Factually! with Adam Conover - How Roads Actually Divide Us with Ben Goldfarb

Episode Date: October 18, 2023

We often perceive roads as connectors, expanding our world and improving our quality of life. However, roads, from the smallest hiking trails to vast multilane highways, have profound and unseen effects on the fundamental ecology of our environment. They divide us in unforeseen ways, influencing everything from the survival of wildlife to the average human lifespan. In this episode, Adam is joined by Ben Goldfarb, a conservation journalist and the author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future of Our Planet, to discuss responsible approaches for preserving our interconnected world. Find Ben's book at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAboutHeadgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgumSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. You know, if you're like most Americans, you probably spent some time in a vehicle on the road today. You drove or maybe you got a ride to work, school, or just about any other imaginable place. Roads are pretty much the most basic physical infrastructure that connects our society together. We even use roads as a measure of societal success and accomplishment, whether we're talking about Eisenhower's interstate highway project back in the 50s or the glory of ancient Rome. For our world to work, we need roads,

a lot of them. America itself has over four million miles of roads, and the vast majority of them were all built in the last century. And the world combined has 10 times that. We expect roads to be near to us, to be close at hand, to be in good condition. And if you live anywhere near a city to be plentiful as hell, because roads are so essential, though, we don't think much about their impact. It's easy to imagine roads as something that exists on top of the world, right? Something somehow separate from it. But that is absolutely not the case. Roads cut right through habitats, geographies, cities, and ecosystems. What for us is a convenience and a God-given right is for a mountain lion or a deer, an obstruction, a wasteland, or a potential death sentence. For animals, the ones that are still left on this planet,

roads are a drastic and dangerous transformation of the world around them. And we now know that roads have a massively negative environmental impact. We think of roads as connecting, but we don't think enough about what they cut off, not just for animals, but for human society as well. So just what is the impact of roads on our planet and on our lives as humans? And is there anything we can do about it? Well, to answer that question,

we have an amazing guest today. But before we get to him, I want to remind you that if you want to support this show, you can do so on Patreon. Just head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of this podcast, ad-free, and a bunch of other awesome perks as well. And if you want to come see me on tour as a stand-up comedian, head to adamconover.net.

I'd love to see you at an upcoming stand-up show. I'm touring all around the country. New dates added all the time. Now, this week on the show, we have an incredible guest. His name is Ben Goldfarb, and he's the author of a new book called Crossings, How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet. Please welcome Ben Goldfarb. Ben, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thanks so much for having me. Okay, so you have a book. The thesis of the book is that roads, the very thing I used to get to the studio today, are bad. What the fucking why? Yeah. Driving ruins everything. That could be the sub-saddle of the book. Roads we think of as being these sort of symbols of freedom and connectivity. We all love going on road trips and

getting places in our car. Roads are so useful, right? But, you know, the thesis of the book is basically that for all of the non-human animals out there, the deer and the raccoons and the opossums and everything that's basically not us, you know, roads are this ecological debacle on a truly massive scale. And how so? Why is that? I mean, it's just like a little strip of asphalt. What's the big deal? Yeah, I mean, you know, certainly like the most conspicuous manifestation of how roads screw up nature is roadkill, right? We've all seen the dead critter lying by the side of the highway. I think that we kind of tend to dismiss roadkill as being a real biological crisis. But, you know, more than a million animals are killed in the U.S. every day by cars.

And roads are an existential threat to all kinds of critters like the Florida panther and the tiger salamander. So roadkill, this incredibly mundane phenomenon that we all drive by a million times a day without thinking about it, is really one of the great ecological catastrophes on our planet. It's one of the causes of the sixth extinction event that we're all living through right now. I mean, I wouldn't have imagined the numbers would be that large, right, of roadkill,

but I suppose it makes sense. I mean, you've got this strip in what was previously in many areas of forest where suddenly there's incredibly large metal objects moving through at a very high rate of speed. It's very dangerous and it's not something that, you know, animals, I guess, evolved to be aware of, right? Well, right. I mean, that's exactly the problem, you know, is the way that cars kind of hijack evolutionary history. You know, you think about all of the,

you know, the common critters that we have in North America, you know, the porcupines, you know, the common critters that we have in North America, you know, the porcupines, which have quills and skunks, which spray and, you know, opossums that play possum and, you know, and snakes that, you know, use their venom defensively, right? It's like, these are all these good kind of stand your ground strategies that work really well against a coyote or a hawk or some natural predator. But, you know, when you. But when you've got an F-150 barreling down I-70 at 80 miles an hour, the worst thing you can possibly do is stand your ground, right? So all of this, I mean, cars basically take evolution and render it maladaptive. I think that's one of the really kind of horrific and tragic things about cars.

