Ben Goldfarb: Road ecology and the normalized violence of transport systems (Ep430)

Written By kamea chayne
“This is in so many ways how we ended up where we are: a fearsome new technology appears on the scene, people roundly reject it, [but still], ultimately, corporate power causes its success and proliferation. You can see that influence reflected in road ecology.”
— Ben Goldfarb

With a significant part of the global population now reliant on paved road systems for the daily functioning of our lives, it is easy to overlook the impacts they have on our human and more-than-human communities.

But how did so many of us become seemingly locked into this dependence on the “normalized violence” of these networks? And what does it mean to support harm reduction in the context of built infrastructures — or even dare to lean into possibilities of regenerative road ethics?

In this episode, we welcome Ben Goldfarb, who we previously hosted a few years ago for an episode on beavers. Drawing upon his recent book, Crossings, Ben calls on us to confront the harmful-by-default impacts of our road systems. Join us as we uncover the various forms of highway pollution that communities of color are disproportionately subjected to; how roads impact our more-than-human communities beyond roadkill; what road decommissioning projects have entailed in practice; and more.

What does it mean to alchemize change for transport systems that are quite literally being rigidified as they further expand — entrenching us deeper into these status quo ways of world-making?

We invite you to…

 

About our guest:

Ben Goldfarb is an independent conservation journalist. He is the author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future of Our Planet, named one of the best books of 2023 by the New York Times, and Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, winner of the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.

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transcript

Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Ben Goldfarb: We know that more than a million animals are killed by cars every day. And those are just vertebrate animals in the US, to say nothing of the insects and arachnids and all of the other invertebrate creatures that are killed by cars as well. We know that it's this huge sort of direct form of mortality for all kinds of species from Florida panthers to ocelots to tiger salamanders. We're driving many species to extinction, the road effect zone indicates that the harms of roads extend far beyond the pavement itself. And there are all these other factors that the road causes that transcend that little strip of asphalt.

So you think about road noise pollution, the constant whine of engines and tires. Well, that noise pollution is billowing away from the side of the highway and impacting all of the songbirds and other species that are subjected to it. And then we've got tire particles that are bleeding into the environment and killing fish in places like Western Washington. Then we've got road salt which we apply as a de-icing chemical, and that's running off into the landscape and turning rivers and lakes increasingly salty.

We have all of these different forces and issues that the road creates, a lot of which are so much broader than the little strip of pavement itself.

And so that's really what road ecology, this field of science, I think is trying to do — is look at all of those different forces and factors and connections.

Kamea Chayne: And it's of course also really important to think about the disparities amongst different demographics of people. As you share, “according to one Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study, Black people are 40 % more likely to live near a highway than whites. Latinos are 60 % more likely and Asian Americans are 75 % more likely. The noxious byproducts of internal combustion are inordinately absorbed by Black and Brown bodies."

I would appreciate it if you could shine some light on the historical and political context of this that people should be mindful of and how this demonstrates that historical injustices are not just some abstract stories of the past, but that they have systematized and locked us into structural racism in many ways today.

Ben Goldfarb: Yeah, it's such an important question and those racial disparities in some ways go back more than a century, but those seeds were especially sown in the 1950s as the U.S. started building its interstate highway system—these massive new highways that crisscross the country and connect urban areas with rural areas.

And lots of planners, of white planners in cities like Minneapolis and Miami and Syracuse and Buffalo (I mean, it's really hard to name a city where this didn't occur to some extent) said these new urban freeways, these new interstates, they're an opportunity to get rid of a lot of communities of color.

These white city planners, see neighborhoods with Black and Brown people in them and that those neighborhoods are undesirable, that they're blight. And so these new freeways become an opportunity for those planners to destroy those communities.

We're just gonna run one of those urban freeways through a Black community and therefore get rid of it that way. And again, this happened in so many different places and it created these incredibly long-lasting disparities that you referenced here today.

People of color are more likely to live along highways and suffer those ill health effects as a result. And a lot of those communities have been so totally fragmented by urban freeways.

