“Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet” by Ben Goldfarb, Part 2 of 2

In “Crossings,” Ben Goldfarb highlights success stories involving wildlife crossings, culverts, and underpasses. “I really love a story I tell about a biologist named Matthew Aresco, who’s a turtle biologist in Florida now, because I think his story really illustrates the ability of a single person to make a big difference. More than 20 years ago, Matt basically became aware of this massive turtle kill situation where there were these two lakes, or wetlands, with a highway near Tallahassee running right between them. He convinced them to build what he calls an ecopassage, this tunnel connecting these two lakes.” “Sometimes when people think about wildlife crossings, they think about those big, $10 million-bridges that go over the highway. But there’s also a lot of cheap interventions we can do with things like critter shelves and culvert fencing to use the infrastructure we already have and make it more amenable to animals.”

“More than 400 drivers are killed in deer collisions every year. But it just goes to show that by building fences and crossings, we can actually save human lives as well as animal lives. The problem is that if we take a primarily human safety focused approach to building wildlife crossings, there are a lot of animals that we tend to leave out: frogs, and salamanders, and those turtles I mentioned earlier. And yet those are some of the most road endangered animals on Earth.” “We know that roads are one major barrier that animals face to their migration, but there are lots of other barriers as well. I think about barbed wire fences, for example, here in Colorado. We have to practice conservation in this holistic way where we’re thinking about all of the different threats these creatures are facing and trying to, in so far as this is possible, address them together in a kind of strategic way.”