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brandonpytel's review against another edition
5.0
Crossings reminds me why I like climate books so much. Ben Goldfarb not only dives deep into an utterly fascinating perspective on roads; he does so with such a captivating, beautiful writing style that effortlessly weaves metaphors into prose.
Most importantly, though, is the subject matter: Thinking it was going to be mostly about roadkill and wildlife crossings, I was surprised at how much depth Goldfarb added to the subject matter: “While Crossings is rife with other species… it also considers how our own lives have been captured by pavement and how we can reclaim them.”
While also bringing up complicated questions I had never thought of: “Roads pose the same queasy conundrum as climate change: having profited wildly from growth, can wealthy nations deny less-developed countries the benefit of connectivity?”
Goldfarb grounds us in the problem in the first section of his book, “Killer on the Road,” where we see just how destructive roads are to species (including our own), animals’ migratory paths (where the “moving fence” of roads literally cut in half roamings), and the fragmentation of environment that is birthed from our car-centric world, as is brutally exemplified in the mountain lions’ fates in “Hotel California.”
In the second section, “More than a Road,” we get more of a cultural history of roads, some background on the largest roadmaker in the world, the U.S. Forest Service, and the recklessness on which roads were constructed for timber than parks, something that mimics the Bureau of Reclamation and their dam-building in the early 20th century. We again get those often-overlooked impacts of roads, like noise pollution, which serves as another fence for wildlife.
We also get at the bottom of a centrally American problem: How so much of our landscape is built without any regard for the environment or wildlife, and only years later, after we realize its disastrous effect, do we try to retrofit this infrastructure. Again, going further, Goldfarb dives into the pollution of roads, the silt, the particulates from tires, the stormwater: “We’ve paved the earth for cars, then used them to poison it.”
The whole book, meanwhile, is set against a backdrop of climate change, where climate change is speedingup habitat loss and shifting migration patterns, and animals are struggling to keep up: “Our landscapes are changing in a cruel and ironic way: they’re becoming less permeable to wildlife at the precise moment animals need it most.”
Finally, “The Roads Ahead” offers some relief from the onslaught of problems, starting first in Tasmania, the roadkill capital of the world, where volunteer carers nurse injured animals back to health, and the irony of such a situation: “We force individuals to bear the weight of societal failure, then celebrate their resolve.”
And later, when talking of car companies building more massive SUVs and engineers designing unsafe streets: “What could be more American than blaming deep-rooted problems on individual failings rather than corporate power structures.”
Then to Brazil, where the country has a contentious relationship with the Amazon, exacerbated by roads. In perhaps the truest sentence of the book, Goldfarb again offers a larger context for roads and cars: “Once a road is built, our lives and landscapes bend to conform with it. Name an environmental problem, and it’s exacerbated by the access that roads provide and the incentives they create.”
And finally to Syracuse, where the city is wrestling with how to undo the damage that highways have wreaked on neighborhoods and human lives, by replacing them with pedestrian-friendly boulevards.
We’re stuck with the automobile, whether we like it or not. But we’re still empowered to do something that manages the harms of all these roads. Roads are currently agents of chaos and destruction, but Goldfarb highlights all the different ways we can change that and eventually retrofit them or design them based on what Aldo Leopold describes in his land ethic: to preserve integrity, stability, and the beauty of the biotic community.
A future with “lives not on the road but over and beyond it, a road animals would never meet, a road the land would never notice.”
Most importantly, though, is the subject matter: Thinking it was going to be mostly about roadkill and wildlife crossings, I was surprised at how much depth Goldfarb added to the subject matter: “While Crossings is rife with other species… it also considers how our own lives have been captured by pavement and how we can reclaim them.”
While also bringing up complicated questions I had never thought of: “Roads pose the same queasy conundrum as climate change: having profited wildly from growth, can wealthy nations deny less-developed countries the benefit of connectivity?”
Goldfarb grounds us in the problem in the first section of his book, “Killer on the Road,” where we see just how destructive roads are to species (including our own), animals’ migratory paths (where the “moving fence” of roads literally cut in half roamings), and the fragmentation of environment that is birthed from our car-centric world, as is brutally exemplified in the mountain lions’ fates in “Hotel California.”
In the second section, “More than a Road,” we get more of a cultural history of roads, some background on the largest roadmaker in the world, the U.S. Forest Service, and the recklessness on which roads were constructed for timber than parks, something that mimics the Bureau of Reclamation and their dam-building in the early 20th century. We again get those often-overlooked impacts of roads, like noise pollution, which serves as another fence for wildlife.
We also get at the bottom of a centrally American problem: How so much of our landscape is built without any regard for the environment or wildlife, and only years later, after we realize its disastrous effect, do we try to retrofit this infrastructure. Again, going further, Goldfarb dives into the pollution of roads, the silt, the particulates from tires, the stormwater: “We’ve paved the earth for cars, then used them to poison it.”
The whole book, meanwhile, is set against a backdrop of climate change, where climate change is speedingup habitat loss and shifting migration patterns, and animals are struggling to keep up: “Our landscapes are changing in a cruel and ironic way: they’re becoming less permeable to wildlife at the precise moment animals need it most.”
Finally, “The Roads Ahead” offers some relief from the onslaught of problems, starting first in Tasmania, the roadkill capital of the world, where volunteer carers nurse injured animals back to health, and the irony of such a situation: “We force individuals to bear the weight of societal failure, then celebrate their resolve.”
And later, when talking of car companies building more massive SUVs and engineers designing unsafe streets: “What could be more American than blaming deep-rooted problems on individual failings rather than corporate power structures.”
Then to Brazil, where the country has a contentious relationship with the Amazon, exacerbated by roads. In perhaps the truest sentence of the book, Goldfarb again offers a larger context for roads and cars: “Once a road is built, our lives and landscapes bend to conform with it. Name an environmental problem, and it’s exacerbated by the access that roads provide and the incentives they create.”
And finally to Syracuse, where the city is wrestling with how to undo the damage that highways have wreaked on neighborhoods and human lives, by replacing them with pedestrian-friendly boulevards.
We’re stuck with the automobile, whether we like it or not. But we’re still empowered to do something that manages the harms of all these roads. Roads are currently agents of chaos and destruction, but Goldfarb highlights all the different ways we can change that and eventually retrofit them or design them based on what Aldo Leopold describes in his land ethic: to preserve integrity, stability, and the beauty of the biotic community.
A future with “lives not on the road but over and beyond it, a road animals would never meet, a road the land would never notice.”
liveoncoffeeandbooks's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
medium-paced
5.0
elienore's review against another edition
adventurous
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0