"Roads are both logistical essentials and cultural artifacts," writes Ben Goldfarb in "Crossings." "To us, roads signify connection and escape; to other life-forms, they spell death and division." Photo by @franckreporter/Getty Images
by John Clayton
August 1, 1915 may be the most important single date in the
history of Yellowstone. Almost a half-century after its founding, the first
automobile legally entered America’s first national park.
Motorized vehicles changed the way people interacted with
Yellowstone, no longer bunched together on stagecoaches that stopped at central
hotels for dinners of canned food. Now more visitors could camp in the wild and
choose for themselves which attractions were most worthy. Their experiences
were freer, more democratic, and arguably richer than when mediated by
railroads and driver-guides.
Yet roads in Yellowstone, as elsewhere, degraded people’s capacity
to connect with nature. Yellowstone eventually became mostly a “windshield
wilderness,” in the vivid phrasing of historian David Louter. Tourists’ relationships
were as much with their vehicles and the road as with the surrounding
environment. For many locals today, the park’s most salient feature has become
its traffic jams.
ROADS: ALTERING PEOPLE AND NATURE
Road-nature tensions have now played out for more than a
century. In his 1949 A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold wished that
“recreational development” could be “a job not of building roads into lovely
country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.” A
road, he felt, was a spiritual void that plowed over pristine wilderness with
boosterism and consumerism.
But cars and roads don’t just alter people. They alter
ecosystems themselves. Consider, for example, the classic 1950s Yellowstone
roadside bear, eating candy from a vehicle’s window. “From the 1930s to the
1960s, a lot of black bears, especially, spent a portion of their day
panhandling,” Kerry Gunther, Yellowstone’s bear management biologist, told me.
In other words, these bears altered their lives and the
lessons they taught their young, based on the dynamics of acquiring this new
food source. We speak of such bears being habituated to people, but that’s not
quite right. People on foot or on horseback didn’t prompt the same scale of
change. The real impact—the new ecological web—came from roads.
Americans hardly ever think about roads. But every time we drive one, we’re participating in alterations of our surrounding ecosystem in ways that scientists have only recently begun to fully understand.
In the late 1960s, Yellowstone closed garbage dumps while
prohibiting recreational feeding, and bear populations plummeted. As their
populations have recovered, “density has increased, and the habitat has
filled,” Gunther said. Some bears have returned to roadsides to find their
natural foods, especially females with cubs and subadults. They use roads as a
human shield against aggressive backcountry bears.
A prime example is the world’s most famous bear, Grizzly 399,
often easily visible from roads in Grand Teton National Park. Yet she’s a "roadside
bear" because of ecological adaptation. As my esteemed colleague, Mountain Journal founder Todd
Wilkinson has written, one of 399’s first cubs died in the deep backcountry,
and she may have decided that the human-caused risks of living near the road
were fewer than the boar-caused risks of living away from it.
So, she adjusted to the road and taught her cubs to adjust: to
look both ways before crossing, to seek out elk guts left by hunters, to hunt
elk calves in a road-adjacent place called Willow Flats that just happens to be
in full view of Jackson Lake Lodge.
Roads, and road ecology, have altered 399’s behavior and formed
her celebrity. In turn, of course, her celebrity has altered human ecology.
She causes traffic to pile up in massive bear-jams. She and her fellow roadside
bears bring tourists great delight, which causes the National Park Service to
expend energy on their behalf. “We keep staff present when bears and wolves are
foraging on the roadside,” Gunther said. “We manage the people” rather than hazing
the bears away from the road.
Crossingsdoes for road ecology what David Quammen’sThe Song of the Dododid for island biogeography: introduce us to a new field of science through a tour of amazing places.
And those people contribute to the local economy: a 2014
study found that roadside bears were responsible for 155 regional jobs, and
that Yellowstone visitors would pay $41 more in entrance fees to ensure that
bears remained along roads. The Park Service estimates that Yellowstone visitation
benefited local economy in 2022 to the tune of $600 million, and that was the
year tourism faltered following historic park flooding. Many of those visitors
are hoping to see Yellowstone’s charismatic megafauna, including wolves, bison and
grizzlies. Most never leave their cars.
