Santa Barbara
Permaculture Network presents
Booksigning & Talk CROSSINGS -Ben Goldfarb
How Road Ecology is Shaping The Future of our Planet
TUESDAY OCT 24 6:30-8:30pm
Santa Barbara Community Council (CEC) Environmental Hub FREE
1219 State St
Santa Barbara, CA 93101
Road ecology is the study of how roads and other forms of transportation infrastructure affect nature
An eye-opening and witty account of the global ecological transformations wrought by roads, from the award-winning rauthor of Eager: The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter
Some 40 million miles of roadways encircle the earth, yet we tend to regard them only as infrastructure for human convenience.
While roads are so ubiquitous they’re practically invisible to us, wild animals
experience them as entirely alien forces of death and disruption .
In Crossings, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb travels throughout the United States and around the world to investigate how roads have transformed our planet. A million animals are killed by cars each day in the U.S. alone, but as the new science of road ecology shows, the harms of highways extend far beyond roads
Creatures from antelope to salmon are losing their ability to migrate in search of food and mates invasive plants hitch rides in tire treads road salt contaminates lakes and rivers and the very noise of traffic chases songbirds from vast swaths of habitat.
yet road ecologists are also seeking to blunt the destruction through innovative solutions. Goldfarb meets with conservationists building bridges for California’s mountain lions and tunnels for English toads engineers deconstructing the labyrinth of logging roads that web national forests animal rehabbers caring for Tasmania’s car-orphaned wallabies and community organizers working to undo the havoc highways have wreaked upon American cities.Today as our planet’s road network continues to grow exponentially the science of road ecology has become increasingly vital. Written with passion and curiosity Crossings is a sweeping spirited and timely investigation into how humans have altered the natural world—and how we can create a better future for all living beings
A Community Event Hosted by Santa Barbara
Permaculture Network
www.sbpermaculture.org
Cosponsors- CEC Community Environmental Council and
Sustainable
World Radio RESOURCES
FACEBOOK PEVENT PAGE
https://www.facebook.com/855792232796516/
RESOURCES
Ben Goldfarb website
https://www.bengoldfarb.com/
How Roads Have Transformed the Natural World
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-roads-have-transformed-the-natural-world-180982809/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_term=952023&utm_content=new
PODCAST Fresh Air interviews Ben Goldfarb How Roads & Highways Affect Wildlife
https://www.npr.org/2023/09/26/1197954444/fresh-air-draft-09-26-2023
Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing
https://annenberg.org/initiatives/wallis-annenberg-wildlife-crossing/
The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing is a public-private partnership of monumental scope that has leveraged the expertise and leadership of dozens of organizations and institutions to protect and restore wildlife habitats in Southern California.
EXCERPT Interview
Crossings’ details how roads impact wildlife in Washington and beyond
What is road ecology? Why does it matter?
Road ecology is the study of how roads and other forms of transportation infrastructure affect nature. And I think the reason that it matters is that roads are among the worst forms of ecological disruption that we inflict on nature. We take them for granted because they’re such a part of our daily lives. We don’t think about them in the same terms that we think about climate change or dams on rivers or poaching wildlife.
How did you get interested in road ecology?
In the fall of 2013, I was working as a reporter writing about habitat connectivity and wildlife in the Northern Rockies — Montana, Wyoming, British Columbia and Alberta. I got a tour of a wildlife overpass on Highway 93, north of Missoula on the Flathead Indian Reservation. And it was just getting on top of this old wildlife overpass, this bridge that was specially built to allow grizzly bears and elk and other creatures to safely navigate this really busy federal highway. And there’s just something so beautiful about that — the fact that humans were going to such great lengths to undo some of the harms we’d inflicted.
I found that really powerful and moving. I also just found it to be a great intellectual challenge. We’re so accustomed to building infrastructure for ourselves. How do we build infrastructure for animals? How do you know what kind of overpass or underpass a
deer or a cougar or a coyote might find appealing? We have to think like an animal in some ways.
What are some of the assumptions you had about road ecology going into the book, and what were some of the biggest things that surprised you?
I think that the primary assumption that I had going in was geographical. The first wildlife overpasses and underpasses were built in Western Europe — France, Germany, Switzerland. Then there were great examples in Canada and the western U.S. I sort of thought this is primarily something that the Western world is doing and maybe there’s some export of knowledge to other countries as well.
But the more that I read, I realized there’s just incredible road ecology movements in places like Brazil and India, and Costa Rica and Kenya. These are places that are engineering wonderful endemic solutions to their own conflict between roads and nature. One of my favorite examples is in India. They’re building this new highway through a tiger sanctuary, and they just put the entire highway up on pilings. They elevated the whole freeway above the forest so the tigers can walk under this highway undisturbed. That’s more radical than anything we’ve done in North America to accommodate wildlife.
You’ve got so many cool stories in here — frogs and turtles being ushered across roads by
volunteer hands, a wildlife crossing for cougars in California, citizen roadkill reporting networks. In many ways, it’s a book about the people trying to correct our mistakes. What were some of the solutions to our road problems that seemed the most promising to you?
I’ve already talked a bit about wildlife crossings, but that’s the first one that comes to mind. There are some fantastic examples of that all over the Northwest. Most Washingtonians have probably driven I-90 and seen the crossing up on Snoqualmie Pass. There’s that very visible, conspicuous overpass that you drive by, but there are many other underpasses that are already being used very readily by elk and black bears and coyotes and all kinds of creatures. Those structures also have fences along the interstate so that the animals stay off the highway and are directed by those fences to the crossings.
One important thing to note about them is that they’re very, very cost-effective. People see this big bridge over the highway and think, “Oh man, what a huge expenditure.” I think that [Snoqualmie Pass] overpass was something like $6 million. But because those crossing structures are preventing so many wildlife-vehicle collisions, they’re often paying for themselves really quickly.