One of the places I visited was Syracuse, which is one of the most segregated cities in the country today. The reason for that is Interstate 81, this giant viaduct that was plowed through the middle of the city and destroyed the 15th War to a historic black neighborhood and still separates Syracuse's south side from the rest of the city and leads to that segregation.

Something I was very conscious of working on in this book was drawing those very explicit comparisons between how roads impact more natural ecosystems and how they impact human ecosystems. In both cases, roads are this profound force of division, whether for natural communities or human communities.

Kamea Chayne: And I wouldn't doubt that this has broader implications. Like, what does it mean systemically for Black and Brown bodies to have disproportionately been absorbing more toxins and being exposed to persistent noise pollution? How might that impact a child's development or contribute to health disparities, medical costs, performance at work, economic injustice, and so forth?

Ben Goldfarb: Absolutely. In Syracuse, there's a public school basically under the freeway. And that public school has really low standardized test scores. And I mean, how much of that is both the air and the noise pollution impacting those students' ability to learn and thus it's sort of inhibiting positive educational outcomes and affecting their lives down the line. So certainly, there are all of these different impacts.

I think about noise pollution as being one of the biggest things—in some ways, it's the great public health, the unsung public health, crisis of our time.

You look at the peer-reviewed scientific literature around noise pollution, and you realize that it's elevating our cortisol levels and our blood pressure and our heart rates and making us more susceptible to cardiac disease and diabetes and stroke and all of these maladies.

And again, those are problems that are disproportionately suffered by people of color. Noise pollution is one of those ways in which, living near a road is killing people.

Kamea Chayne: It seems like there are a lot of less visible and less tangible impacts that we have to highlight here. And I guess I'm always interested in thinking, how did we get here?

So certainly the historical policies of racism and economic injustice relate to the disparities we see today for different communities. And I'm also curious to backtrack and zoom out a bit more because I wonder, is this road infrastructure and system with pavement set up in the networks that they're set up in — is this the only way that people could have enhanced the ease and speed that people can move around and get from point A to point B?

I think the answer is no, but I'm curious about some of the key incentives and driving industry influences that led us to develop transport systems and road ecology in this very particular way. Because once it's set up and calcified in place, a lot of people, depending on their context, have limited choice in terms of being able to opt out.

So how did we get to this place where so many roads were ploughed through without care and consideration? And now to this point where many of us are locked into this, by default, harmful way of being able to get around and live our lives.

Ben Goldfarb: Certainly we know that our road system is the product of lobbyists, in many cases of industry lobbyists. This is something that the historian Peter Norton has written about a lot. But when the car first burst onto the scene in the early 1900s Americans hated the car.

We think the US is having this love affair with the automobile, but as Norton has pointed out, it was this terrifying new force in American society. The car was this fearsome machine running down pedestrians and conquering city streets throughout the US.

There were massive protests against the automobile in the early 1900s where thousands of parents and children would go out in the streets and hold events called safety parades where they called the car an instrument of the devil.

And what happened there is basically that Ford and GM and the other car companies got good lobbyists and they wrote letters to editors and captured the political discourse and helped the car conquer American civic life, along with groups like the American Automobile Association, this lobbyist groups that promoted automobility.

So I think that's in so many ways how we ended up where we are: that this fearsome new technology appears on the scene, people roundly reject it and then ultimately corporate power causes its success and proliferation. And you can see that influence, or at least reflected in the road ecology discourse.

You go back to the 1920s and 30s, it's sort of the early days of the car, and there are all of these wildlife biologists writing papers in which they say, hey, this new machine, the devil wagon, is running down wildlife. And just as the streets of American cities are tainted with the blood of pedestrians, so too are all of these ground squirrels and garter snakes and woodpeckers dying as well. But by the late 1930s and 1940s, the car has conquered the American landscape. These early road ecologists are saying that the idea of a safety campaign on behalf of wildlife is foolish and impossible because the car has become the unquestioned ruler of the American landscape. And that's just a story of corporate influence and power like so many stories in the U.S.

