Book review of Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet, by Ben Goldfarb
Although I don’t work in road ecology or traffic engineering, the author somehow pulled me through 300 pages on this topic. He managed this not just through vivid language and diction, but by personally visiting places and telling stories about the specific challenges that animals, “carers,” forest service workers, and others faced as freeways and highways bisected and dissected their environments.
On a more personal level, reading the book made me want to check out some crossings myself, especially the ones mentioned near Snoqualmie Pass in the book’s closing chapter that are close to my home. Animal crossing structures aren’t something I’ve even noticed during my last 30 years of driving. I’d like to find a map that shows where all the crossings are (though public availability of these maps might be counterproductive to their purpose).
In this book review, I’ll comment on a few salient themes in Goldfarb’s book: the impact of autonomous vehicles, roads as vectors for human infiltration, challenges in solving the animal crossing problem, and roads as tools for community displacement.
- Impact of autonomous vehicles
- Roads as vectors for human infiltration
- Solving the animal crossing problem
- Roads as tools for community displacement
- Conclusion
- Other book reviews
Impact of autonomous vehicles
Goldfarb’s section on autonomous vehicles caught my attention more than others since I work in tech. The author explores how AVs, specifically Waymo and Tesla, might impact animal crossings negatively. He wonders not just how AVs might react to animals in their path (will they slow, swerve, even detect, plow on through?) but also on the possibility of AV sensors being used to catalog roadkill as a kind of “participatory science” project.
Just like OpenStreetMap could be considered a form of participatory cartography, these AVs could be engaged in a similar participatory science through roadkill cataloging. Goldfarb writes, “It isn’t outlandish to suggest that AVs will become the most ingenious road-ecology tools ever devised, a roving squadron of automated scientists perpetually uploading terabytes of real-time data about the animals, dead and alive, with those paths they cross” (242). Many AVs have dozens of sensors—enough to pull in terabytes of data if they wanted. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much of a business justification by AV companies for doing so.
Goldfarb says that Waze used to have a button that allowed users to report roadkills. “After Israel added a roadkill button to the traffic app Waze, drivers reported twelve thousand animals within six months” (235). Now, Waze just allows users to report “hazards.” Even with the more general “hazards,” I’m a fan of participatory data collection on the roads — so many cars could contribute sensor-gathered information this way. It would be interesting to know just how many deer, raccoons, porcupines, cats, and other animals are killed by cars each year.
Goldfarb notes that roadkill allows biologists to autopsy the dead animals, which then reveals a lot more about the animal in ways that wouldn’t otherwise be available (since you can’t just randomly autopsy animals in the wild). These autopsies help biologists understand what’s happening with animal populations, especially from roads (for example, whether animal populations are dwindling or thriving, etc.).
Goldfarb also argues that AVs might actually increase the amount of roadkill, especially if autonomous delivery trucks operate through the night. These delivery trucks will likely increase long-distance traffic on dark roads when human drivers might not be on the roads. “Liberated from drivers,” Goldfarb writes, “autonomous trucks will have no compunctions about prowling the highways at night, and darkness, once a reprieve for wildlife, will become as dangerous as daylight. Far from ushering in a halcyon, roadkill-less era, AVs could be the gravest challenge to road ecology since, well, roads” (244). In other words, free from the constraints of human drivers, the delivery trucks might run more continuously and frequently, even at non-business hours that animals once considered safe.
Fortunately, most AVs stick to controlled, well-mapped, urban-centric roads. The idea that AVs roam rural roads in deep farm country is a fantasy that has eluded the best technologists trying to make it happen. However, AV trucks completing long, dull stretches of freeways is a much closer reality.
Goldfarb argues that AVs could distance humans from the outside world, allowing its passengers to focus on other matters while the AV drives them. AV passengers will be less engaged with the external world as they turn their focus and attention on social media or laptop work during their AV-driven commutes. In this view, Goldfarb aligns closely with Matthew Crawford in his book, Why We Drive (which I reviewed here).
AVs will likely push commuters farther into suburban communities. Goldfarb says, “Autonomy—in tandem with electrification, which will make driving cheaper and thus encourage more of it—might turn out to be a suburban carcinogen that triggers metastatic sprawl” (244). Imagine climbing into your car, still half asleep, to complete a three-hour morning commute along a long stretch of highway into the city. You could sleep while the AV drives you to your work’s doorstep, oblivious to all the animals your AV squished or killed along the way.
Roads as vectors for human infiltration
Let’s move past AVs to get to the heart of the book. More than anything, Goldfarb persuaded me to see roads in a different light. Although cars and roads are typically seen as a means of mobility and freedom (especially in movies), they present the opposite to animals: they restrict and lock down movement, creating barriers that imprison them within specific geographic confines. Goldfarb writes, “If you’re a Kerouac reader, you grew up steeped in the dogma that highways represent freedom. If you’re a grizzly bear, they might as well be prison walls” (4).
