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

by Ben Goldfarb

Journalists bemoaned the proliferation of “road hogs,” “speed maniacs,” “Sunday drivers,” “juggernauts,” and the dreaded “flivverboob,” the epithet for an inconsiderate motorist. 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.”

Cities seemed to compete over which could stage the most lugubrious anti-car demonstrations. Memphis planted black flags at accident sites. Baltimore erected an obelisk inscribed with the names of dead children, while St. Louis built a cherub-festooned monument titled “In Memory of Child Life Sacrificed upon the Altar of Haste and Recklessness.” In Pittsburgh, a “safety parade” included a float depicting a girl crushed between cars. A demonstration in Milwaukee incorporated a trashed automobile on a trailer: behind the wheel sat Satan himself.

maybe we should bring these back?

Deer preoccupy road ecologists even more than they do suburban mayors. Unlike, say, black bears, deer are so abundant they cause crashes almost constantly; a deer meets a car every eight minutes in New York State alone.

Among all these animals, mule deer are unsurpassed cartographic geniuses. In most mobile species, migration knowledge is hardwired. Songbirds track the stars; some moths sense magnetic fields. Deer, however, learn to migrate, cultivating mental maps as they tail their mothers from winter range to summer pasture. Whereas other ungulates stray widely, mule deer remain faithful to their inherited pathways. Deer migration isn’t merely a movement pattern but a form of culture, transmitted from doe to fawn like family lore. And when roads thwart their treks, the loss is as thorough as the erasure of a language.

It seemed an injustice that such a wondrous fish could be denied fulfillment by an object as banal as a culvert. Nothing could be more mundane than a road, or more sacred than the beings that swim beneath it.

When the Indian government constructed a new highway through a tiger reserve in 2019, for instance, it elevated the road on concrete pillars, permitting animals to wander the forest floor unperturbed. “We think we’re such leaders,” one American ecologist told me. “And then you go to India and you’re, like, wait—they’re just going to lift the highway?”

Absent intervention, it was easy to imagine the former 15th Ward being colonized by fast-casual food chains, luxury condos, and urban development’s other weedy pioneer species. “I’m realistic enough to know that it won’t be shiny happy people holding hands and dancing in a circle after we knock down this barrier,” Driscoll said. And it wasn’t just the land immediately beneath the viaduct at issue. Replacing a hideous, polluting freeway with a pedestrian-friendly boulevard, many locals feared, would shock property values around the city, accelerate gentrification, and precipitate what one columnist called “Negro Removal 2.0.” You could yank a knife from a patient’s heart and still watch him bleed to death.

Among the pandemic’s surprising effects was how ruthlessly it exposed the rot in America’s status quo: its broken politics, its inadequate health care, its cultish individualism.

What could be more American than blaming deep-rooted problems on individual failings rather than corporate power structures?

By all means, slow down at night, brake for snakes, and shepherd salamanders across the pavement. Yet making roads lie lighter on the land isn’t the job of individual drivers any more than swapping out light bulbs will solve climate change. Instead, it’s a public works project, one of history’s most colossal. Like