Americans hardly ever think about roads. But every time we
drive one, we’re participating in alterations of our surrounding ecosystem in
ways that scientists have only recently begun to fully understand. It’s not
very productive to pass judgement on these alterations as “good” or “bad,”
since in the big picture roads aren’t going anywhere. But it’s incredibly
important to acknowledge that these alterations exist; to think about them,
understand them, and perhaps design ways to mitigate their worst implications.
IT ALL STARTS WITH ROADKILL
Author Ben Goldfarb surveys the science of road ecology and its
implications in a delightful new book, Crossings: How road ecology is
shaping the future of our planet, which was published in September. A Notable Book of 2023 from The New
York Times, Crossings does for road ecology what David Quammen’s The
Song of the Dodo did for island biogeography: introduce us to a new field
of science through a tour of amazing places.
Goldfarb began his career as a Yellowstone intern in 2009.
He recalls coming across an elk on the shoulder
of Highway 20, her legs shattered by a passing car. The elk was not yet dead
and was writhing in agony. Goldfarb retreated to the truck shortly after a
ranger came upon the scene with a rifle. “I watched him shoot the poor animal
in the head in the rearview mirror,” Goldfarb told me. “It was awful to see.”
Thus, Crossings begins with a history of roads, cars
and large animals such as deer and elk—in other words, a history of roadkill. Deer
are “North America’s most
Published in September by W.W. Norton, "Crossings" is author Ben Goldfarb's second book following "Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter."
dangerous wild animal,” Goldfarb writes, “implicated
in three times more deaths than wasps and bees, forty times more than snakes,
and four hundred times more than sharks.” Reducing roadkill, most everyone
agrees, is worthwhile, honorable and cost-effective.
But as Goldfarb pays a winter visit to Wyoming’s Red Desert to
help biologists measure the health of mule deer, the issue becomes more complicated.
He’s highlighting the work of the Wyoming Migration Initiative, which has done
so much to reveal how and where deer and other mammals migrate—or don’t. Radio
collar data shows all sorts of animals approaching roads and then shying away
from them. Not crossing reduces roadkill but at the price of thwarting
migrations to and from important habitat. Animals can die from collisions, but animal
populations can die from avoiding collisions.
Now even conservative politicians and state highway
departments embrace crossings. In creating a Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program as
part of the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Congress cited 1 million
vehicle collisions per year, which cost the nation around $8 billion. The
program recently granted $24
million to Wyoming and $9
million to Montana.
Crossings reduce crashes, saving human lives and money. But,
as Goldfarb shows, the cost-saving angle is a human-centered—and deer-centered—approach.
After all, many types of animal migrations are thwarted by roads. Compared to
deer, animals such as male grizzlies are more road-shy. Other animals, like
pronghorn, are more claustrophobic. Still others, including reptiles and
amphibians, are too small to cause costly crashes. Hence the value of wildlife overpasses,
such as the one at Trappers Point near Pinedale, Wyoming. Yet overpasses cost on
average six times more than culverts.
That’s where I expected the book to leave off. As a work of
science journalism/advocacy, it would examine successful overpasses, such as those
on the Flathead
Author Ben Goldfarb with a nonnative brook trout he caught in the northwest corner of Yellowstone National Park, circa 2014. An invasive species, brook trout threaten the native Yellowstone cutthroat. Photo courtesy Ben Goldfarb
reservation north of Missoula, in Alberta’s Banff National
Park, and on I-90 in the Washington Cascades. It would be a useful document for
people seeking to reengineer roads such as U.S. 191 from Bozeman to Big Sky to
West Yellowstone, or U.S. 20 near Targhee Pass, but a bit tedious for the
amateur scientist or armchair traveler.
I was wrong: although the book does all that, it’s also far
more. First, Crossings is a terrific read, full of creative comparisons.
Before radio collars, Goldfarb writes, biologists watched pronghorn disappear
into the mountains “like loose change vanishing into a sofa.” Signs such as
“Deer Crossing: Next 10 Miles” are so useless as to be “litter on sticks.” Eagles
might linger at a carcass for hours, “nursing their repast like day-drinkers in
a pub.” Crossings is worth reading just for the joy of having roadkill’s
ubiquity explained by a perfect Simpsons reference.