Roads carve up previously open spaces, change animal habitats, pollute the land (especially from toxic tire particles), and more than anything else, usher in an influx of humans. This human layer that’s coating and transforming the earth with human-created artifacts — the concrete roads, factories and buildings, landfills, reshaped land,etc. — is all part of the Anthropocene.
Goldfarb says that after the Forest Service learned about the environmental changes the Anthropocene brings, it did an about-face with their massive access roads projects. The Forest Service initially built an abundance of forest roads to provide better access for fire control, maintenance, and other monitoring. They built enormous numbers of access roads—”Although few of its roads show up in your Rand McNally atlas,” he says, “it’s almost certainly the U.S. Forest Service—not the Federal Highway Administration, not the Chinese Ministry of Transport—that is the largest road manager on earth. You could make it to the moon on Forest Service roads, and most of the way back” (115).
However, Forest Service workers later realized that these access roads devastated the wildlife. Access roads allowed hunters, four-wheelers, and large numbers of people to infiltrate these areas. In short, “Where roads perforated the woods, motorists followed” (120). Forest Service officials later decommissioned many roads, letting them rewild with closed access. Goldfarb notes, “Decommissioning just 1 percent off Forest Service roads each year for a quarter-century, scientists have calculated, would increase wildlife habitat by around 25 percent” (132). I’d never considered that a road alone could trigger so much negative environmental impact.
Solving the animal crossing problem
A running narrative in Goldfarb’s book is how to solve the crossing problem. A grizzly acts differently from an ungulate (e.g., deer), which acts differently from “herps” (snakes, lizards, toads, etc.) or other animals like capybaras and mice, which also behave differently than cougars, etc. There are also fish, especially salmon. To accommodate all their movements, do you provide an overpass or underpass? Do you build a bright, visible crossing or a long, dark tunnel? How do fences guide animals to the crossings? How should culverts be designed? Further, how do you measure animal use of the crossings to determine their success?
Animals often roam to survive. If a deer can’t cross a highway to graze on greener grass, it might starve. Yet if it attempts to cross, it could be killed. How many cars per minute go by is a measure of the road’s danger. Goldfarb notes, “When cars rolled by every thirty seconds or less, deer refused to cross, or were killed or nearly killed, when they did. When the gap exceeded a minute, they usually made it without incident” (49). When a road exceeds 10,000 cars per day, it’s a real barrier to nearly every type of animal. Thus, when determining whether to build a crossing, you have to assess how much of a barrier the road is due to its traffic flow, as well as the animals attempting to cross it.
Another challenge is funding: How do you seriously fund crossing infrastructure that might cost millions for seemingly insignificant toads or other creatures? How do we deprioritize human needs to spend millions on a mice tunnel under a highway? Bills that fund these efforts become targets of political ridicule and a symbol of wasteful spending.
Roads as tools for community displacement
Beyond analyzing the impact on animals (like mountain lions, grizzlies, and ungulates), Goldfarb looks at how roads have displaced and affected human populations, mostly minority groups.
Goldfarb says roads were often used as government or state tools to remove slums and other poor neighborhoods — for example, building freeways through lower economic areas where minorities lived as a way to clear them out. This clearing through road building devastated the economic vitality of the regions and introduced health hazards — spiking asthma for those alongside freeways, increasing stress and hypertension through higher decibel levels, and so on.
Home loan programs also restricted loans to people living in risk-averse neighborhoods (where congestion-heavy roads crossed), thus denying home equity to blacks and reducing their ability to build wealth across generations. In this way, roads took on a more malicious purpose, becoming a tool for the displacement of undesirable communities. If you don’t like something, you build a road through it.
In many places, expressways that once cleaved cities and created traffic walls have been torn down. In Seattle, the previous Alaskan Way Viaduct was replaced with the Alaskan Tunnel (which I regularly drive through). With cars moving below ground, the impact is much less than a freeway along the waterfront that creates noise, pollution, and access barriers, especially to the water.
Converting freeways into tunnels requires an expensive infrastructure redo, but most people realize they don’t want a freeway dividing their cities. If the negative impacts of freeways are apparent to the humans who live there, enough to spend billions removing them, consider how animals must view the same structures dividing their lands.
Conclusion
Overall, Goldfarb’s book on road ecology helps outsiders like me become aware of road ecology, including crossings and other necessary infrastructure. As a final strategy for reducing the impact of roads, Goldfarb recommends they function as “visitors” in the areas they’re built (296).
When you lay down a road, it changes the land at a fundamental level. “Roads, and their absence, changed the land and the meaning of the land — changed who and what it was for,” Goldberg says (128). Roads are basically vectors for the Anthropocene, enabling humans to penetrate environments and radically transform those environments with free-flowing access and surrounding construction. The fewer the roads, the more freedom and vitality animal life will have.
Other book reviews
Here are some other good book reviews to read for Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet:
- Book review – Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet, by the Inquisitive Biologist
- How Our Roads Hurt Us and Everything Around Us, by Emily Raboteau (NYTimes)
About Tom Johnson
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