any other factor, roads—or their lack—determined whether animals would survive in peace or be rousted by humans. This was a profound discovery and a disturbing one.

After a year of bombardment, Clinton caved. The administration instituted the Roadless Rule, a policy that permanently secured the national forest system’s large, unroaded blocks of land. Disgruntled lobbyists fought it, and the Bush administration tried to undo it, but the rule endured and today protects nearly sixty million acres of roadless forest. The Roadless Rule represented both a management change and an ideological one. When Congress foisted the Wilderness Act on the Forest Service decades earlier, the agency had to be dragged along.

Ugh and now undone

The Nez Perce Tribe, the land’s ancestral stewards, joined the effort as an equal partner, contributing money and personnel. The result was not initially lovely—one visitor called it “as ugly as a war zone”—but the sites recovered fast. By 2005 more than five hundred road miles had been expunged from the Clearwater’s network.

Roads, and their absence, changed the land and the meaning of the land—changed who and what it was for.

At one point during my visit to the Clearwater, Connor, Lloyd, and Forestieri took me to Packer Meadows, a lovely, sunlit grassland near a mountain pass. The Nez Perce have gathered at Packer Meadows for millennia to harvest camas, whose edible, onion-shaped bulbs are among the tribe’s traditional staples. In the 1930s the Forest Service drilled a road through the area, which diverted a stream and dried up the meadows, to the tribe’s displeasure. Nonetheless, the agency has declined to demolish the road. “The Forest Service believes the road itself is a cultural resource,” Forestieri said. “What is its cultural value?” I asked. Lloyd shrugged. “That it’s old,” she said. Forestieri, who worked for the Nez Perce, added, tongue half in cheek, “And built by white people.”

Roads as history, as legacy, as proof of our presence: this, too, explains our attachment.

It’s also a fiction: how can any place remain untrammeled when climate change is trammeling everything?

America’s windshield wilderness had extended acoustic pollution into its best-protected places.

think all of our work is pointing towards this: the best way to preserve quiet habitat for wildlife is to not build the damn road,” Barber told me. “And once you do, you’re in big trouble.”

The combination of Roundup and ethanol wiped out thirty million acres of milkweed between 1996 and 2013, an interval that coincided with an 84 percent decline in the monarch population. Come winter, flocks that once blanketed dozens of acres of fir forest shivered on a few trees. The insect apocalypse had come for the monarch butterfly.

Roadsides were many things at once—infrastructure, aesthetic spaces, habitat—competing interests that hung in delicate balance.

Humans have always coveted salt, a commodity so precious that Roman soldiers were paid in it, the etymology of salary.

Besides, Snell-Rood pointed out, monarchs will use highwaysides whether we want them to or not. Instead of asking whether roads were “good” or “bad,” the better question was how to improve them.

Reminds me of drug/sex worker discussions

from cosmos to pavement.

In truth, no one decomposes alone.

The necrobiome airbrushes our roadsides, camouflaging a crisis by devouring it.

I had become accustomed to thinking of wildlife crossings as a form of ecological empathy, an expression of concern for the creatures who used them. When I spoke to Charlene Krise, she pointed out that roads had also severed reciprocal human relationships. Replacing culverts was not merely ecological restoration; it was environmental justice—a means of remedying, or beginning to remedy, more than 150 years of state-sponsored inequity. “Tribal people use salmon as an analogy of our life—you know, you go through a lot of struggle in your lifetime,” Krise said. “And sometimes that means throwing yourself up onto some jagged rock or getting tangled up in some roots and getting yourself free. You have to be like that salmon. You have to know what your destination is.”

In Washington each humble pipe carried the weight of colonialism, civil disobedience, and perseverance against deferred justice.

The curse of culverts—like dams and power lines, gas mains and fiber-optic cables—is that they only cross our minds when they fail.

Today, however, infrastructure no longer has the luxury of invisibility. Climate change has destabilized systems that were never stable to begin with. Storm surges claw at levees and seawalls. Wildfires erupt from power lines. Floods overwhelm sewage plants.

Tree-sits were out, residential solar panels in. Even the Sierra Club had recently put forth a $6 trillion infrastructure proposal. The Salmon SuperHighway was a manifestation of that trend: a climate-sensitive conservation plan that embraced infrastructure rather than fighting it, a stimulus for people and planet.

there may be nothing humans do that causes more misery to more wild animals than driving. In

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?

Marsupials are lactose intolerant and require special formula; a few die every year when novice carers feed them cow’s milk.

Carer, it occurred to me, was a beautiful word, one that captured the tender reality of animal work—the bottle-feeding, the bum-wiping, the relationship-building—better than rehabilitator, with its connotations of incarceration and addiction.

To many Tasmanians, by contrast, roadkill is anesthetizing: a problem so prevalent that it no longer looks like a problem.

Species are devalued by their own commonness. (Would you be more upset at crushing a squirrel or a lynx?)

Most carers have experienced compassion fatigue—a condition, popularized in the 1990s by a psychologist named Charles Figley, that describes the suffering of therapists, nurses, social workers, and others exposed to their patients’ pain.

In some ways caring reminded me of those sappy viral stories in which a person makes a dramatic personal sacrifice to patch a hole in the social safety net: the son who opens a lemonade stand to pay for his mother’s chemotherapy, the diabetic who crowdfunds his insulin. We force individuals to bear the weight of societal failure, then celebrate their resolve. It’s wonderful that wildlife carers exist. It would be better if infrastructure rendered them obsolete.

landscape immunity”—the notion that fewer zoonotic diseases spill from intact, diverse ecosystems than from fragmented, species-poor ones. And no force compromises immunity quite like a highway. “If you want to prevent pandemics, you have to think about roads,” Tabor told me.† In the Amazon, highway construction not only brought disease; it spelled genocide.

“The more I researched it, the more outraged I became,”