Kamea Chayne: It feels like a pattern here in terms of many people being initially opposed to something strongly at first, but when it still gets plowed through and takes over and becomes something that a lot of people just know as how things work, starting from when they're little, it can be a lot to even think that there are alternatives. So it's normalized as the background of how society functions and a sort of normalized violence that becomes invisible to a lot of people.

I know you've explored various ways that people are working to address the harms of road ecology given the picture of today. This ranges from tweaks and additions given our existing road systems to people working on more radical possibilities. As you share, roads and infrastructure are not things that individuals can choose to just change, like a lifestyle choice, but it's a larger scale decision made at a different time scale, layered with bureaucracy political barriers and other barriers to everyday people when it comes to urban planning and development.

So just to start here, what are some examples of what people have already implemented successfully as harm reduction, given the roads and highways that we already have set up today?

Ben Goldfarb: I loved your phrase earlier of ‘normalized violence of roads’. I think that's so accurate and apt and exactly describes the experience of just driving this road network that kills more than a million animals every day. And seeing dead deer and raccoons and opossums and just blinding ourselves to it because you have to ignore it to function. So anyway, that phrase ‘normalized violence’ is going to stick with me.

As for your question about solutions, one of the very straightforward technologies I write about in this book is wildlife crossings. These overpasses and underpasses and culverts and tunnels. There are all of these structures that allow animals to move safely from one side of the road to another. And those structures are incredibly effective. They work well. They dramatically reduce roadkill rates when they're combined with roadside fencing and let these migrations that we know are so important for the survival of these animals continue safely. And so we’re building those sorts of structures in the U.S. but we certainly need many thousands, if not tens of thousands more than we already have. I think that's at least the most straightforward thing we can do.

Your point about the scale of the solutions is an important one too. People always ask me, “How should I drive differently to help wildlife?” And my attitude is, yes, there are things you can do. You can drive slower, you can drive less at night. But ultimately, this is not a problem we're gonna solve by changing human behavior. If your goal is to make Americans drive slower, that's difficult. We're just such an automotive society. And so, I think that ultimately the task is at the infrastructural level. It's modifying our roadways to make them safer and more permeable to wild animals.

In the book, I draw an analogy with climate change, where, at one point climate activists I think were very focused on individual behavior, and we were going to save the planet by eating less meat and changing our light bulbs. Those are good things to do, but they're not going to save the planet because again, it's just not a solution that scales up. It's just so hard to make a change at the individual behavioral level, and I think that most climate activists are much more focused on decarbonizing our infrastructure itself. And I think that's also true of road ecology.

We're not going to save wildlife by trying to convince Americans to drive slower. We're going to save wildlife by physically changing our built environment to make it more amenable to wild animals.

Kamea Chayne: I resonate with how it's not about individuals. Everyone should do what they can, given what they have access to. But ultimately, a lot of it goes a lot deeper into how society is systemically wired. And I often think about this baffling and counterintuitive question: Why are a lot of countries exporting the same amount of meat products and producing products that they're then importing? That's feeding people the same number of calories, but requiring more transport miles to make happen.

And then, I think the driving force there is much deeper than just being able to feed people. It's about power, corporate control, multinational interests that cross international borders and so on.

But at this stage, I'm sure you sat with these difficult questions for years and beyond. And I'm also interested in hearing you share about the more radical possibilities that you've either learned about or just thought through. If we were to do away with questions of practicality for a moment here, I'm thinking about this idea you share from the Salish and Kootenai tribes that “the road is a visitor that should respond to and be respectful to the land and spirit of place." You also raised this as well, what it means to reframe this perception of animals crossing the road to the road crossing the land, or the road crossing the forest.

But if these are relatively permanent, concreted and paved roads had never been imposed onto dynamic landscapes, and if we also have the option of undoing roads, like projects of undamming rivers, to be able to rewire transport systems altogether, what other ways of developing these systems of movement might we have? Because also historically people across cultures have always moved around with many communities that are migratory as well, many of whom were able to securely feed themselves and meet their basic needs with more land-based lifestyles.