And cars have not been around that long, less than a hundred years have we been driving at that rate of speed. And so there hasn't been time for evolution to evolve anything to compensate for that. Like I was kind of having fun imagining what an evolutionary adaptation to traffic would be like, I don't know, maybe you could inflate or or or I don't know, move move across the road very quickly, I suppose. Yeah. Or really far or something. Yeah. Yeah. Or maybe maybe resemble a car coming in the opposite direction to cause the driver to swerve. Right. If you could like have two headlights pop out and sort of whatever mimicry move. pop out and sort of whatever mimicry move. But that would take a couple million years. You're right. There is one really cool study about road-driven evolution.

There's this fantastic paper about swallows, cliff swallows, that build those little mud nests on the undersides of highway bridges and overpasses. Yes. You can see the swallows flying around. And basically what researchers found is that, you know, over the course of just a few decades, so really like the geologic blink of an eye, you know, cliff swallows have actually evolved to get shorter wings. And the reason for that is that if you have long wings, that's good for flying long directions and straight lines. But if you have short wings, that's good for making lots of tight turns and rolls. It's good for that

maneuverability that you'd use to get out of the way of an 18-wheeler, you know, barreling down the highway. So as a result, all of the long-wing swallows are getting weeded out of the population by vehicles, and the short-wing swallows are being selectively favored. So evolution is actually happening really rapidly because of our roads, which is which is pretty, pretty amazing to think about. OK, that's a very quick evolutionary adaptation. But I mean, most animals are not going to have that opportunity. It normally takes, you know, thousands or millions of years to evolve something as complex as venom or, you know, a startle, you know, stand your ground response, right? Totally. Yeah. I mean, the cliff swallows are definitely the exception, not the norm. And, you know, most animals just are not able to

cope with, you know, with vehicles, which is, you know, a huge part of why they're so destructive, definitely. Okay. But look, I think if you're coming on here to say, Hey, roadkill is bad. People will say, yes, I agree, but come on. Like, you know, roads are, it's a small strip, right? Um, there are still many, many, you know, millions of acres of wild places here in America, especially if you go to, I don't know, States like Montana or, or, uh, you know, even many parts of California, you know, you, you know, I. I fly a lot. You look down, you see one little road going all the way across the desert with miles and miles of desert on either side, right?

And so how bad could this problem really be on a large scale? Yeah, it's a great point. I mean, I think that one of the things that people fail to realize that you certainly don't notice when you're just looking down at a road from above is roads, despite being these little slender asphalt ribbons are actually

huge forms of habitat loss, right? You can see, you know, you could imagine a herd of migrating elk or antelope, you know, these animals that have to move across large landscapes to find food and water and shelter and all the stuff they need, just like people, right? And when they hit, you know, an interstate like I-70 or I-80 or I-90, you know, there's this kind of constant stream of traffic driving along, you know, this kind of this phenomenon that some biologists have called the moving fence, just this impenetrable wall of traffic. And animals are reluctant to try to break through that wall, right? Nobody wants to, you know, dart across, you know, a 200 foot wide interstate highway that's, you know, that's trafficked by 20,000 cars a day, right? So when animals fail to even attempt to cross the highway, they're losing access to all of that habitat that they need to survive. So they're actually... It's a wall. It's a wall, exactly. It's a wall of vehicles. And, you know, there are some really horrific stories of, you know, after the interstate highways were built of these big herds of

deer and elk and other migrating animals that actually starve en masse because they have to kind of keep going to get to their, you know, low elevation winter pasture where they can find food, you know, in the snowy months, but they hit that wall of traffic and they don't try to cross and they just end up dying as a result. So the road's not killing them directly, right? It's the habitat loss that's caused by the road. That's the big problem. Right. If you take a large habitat, a large plains that a group of animals might use, and you just put one road across the middle, you've taken away half of the habitat for those animals if they're stuck on land.

That's the only way to move across because you've divided it into two. And also you mentioned the sixth extinction. I read Elizabeth Colbert's book a number of years ago, incredible book. And she talks about how humans doing that to animal habitats, subdividing them or connecting habitats that didn't exist, but weren't connected before, like is just generally numerically reduces

biodiversity on a massive scale. Is there an impact here as well? Oh, I mean, a huge one. Yeah. You know, I think that, that, that fragmentation of habitats, you know, which roads really inflict is, is one of the huge contributors to that, this, you know, massive extinction event that we're, we're living through. Right. And it's not just those migrating animals. You can imagine a big critter like a mountain lion or a grizzly bear. These are big animals that need lots of prey and they patrol huge territories and they have to wander these enormous swaths of intact habitat. So if you get a bunch of highways that fragment that habitat and prevent them from seamlessly moving across the landscape, I mean, that's potentially fatal to

them. There are some horrific cases of populations of mountain lions, for example, that have become inbred because no new mountain lions can enter the population and, you know, none of the mountain lions in the population can leave because they're surrounded. They're on these little islands of habitat surrounded by oceans of freeways and they have to end up mating with their own daughters and granddaughters and great granddaughters. The population gets super inbred and declines over time. So yeah, no question that, you know, that roads are, even when they're not killing animals directly in the form of roadkill, even when they're not killing animals directly in the form of roadkill, they're still preventing critters from getting to the places they need to

