When I first read about the horrifyingly high numbers of animals killed by cars, in a paper on roadkill by sociologist Dennis Soron, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
A commonly cited statistic says cars kill a million vertebrates in the US every day, and even this is likely to be a significant underestimate, according to environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb, author of the new book Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet.
The book could also have surprising implications for the hundreds of millions of Americans who travel to the country’s protected natural areas every year: if you value wildlife, you may want to rethink visiting them by car.
To take a really dramatic, stark example, there are herds of mule deer and pronghorn in Wyoming that starve en masse while trying to reach low-elevation valleys to find food in winter because highways have blocked their migrations.
It really begins with this group of famous car campers: Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, the tire magnate, and John Burroughs, the great nature writer and naturalist.
One chapter of the book is set in Brazil, where I visited a park where the road had actually been engineered to be really sinuous and curvy, both on the X and Y axes, to make people drive slower for the sake of animals.
The original article contains 2,824 words, the summary contains 223 words. Saved 92%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
When I first read about the horrifyingly high numbers of animals killed by cars, in a paper on roadkill by sociologist Dennis Soron, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
A commonly cited statistic says cars kill a million vertebrates in the US every day, and even this is likely to be a significant underestimate, according to environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb, author of the new book Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet.
The book could also have surprising implications for the hundreds of millions of Americans who travel to the country’s protected natural areas every year: if you value wildlife, you may want to rethink visiting them by car.
To take a really dramatic, stark example, there are herds of mule deer and pronghorn in Wyoming that starve en masse while trying to reach low-elevation valleys to find food in winter because highways have blocked their migrations.
It really begins with this group of famous car campers: Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, the tire magnate, and John Burroughs, the great nature writer and naturalist.
One chapter of the book is set in Brazil, where I visited a park where the road had actually been engineered to be really sinuous and curvy, both on the X and Y axes, to make people drive slower for the sake of animals.
The original article contains 2,824 words, the summary contains 223 words. Saved 92%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!