https://undark.org/2023/10/13/book-review-crossings/
"BOOK REVIEW — “Crossings How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our
Planet,” by Ben Goldfarb (W. W. Norton & Company, 384 pages).
Ours is a time of what environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb describes as an
“infrastructure tsunami.” The automobile reigns supreme and civilization’s
appetite for new roads appears insatiable. There are about 40 million miles of
roadways in the world, Goldfarb writes, and our collective future will bring
many more cars and the need for even more roads. But the environmental and
social costs of this tsunami are almost unimaginable.
A few examples: Roadways have helped bring about an “insect apocalypse” by
squashing billions of pollinators on windshields each year; the misery and
violence of countless roadkill; salmon population collapse by acting as
impediments to migration; and the genocide of the Indigenous people in the
Amazon by enabling logging and accompanying societal disruption.
One way people deal with these costs is to anesthetize themselves to reality.
To Goldfarb’s credit, his absorbing, highly intelligent book “Crossings: How
Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet” gently shakes us awake from
our ethical torpor and helps us confront the conservation problem we perpetrate
each time we get behind the wheel, accept a package, or use public
transportation.
Goldfarb details how roads have created a “vast cauldron of unintentional
experimentation” by tinkering with both evolution and society. They also
birthed a new scientific field known as road ecology, the study of how roads
affect the lives of plants and animals. Starting in the 1920s, a handful of
foresters and biologists pioneered the field when they took an interest in the
impact of automobiles on wildlife, Goldfarb writes, traveling America’s new
highway systems and counting the dead."
Via Muse.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