So I know I tossed a lot in here and you're welcome to take this in whatever direction you'd like, but I guess the underlying question is what can we learn from looking to the peripheries or even just daring to dream of a sort of abolitionist road ethic?

Ben Goldfarb: That's a good question to pose to an Indigenous futurist, rather than a lowly journalist who's just reported on the world as it is, rather than as it could be. I look to other countries that are building out their infrastructure now and doing it right in a way that we failed to. And look, I think about Brazil, for example.

I visited a cool road in Brazil that was built to deliberately frustrate human speed. It was a road built with lots of hairpin turns, and it rolled up and down on the Y-axis like a roller coaster. So you physically couldn't drive faster than 25 miles an hour or so. And that was for the sake of tapirs and anteaters and other wild animals.

And so you could imagine a world like that, where we have roads that instead of being built to facilitate swift and seamless human movement at 80 miles an hour, are built to actually frustrate human movement in a sense, or at least to bring it back down to a speed that is happening at a more natural scale and is less harmful to wildlife.

Or you think about some of the work that's being done in India now, whereas they're building out their infrastructure for the first time, there are places where they've built highways that are elevated on these concrete pillars for many miles so that animals can move back and forth across the forest floor as a way of lifting that infrastructure away from nature and ensuring that the creatures still have mobility. So you can imagine that world where our highways are lifted off the surface of the land itself.

As for the most radical ideas of all, a world without or with much fewer paved roads is maybe the place to begin, just because our road network is so redundant in so many ways. We have far more roads than we need.

It's hard for me to imagine a world without this paved infrastructure. I think that one of the things that I gobble with myself is: would I want to live in that world myself? I don't know. My dirty secret is that I love driving. I love the road trip. I think a lot of people feel the same way. It's like the fact that I can get in my car here in Southern Colorado and three hours later be in Taos. In four hours, I can be in Santa Fe or I can go north to Rocky Mountain National Park or west to the Black Canyon or northwest to the mountains around Crested Butte.

The car just facilitates all of these amazing human experiences and there are times when I feel like, I’m a hypocrite because I'm just part of this automotive system that we have. And so sometimes it's hard for me to, imagine a more radical future because I think as a journalist, I tend to pragmatically operate in the world in which we live. So that's my mealy-mouthed circuitous way of answering your great question that it's hard to imagine a truly radical roadless world.

I imagine a world like the one that's being created along some highways in India or Brazil, where yes, roads and cars exist, but engineered and operated in a way that they're not innately catastrophic to nature.

Kamea Chayne: These are complex and big questions. And I know it might feel like a stretch to think about going beyond harm reduction to transport routes, possibly having even regenerative impacts. But I think about river networks as the arteries of the earth breathing life everywhere that they travel to or the migratory pathways of huge populations of bison historically, and how the ways that they move across the land contribute to the regeneration of grasslands.

I would dare us to dream of alternate ways that we can exist. And of course, learn from real-life examples of other models of transport networks. I'm also interested in thinking about how roads represent something bigger. I think about how the mileage per capita that people are traveling per day just to be able to live, work their jobs, and acquire food.

I'm sure there are a lot of factors, but instead of everything or most things being integrated into more human-scale communities, we've siloed and centralized a lot of these systems so that many people have to drive more miles just to live. Even people living in walkable metropolitan areas I don't think are absolved of these conversations either because all the food and other products in markets and grocery stores were likely trucked in from far away.

A lot from large-scale monocultures that are specializing in different crops in the name of quote unquote, efficiency. And then also all the trash that has to get trucked out and even water and sewage systems that require similar colonial infrastructures to get in and then funnel out. So a lot of these things, as we talked about that normalized violence, they've just been rendered invisible, but still are at the heart of the energy intensiveness required for people to simply exist today.

I'm struggling to articulate a question here that encapsulates all of this, but what feels top of mind for you that you'd like to add in terms of looking at the broader and supplementary systems that influence how roads are developed and also who gets a say in how this has been playing out and will continue to play out.

