As the holidays approach, many of us will be pilling into the car and speed down a portion of the Earth’s 40 million miles of roadways. But what is the impact of those roads on the natural world around us? In what the New York Times has called a Notable Book of 2023, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb argues that roads kill more wildlife than any single natural disaster, but that is just the tip of the iceberg.

“You’ve got noise pollution from roads that’s really altering wildlife habitat and human lives as well,” he tells A Public Affair. “You’ve got all of that road salt that we pour on our highways as a deicing agent… Midwestern states tend to be some of the heaviest users and all of that road salt–or at least a lot of it–runs off into surrounding rivers and lakes and streams, and turns them brackish. You’ve got the genetic fragmentation that roads cause: all of these walls of traffic, preventing animals from finding each other and mating.”

Ben Goldfarb joins host Carousel Bayrd to talk about the impact of roads as laid out in his new book Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet. 

Ben Goldfarb is an independent conservation journalist. His previous book is Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, winner of the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.

Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

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