HOW CAN I hate roads? They are the way we pass through this world, the way we visit each other, the way we connect places. They are the formula by which my beloved comes home to me. They are the romantic vias to other lives, other possibilities. They are the way we enter the world of humans.
In 1979 C. R. Ferris determined that in Maine each kilometer of I-95 built displaced 130 pairs of breeding birds, which translated into 62,400 pairs of breeding birds along the 480 kilometers of I-95 in the state. For a roadway that is 30 meters wide, each kilometer of length deletes 750 acres of active or potential wildlife habitat.
A 1983 study found that 6.3 million kilometers of roadway took up 20 million acres in land surface across the United States, an amount that equals the combined area of all our national parks.
In the natural history of roads, human passages evolved from path to trail to trace to way to lane to road, but at some point the meaning of the word road changed. As long as humans perambulated, we had no need for a thoroughfare wider than our swinging arms. As long as we drove horses, we had no need for roads wider than a team, with maybe, in populated areas, a lane for wagons to pass. Roads connected people to each other, threads through wilderness.
Road once was a verb meaning “to join”; now it connotes “divide.” In our past one hundred years of life in this country, since the Model T was created in 1908 following the invention of the automobile in Europe, our roads have ever widened, until they became great swaths gouging through the landscapes. The widest road I have ever seen was in Los Angeles, about 24 eighteen-wheeler-width paths, half going one way and half the other. Dividing everybody from everybody. Each person in his or her own car, divided.
Roads may bisect home ranges established by wide-ranging mammals or birds, territories that we cannot see with our eyes the way we can see picket fences and NO TRESPASSING signs, and sometimes roads divide natural migration routes. It is along roadways that exotic, often invasive, species get introduced and spread.
Roads are sometimes useful to animals. Roads may offer the opportunity for unhindered movement, as with panthers and bears in the Everglades, and often roadways provide new food sources, such as spilled grain, food thrown out car windows, and carrion. Bald eagles, for example, are seen dining on roadkill (which makes them more vulnerable to accidents). In some cases the roadways provide new habitat, especially for species such as the gopher tortoise that need clearings.
We mistakenly think that four-lane roads into rural areas will bring prosperity and development. We build interstates and parkways that allow fast travel, such as the road that quickly brings Atlantans to coastal Georgia, Highway 441, and these roads bypass the rural towns that have survived in part because of the business of passers-through. These new roads are not moderate in size and structure. On the contrary. New roads being built in Georgia, as previous governor Roy Barnes explained, “to bring a four-lane within twenty miles of any Georgian” are violently immoderate. But a four-lane interstate highway, being wider and paved, has greater effect on a landscape than a two-path road.
New highways everywhere (check out Mississippi) are unnecessarily destructive to life. In the worst-built roads, two directions of traffic are separated by a wide, ecological dead zone of median, mostly free of trees in case of accidents, and the shoulders of the road are at least a hundred feet wide, planted with high-maintenance grass. These roadways cut a swath one-eighth of a mile wide through the countryside.
Loss of land is a passive form of fragmentation. The automobiles that accompany the roads are active fragmentation. In 1974 more than 146,000 deer were killed on U.S. highways. Highway collisions accounted for 45 percent of all known panther deaths in the 1980s. In a 2.9-mile section of highway crossing Paynes Prairie, a state preserve in Alachua County, Florida, 13,000 snakes were counted dead from highway collisions, in a study that lasted four and a half years. The reptiles, which totaled about 1.3 tons, were killed crossing the portion of Highway 441 that bisects the preserve, or while sunning on the pavement. On a single day—February 22, 2000—90 roadkilled turtles were collected on a one-third-mile section of U.S. Highway 27 in Leon County, Florida, by biologist Matthew Aresco of Florida State University. The road bisects Lake Jackson. In England a 1987 study by the Fauna and Flora Preservation Society found that British drivers kill more than 20 tons of toads per year. A 1980 study in the Netherlands discovered that over 800,000 birds and mammals are killed per year on Dutch highways.
In addition, automobile emissions ranging from heavy metals such as lead to monoxide-laden exhaust fumes contaminate the rights-of-way. One scientist, P. F. Scanlon, studied small mammals next to highways and learned that they carry greater concentrations of heavy metals than small mammals found elsewhere. In addition, chemical herbicides are commonly used to maintain rights-of-way, and these impact not only inhabitants of the roadways, but the animals that prey on them.
In many cases four-lanes (like Wal-Marts and other chain stores) are built where they are not wanted or needed. Even if needed, a four-lane highway can minimize its impact on wildness and vital environmental processes.
I have become increasingly bitter about the ignorance of the federal Department of Transportation, state road departments, and county road supervisors. I am convinced that a road-building lobby as organized and destructive as the development lobby is driving new road-building projects. Many roads are wasteful. Many are unnecessary. Dare me to say it—all are contrary to environmental ethics, and all are enemies of wild America.
Wildlife underpasses are another kind of corridor. Wildlife agencies are experimenting with wildlife crossings in Lake and Collier counties in southern Florida, where bears are especially hard-hit. A guidewall and culvert system at Paynes Prairie, Florida reduced mortality of fauna by 64 percent (excluding birds and tree frogs, the ecopassage reduced wildlife mortality by 93 percent). At Lake Jackson, a temporary fence that guided reptiles toward culverts has helped reduce wildlife carnage until a permanent ecopassage can be built. These crossings are expensive, particularly when roads must be retrofit, but are being used by a menagerie of wildlife, with varying and often great degrees of success.