Second, Goldfarb avoids blow-by-blow accounts of implementation
politics. For example, after a nonbinding 2018 referendum in Island Park,
Idaho, overwhelmingly rejected wildlife overpasses in that community from fear
of federal overreach, Goldfarb covered
the story for High Country News. But he leaves that story out of this book because he says it’s such
an unusual outlier in the history of wildlife-crossing politics. “It
felt like telling that story in the book would give the impression that these
structures are often controversial, when in fact they almost never are,” he
told me. “Funding is an obstacle, but
politics generally aren’t. Nobody wants to hit an animal. So strong community
support typically exists.”
BEYOND THE OVERPASS
Crossings frees itself from local politics by traveling
far, both geographically and intellectually. Goldfarb unlocks the secrets and
implications of road ecology in visits to, among other places, Brazil, Tasmania
and a majority-Black neighborhood in Syracuse, New York. Places with more roads
face bigger problems thus offer more opportunities for creative solutions.
Meanwhile, Goldfarb uses those excursions to explore deeper
questions. Can “roads create habitat as well as destroy it”? Pollinator habitat
along I-35, aka the “Monarch [Butterfly] Highway,” allows an evaluation of
pluses and minuses. A chapter on road policies in the U.S. Forest Service presents
them as “proxy battlegrounds in a cultural war: What are public lands for, and
who gets to decide?” Finally, Goldfarb admits that he was at first curious
whether advances could be exported to other countries, but then realized the
folly of “scientific imperialism” and the wisdom of learning from advances
elsewhere. In Brazil, for example, some roads have been privatized, and the road
management contracts include incentives for the contractor to reduce roadkill.
Crossings feels like news because, to most of us, “road
ecology” is a new and unexplored science. Indeed, Goldfarb interviews an
old-timer who says, “I remember when we made that term up.” Readers thus experience
a narrative of unfolding knowledge: early pioneers simply counted roadkill, while
today’s researchers can use data and genetics to answer increasingly
sophisticated questions such as where exactly to put crossings (from pinpointed
vehicle crash data) to analyses of chemicals in the tissues of roadkilled creatures
(from the U.K.’s pungently named “Project Splatter”) to how inbreeding (caused
by the road and its traffic, what Goldfarb calls a “moving fence,” reducing the
number of potential mates) can increase the likelihood of extinction.
Not crossing reduces roadkill but at the price of thwarting migrations to and from important habitat. Animals can die from collisions, but animal populations can die from avoiding collisions.
Goldfarb almost turns that old Greater Yellowstone bugaboo,
“multiple jurisdictions,” into a positive. In the Washington Cascades, he
notes, a Forest Service biologist was especially keen on overpasses, and
eventually convinced collaborating agencies to join in. (Some Forest Service employees
have been especially keen on road ecology because so much valuable habitat in national
forests is bisected by superhighways.) On the Flathead reservation, success
came from listening to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes’ insistence
on doing things differently. Empowering their perspective—best summarized as “the
road is a visitor”—led to major advances.
In other words, road ecology is shaped by human ecology. As
we grow in our understanding of different cultures, and our ability to
synthesize solutions from the best of those cultures, we become better able to
mitigate the impacts of roads.
There’s much to provide hope. We learn more every year. Yet as
Goldfarb notes, roads, traffic, sprawl and motor-dependent recreation keep
increasing. “The essential insight of road ecology is this: roads warp the
earth,” he writes. The effects are worse than dams, poaching, megafires, oil
spills, and other oft-bemoaned trends. The great value of Crossings is
to help us see.
IMPLICATIONS FOR GREATER YELLOWSTONE
Like any form of ecology, road ecology is not only complex,
but context-specific. Each landscape and situation and form of interaction may
result in different dynamics and different benefits from any proposed action. And
that complicates the task of turning insights into policy.
For example, should we prioritize wildlife crossings within
Yellowstone National Park itself? On the one hand, there’s plenty of wildlife,
a “single” landowner, and the opportunity to simultaneously address traffic
problems. In Alaska, Denali has restricted private vehicle travel on its road
since 1972, and sometimes protects wildlife by closing its road even to buses. A
park in Brazil simply closes its roads at night, so that the landscape can
again belong to the animals. Each park is different, of course, and Yellowstone
faces unique challenges.