Ben Goldfarb: Yeah, it's funny, the person you should have on this show instead of me is Becky Chambers. I don't know if you've read any of her novels, but she's a wonderful science fiction novelist. And I just read her book, A Psalm for the Wild Built. And it's this imagined world much like ours, except structured completely differently, half the planet is given over to nature, an E .O. Wilson's half-earth concept, which is problematic in its way, but sort of maybe a good starting point for thinking about giving wild creatures the space they need.

And then in Becky Chambers's imagined universe of this book, communities live in these little hyper-local systems where they're incredibly self-contained and things are produced and disposed of locally and transportation between them occurs via bicycle. And maybe that's the world that we should aspire to—-one in which you don't need this elaborate transportation network to get goods and products in and out of cities.

One of the things I certainly do think about is just how much transportation is about transporting our stuff. It's not just us, it's our possessions. That's something that is changing a lot and is going to change a lot. Once we're no longer going to malls, but instead receiving every single toothbrush and roll of toilet paper via Amazon, that’s just an enormous new source of vehicles on the road.

A lot of those vehicles are likely going to be autonomous, which may avoid deer and elk than we are, but they're certainly not going to break for snakes or squirrels.

It's just sort of easy to imagine a world that's overrun by autonomous Amazon delivery vehicles and that's a Hellish world in a lot of ways. We're unfolded in these enormous systems and transportation is at the heart of all of those.

One of my goals in this book is to just make transportation visible and legible to people. We take it for granted that we can get places and that our products and goods can get to us. And there is this normalized violence, as you put it, that facilitates all of that.

Kamea Chayne: So this isn't just about us getting around to see our family and friends going to a restaurant or buying groceries. A lot of this is a part of this more invisiblized, larger extended transport networks that we've been talking about of like, where is our food coming from? Where are all of our products that we need just to be able to live? So there are a lot of questions layered in this overarching question here.

Most of the political context and historical context that we covered so far has centered on the contiguous United States, but how has this one model of development been exported around the globe in places that might have had or might still have alternate networks of transport? And what do we know about the driving pressures there or how some communities might be resisting or working on alternate alternatives?

Ben Goldfarb: [The U.S.] is exporting our automotive lifestyle. This is happening in China and India and so many other places as these societies so do the consumption, so do driving rates, so it is an Americanization for better and often for worse. They are, as I put it in the book, the roots of all evil. They're these forces that make possible so many other forces of landscape change and development and industrial activity.

We'll return to Brazil because a chunk of the book is set there. It’s a country that has become increasingly enmeshed in China's economy. As China has industrialized, it's bought up a huge amount of land in Brazil and signed all of these contracts with Brazilian soy producers and exporters. And so that sort of intensification of mono-crop agriculture also requires this built-out paved highway infrastructure for getting inputs to the farms and the crop to ports and from there to Asia.

So many countries industrialize and become increasingly enmeshed in each other; the road networks and the correspondent road networks just expand. And I think that for that reason, it's hard to say what isn't road ecology. If road ecology is sort of the study of how roads shape the earth, I mean, literally anything, any sort of industrial activity or economic activity or land use change is theoretically road ecology.

Before you can illegally log a rainforest, you need roads to get the machinery in and the logs out. Before you can drill for oil and gas in the Red Desert (Wyoming), you need the road infrastructure, before you can poach an elephant, you have to drive to the elephant.

And so, all of these economies that are so interlinked are also literally physically linked by road networks. And, I think that's in some ways why it's difficult for me to imagine this alternate future that you’re rightfully calling for because it's just not happening. There are certainly pockets of resistance, places where communities are fighting new road infrastructure, in some cases successfully.

But I think that by and large, the reaction is the opposite, that roads are sort of greeted in most places enthusiastically when they're proposed and built. I don't want to deny, the very real benefits of highway construction as well. The fact that we know that infrastructural connectivity is, again, a force that gets people to schools and it gets people to access healthcare and it helps farmers get their crops to market. And I think it's easy for me sitting here in the US where I can get anywhere I want to get to using our road network to deny other countries the benefit of that automotive connectivity.

