Crossings Quotes

“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.”
― Ben Goldfarb, Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet

“Cars turned streets into war zones.”
― Ben Goldfarb, Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet

“For centuries urban streets had been nodes of activity and commerce, as much bazaars as conduits. Yes, they were the province of carriages and electric streetcars. But they were also where kids played ball and shined shoes, where vendors flogged vegetables, where pedestrians loitered and gossiped.”
― Ben Goldfarb, Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet

“Like many Americans, he judged the automobile a disruptive and fearsome technology. By the 1920s cars had claimed tens of thousands of human lives, frayed social contracts, and demoted pedestrians to second-class citizens.”
― Ben Goldfarb, Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet

“In the mid-1990s the Florida panther, a cougar subspecies that roams the Southeast’s cypress swamps, had suffered its own brush with extinction. After decades of development and roadkill cut the panther’s population to around thirty animals, the survivors had no choice but to breed with their relatives, and genetic anomalies cropped up. Some mutations, like kinked tails and cowlicked fur, were benign. Others were life-threatening. More than 60 percent of males developed undescended testicles, and 20 percent of all panthers suffered atrial septal defects—holes in the walls of their heart. After biologists introduced eight female lions from Texas, the defects abated, and the panther’s numbers ticked upward.”
― Ben Goldfarb, Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet

“Traffic’s moving fence deterred animals from crossing between populations, and cars crushed would-be lovers who dared the trip. By stymieing life’s most fundamental act, highways scrawled their signature into its molecular code. In Switzerland roads distorted the genes of species from roe deer to bank voles; in the Mojave Desert they pared the genetic diversity of bighorn sheep. In the Northern Rockies grizzly populations are so disunited by highways that researchers can tell, from the merest snippet of DNA, on which side of which road any bear was born. Abax parallelepipedus, a flightless European beetle, disperses so feebly that biologists once found a genetically distinct population encircled by a highway exit loop.”
― Ben Goldfarb, Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet