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

by Ben Goldfarb

road ecology, defined loosely as the study of how “life change[s] for plants and animals with a road and traffic nearby.”*

Huijser, it occurred to me, was attempting to inhabit other beings’ Umwelt, their subjective lived experience.

Cars have made deer North America’s most dangerous wild animal, implicated in three times more deaths than wasps and bees, forty times more than snakes, and four hundred times more than sharks.

This means, incredibly, that no individual monarch experiences the species’ entire life cycle. The butterfly I saw dancing through traffic in Minnesota was likely third generation: her grandparents had gone to Mexico and her offspring would as well, but she would never lay her compound eyes on monarch Valhalla herself. I found something poignant in that—this poor parochial butterfly churning out caterpillars in her corner of the Midwest, her existence brief and utilitarian, living in service to her glamorous, adventurous children.

What made that a story? Replied the world’s kindest man, “Because whenever people come together to help either another person or another creature, something has happened, and everyone wants to know about it—because we all long to know that there’s a graciousness at the heart of creation.” We may yearn for grace, but we don’t extend it to wild animals.

Deer collisions have historically surged after Daylight Saving Time ends each autumn: when clocks “fall back,” dusk arrives at around 5:00 p.m., rush hour for both commuters and whitetails. Enacting permanent DST, researchers have calculated, would prevent enough nighttime driving to spare the lives of thirty-three drivers and some thirty-six thousand deer every year.