There are real advantages there. I think what I'm trying to say in the book, maybe inarticulately, is that there's a way to do it or at least to do it better. It's possible to build roads that avoid critical habitats, for example. Some economists talk about the idea of clustering roads. So you're building a couple of really good high-quality roads where people need the most and then you're allowing large swaths of land to remain unroaded. It's not about this dichotomous choice between building roads and not building roads because ultimately we're just going to keep doing it to some extent.

I think the real question is how can we learn from mistakes in North America and Western Europe and build lighter, slower, and more thoughtfully and strategically rather than letting roads pop up willy-nilly.

Kamea Chayne: I certainly don't have an answer in terms of the how, and there's no pure way forward and pure way out. And I do think it's also a little overwhelming to think about because, like you said, everything is so entangled. And road ecology is entangled with everything and entanglement is also very critical for us to think through because so many of us are deeply entrenched within it. But also at the same time, I don't think this is sustainable at all.

So I am very much inspired by and hope to learn more from people who are working within and outside to both contribute to harm reduction in the most tangible ways and also nurture alternatives. And the final question I wanted to ask you is about this trend of decommissioning roads.

In the case of destroying old forest roads, you share that “in the United States, a recent wave of federal legislation and programs has sparked a boom period for road decommissioning”. I wonder if you can offer a brief context around this and share more about what more immediate and tangible possibilities lie ahead of us if people want to get more involved in helping to pave or unpaved the future of road ecology.

Ben Goldfarb: So, that road decommissioning work that I'm writing about is mostly happening in our national forests. And I think unbeknownst to most people, the U.S. Forest Service is the largest road manager in the world. There's something like 370,000 miles of forest road in the U.S. You could drive to the moon and most of the way back on forest roads. And talk about roads being entangled with industry and extractive economies. The vast majority of those roads are old logging roads, that sort of facilitated the clear-cutting of American forests.

And today, those roads don't get a whole lot of use in most cases, but they're still ecologically harmful in all kinds of ways. They cause erosion and sedimentation and landslides and sort of decrease habitat security for all kinds of critters. And so there's this movement now to unmake those roads because again, a lot of them really are redundant and obsolete and serve no great purpose anymore. And so basically the process is pretty simple.

You just go back there with an excavator and chew up the surface of the road and then replant it and 20 years from now, you could go back there and never know that a road was there at all. And so, to me, destroying some old logging roads in the middle of nowhere is not like destroying I-90. But it does indicate that the more radical future you're talking about is theoretically possible and that roads are not necessarily permanent features.

That work also happening in cities around the U.S. as well, where some of these harmful urban freeways in places like Rochester and Milwaukee have been taken down. And other cities like Syracuse are sort of beginning that process. And still, others like Minneapolis and New Orleans are contemplating a future in which some of those urban viaducts that we know are historically racist are going to be destroyed. And so, yeah, removing this infrastructure is possible. We know that we can do it at various scales.

And so the real challenge is, as it is with most things, just summoning the political will to make it happen. So maybe that's the more progressive radical future you're looking for one in which we take some of these old social and ecological mistakes and unmake them.

Kamea Chayne: Well, Green Dreamer, we are coming to a close here, but we will have more references and resources from this conversation linked in our show notes at greendreamer .com. And for now, Ben, thank you so much again for joining us for the second round today. It was an honor to have you back. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?

Ben Goldfard: I appreciate you pushing me to think more radically. One of the challenges I grappled with while working on this book was finding the balance between being radical and pragmatic in my prescriptions. At times, I felt that by advocating for things like wildlife crossings, I was essentially foreclosing a more radical future. I was suggesting that we could maintain our big interstate highways and all our traffic by simply building a few underpasses and overpasses to help — instead of calling for mass-scale road decommissioning, a dramatic reduction in human mobility, and a return to a more locally-oriented society.

I appreciate the green dreaminess of your questions and your daring to imagine a truly roadless or at least less-roaded future. I think that's a wonderful vision to aspire to, and I'm grateful to you and all the listeners who espouse that sort of progressive, futuristic vision. Thank you.

 
kamea chayne

Kamea Chayne is a creative, writer, and the host of Green Dreamer Podcast.

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