Review by Booklist Review
We take roads for granted, rarely thinking about how profoundly highways and vehicles effect the lives of animals and plants. Goldfarb, whose first revelatory book, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter (2018), won the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, covered many miles to assess the environmental impact of highways, interstates, and roads on public land and now pairs engrossing if unnerving field notes with a fresh and startling history of roads, automobiles, and the carnage and destruction they cause. Goldfarb's tallies of the death tolls on American highways of insects, turtles, birds, mountain lions, and more add up to a major factor in the sixth extinction. Roads also severely disrupt animal migration and fracture habitats, while more insidious woes are caused by road noise and pollution. An astute, funny, and imaginative writer, Goldfarb pairs horror with hope as he chronicles the brilliant innovations and tireless advocacy that resulted in lifesaving wildlife crossings, including park-like overpasses and cozy underpasses. With vibrant and enlightening descriptions of the lives of deer, grizzlies, monarch butterflies, fish, and frogs, and striking insights into the culture and politics of roads, Goldfarb awakens readers to the ecological catastrophes roads cause and what we can do to ameliorate the damage and improve life on Earth.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this captivating outing, science writer Goldfarb (Eager) explores the negative impact roads have on wildlife. Discussing the danger vehicle collisions pose to animals, he notes that 10,000 garter snakes were fatally hit in one season in Manitoba and that deer need intervals of approximately a minute or longer between passing cars to safely cross. Other harms are less obvious; the difficulty of traversing roadways leads to genetically inbred clusters ("A flightless European beetle disperses so feebly that biologists once found a genetically distinct population encircled by a highway exit loop"), and noise can disrupt ecological checks and balances (chaffinches in Portugal's oak woodlands avoid loud streets, "allowing unchecked insects to kill roadside trees"). Profiles of individuals working on mitigation strategies are as enlightening as they are encouraging. Among them, Goldfarb highlights biologist Tony Clevenger's research confirming the effectiveness of wildlife overpasses for enabling grizzly bear populations in Alberta's Banff National Park to intermingle and ecologist Sarah Perkins's efforts with Project Splatter to learn more about animal movement patterns by soliciting civilians to report roadkill. Humor leavens the frequently grim subject matter, as when Goldfarb notes that a plan to reduce Dall sheep's anxiety around vehicles in Denali National Park "runs 428 turgid pages and reliably cures insomnia." This one's a winner. Photos. (Sept.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A wide-ranging, fascinating exploration of roads, which are "not merely a symptom of civilization but a distinct disease." Goldfarb's follow-up to Eager, his award-winning book on beavers, is another illuminating, witty work. He chronicles his journeys through numerous countries with colleagues to conduct extensive field research and mixes his findings with historical research showing the effects of roads on our ecology. Pavement, he writes, "blankets less than 1 percent" of the U.S., "but its ecological influence "covers a full 20 percent." Goldfarb sadly notes that it "has never been more dangerous to set paw, hoof, or scaly belly on the highway." With the rise of cars and roads in the 20th century, the degrading word roadkill was born, and the deer became primary victims. The author bemoans how the "Interstate Highway System lopped off migration routes as neatly as a guillotine," and roads with more than 10,000 vehicles per day loom as what road ecologists call "absolute barriers to most wildlife." The sprawling Los Angeles freeway labyrinth, with its "clean as a scalpel" east-west habitat fragmentation, has disrupted practically every species, especially the mountain lion. As a result of roadkill, Goldfarb sadly notes, 21 critters, especially reptiles and amphibians, face extinction, and he reveals how the National Forest Service's many roads have become "proxy battlegrounds in a cultural war" and how they're working to reduce them. Excessive road noise is equally pernicious, as is excessive salt on roads. Not to be overlooked, usually on a car's front, is the ongoing insect liquidation, but many shrubby roadsides have also become insect sanctuaries. "The necrobiome," Goldfarb writes, "airbrushes our roadsides, camouflaging a crisis by devouring it." Fortunately, in Europe and Canada, recent innovations in under- and overpasses have helped reduce the number of dead animals, and the author is optimistic about the roles of citizen scientists, self-driving cars, and achievements in Brazil, which "seem[s] to sit at road ecology's forefront." An astonishingly deep pool of wonders. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