A 2017 bison jam in Hayden Valley, Yellowstone National Park. CC photo
Nevertheless, there are interesting parallels to a century
ago. In the three years prior to August 1, 1915, Yellowstone spent $2.2 million
to buttress bridges, install culverts, build retaining walls, and otherwise
retrofit its road system to handle automobiles. That budget, which came from
the U.S. Army—then managing the park—was almost ten times the inaugural 1916
budget for the entire National Park Service. (It was recouped in part through an
entry fee of $10 per vehicle, which would be $288 in 2023 dollars.) Might a
similar retrofitting of park infrastructure—this time to accommodate science
and wildlife—deserve similar investment today?
On the other hand, there are also reasons to deprioritize new crossings within the
park, most fundamentally that the
road ecology inside Yellowstone is different from outside Yellowstone. For
example, park tourists are generally willing to stop and let bison cross the
road in front of them. Roads are narrow and speed limits low. Structures such
as the 1939 Gardner River Bridge, east of Mammoth Hot Springs, already provide
admirable space not just for the river but also for animals to safely cross underneath.
Such structures arguably contribute to the park’s aesthetics, whereas many modern
crossing solutions—such as eight-foot roadside fences to funnel animals toward underpasses—might
detract from the visitor experience.
Looking to the south, the Gardner River Bridge spans the Gardner River at the North Entrance Road in Yellowstone National Park, July 1983. Photo courtesy Library of Congress
In the past few decades, wildlife advocates have
increasingly focused on creating interregional wildlife corridors to allow for
populations to mix and decrease the likelihood of localized extinctions.
Without corridors, individual animals could thrive within Yellowstone even as
their species was doomed because their gene pool couldn’t also include animals
from elsewhere.
The barriers to those corridors are typically roads. These
may be multilane interstate highways with speeding vehicles, and they may also
be county or state roads; they may pass through a patchwork of landownership
and land-use patterns. In other words, they may pose huge practical challenges
to constructing appropriate solutions. And in the big picture, they may deserve
higher priority than crossings within national parks.
SCIENCE TEES UP SOCIETAL CHOICES
The situation is further complicated by a changing climate,
and the human migrations it causes. Do we build more crossings where we expect
or hope that charismatic species may move as their current habitat gets too
warm? Do we also focus on trailheads, mountain biking routes, and scenic areas
that fuel amenity-based growth—a companion field known as “recreation ecology”—because
the human side of the ecological equation is just as important? Do we build
more crossings in the fastest-growing, wealthiest communities because that
would also save the lives of more BMWs?
“The essential insight of road ecology is this: roads warp the earth,” Goldfarb writes. The effects are worse than dams, poaching, megafires, oil spills, and other oft-bemoaned trends. The great value of Crossings is to help us see.
Our roads have disrupted wildlife migrations and ecosystems
in ways we didn’t understand when we built the roads. Now that we understand,
we must do something. To be effective, that “something” will need to be on the
level of altering our infrastructure rather than altering our individual
behaviors—such is the extent to which humans’ genius for collaboration has
altered ecosystems.
Of course, any “something” we do would represent further
micromanagement: Choosing which species to save, and how. “We built roads to
subjugate nature,” Goldfarb writes, and thus created a situation in which we
have “no choice but to subjugate it further.”
Yet as Goldfarb highlights, the "Road Era" has also been full
of conservation success stories. Many of them have happened in Greater
Yellowstone, including saving bison from extinction, recovering grizzly
populations, and making the Path of the Pronghorn the country’s first federally
designated wildlife migration corridor. Crossings helps us all imagine how
scientific advances could power the next generation of success stories.
Mountain Journal is the only nonprofit, public-interest journalism organization of its kind dedicated to covering the wildlife and wild lands of Greater Yellowstone. We take pride in our work, yet to keep bold, independent journalism free, we need your support. Please donate here. Thank you.
About John Clayton
John Clayton writes the newsletter Natural Stories. His
books includeWonderlandscape: Yellowstone National Park and the Evolution of an American Cultural Icon, The Cowboy Girl, and Natural
Rivals: John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the Creation of America’s Public Lands. He has lived in Greater Yellowstone since 1990.