go and curtailing their lives as a result. And it's so striking that what for us is a form of connection and convenience, right? It allows, for instance, for an isolated population of humans, a road might allow more diversity, right? It might allow people to come in and go, might allow that date who you've never met before, that sex partner who is not from your town and came from the big city. It could bring a little bit of, you know, a new, you know, a little bit of a spice to your footloose town, right? That's what a road represents to humans. a little bit of a spice to your footloose town, right? That's what a road represents to humans. To animals, it represents like it can create separation and isolation and deprivation.

You mentioned mountain lions. There's a really great example of that here in LA where I live. Famously, I'm sure you know this story. There's a mountain lion named P-22 who crossed multiple freeways to cross the Santa Monica, you know, the normal range of these mountain lines would be the Santa Monica Mountains, which are now subdivided by freeways. This one mountain line crossed multiple freeways to enter Griffith Park, which is the biggest urban park in LA.

It's a big mountainside and lived there for, I believe over a decade, just eating like, I don't know, rats and bunnies and things like that, but became sort of a symbol of the city, very beloved resident. People would be very excited when they saw P-22, except that it was fundamentally sad because he had no mate. He had no ability to sort of have a full mountain lion life.

He was essentially like almost rendered into a zoo animal and eventually died when he was hit by a car and, you know, was injured. And I'm sorry to end the story on a down note, but it was just such a it was like it was a very traumatic event for the city when this happened because he was so beloved. And, yeah, it's it's it's real what you're talking about. Yeah, it's real what you're talking about. Yeah, totally. I'm glad you mentioned P-22 because he is kind of building this gigantic wildlife overpass over the 101 that will allow those little inbred, that little inbred cluster of Santa Monica mountain lions to disperse out and will allow new lions from elsewhere in California to disperse into that little island of habitat. It'll encourage that kind of genetic interchange that that Santa Monica population needs to survive in

the long term. And, you know, certainly that incredible bridge that's being built right now wouldn't have happened without P-22 galvanizing the city and raising awareness about, you know, the fate of these animals. So P-22, you know, he definitely suffered an awful end, but he kind of died a martyr. You know, Adam, the rest of his family is ultimately going to benefit from his sacrifice to lion kind. I mean, there are murals of this mountain lion all over Los Angeles. It is, you know, such a beloved story and a beloved figure. And I didn't realize they actually are building that wildlife corridor. I knew there was plans to, but it's under construction now? It's under construction now.

It'll be completed by 2025. What is that going to look like? Like, just paint a picture for us of what that is. Yeah, it's a really amazing structure. Almost calling it a bridge is, I think, kind of a misnomer because it's really going to be this. I mean, one planner described it as, you know, architecturally solid terrain through which the highway must pass. It's basically this brand new ecosystem, you know, almost as wide as it is long, that's going to have shrubs and

chaparral and oak trees and all kinds of little habitat features on it. Because, you know, mountain lions, yes, they're sort of the symbol of the divisiveness of the 101, this giant freeway, but, you know, there are also coyotes and deer and bobcats and lizards and birds and insects, right? There are all of these other species that are also suffering due to the division and the fragmentation created by the freeway. And, you know, the designers and the landscape architects who are building this thing have to think about all of those different animals, right, and create the habitat features that they all need, whether that's, you know, little log jams for rodents or rock piles for snakes or, you know, or oak woodlands for deer. You know, you have to think

about the entire ecosystem. So it's really going to be this whole new chunk of land that's going to span the 101. It's incredibly exciting. And do we think that animals are actually going to be able to use this? Because I imagine, you know, these are not people, right? They're smart and they're adaptable, but are they going to realize, hey, if I want to cross this thing, I got to go a mile south because that's where the crossing is, you know? Yeah, I think so. You know, it's one of the really important pieces of this whole construction, and this is true of any wildlife crossing, you know, is you have these roadside fences that kind of lead the animals to the crossing, right? So if you're a mountain lion and you're looking to, you know, you're looking to disperse into a new habitat, you're wandering along, you know,

you reach the 101 and then you hit a fence and you, you know, you turn right and you follow the fence line looking for a way across. And then, oh, suddenly here's this amazing bridge that you can use, right? So the animals don't necessarily know to use the structure unless you've got the fences along the road that kind of direct them or funnel them to the crossing. Ah, I see. So we're sort of, sort of inclining them. Hey, if you go this way, maybe there'll be some nice stuff down there and they can sort of follow the, follow the path, kind of like a wayfinding at an airport. Just go this way.

We're just going to let you know, if you go this way, you'll get to the right spot. But look, that's one project I assume constructed at the cost of many millions of dollars because of because of one celebrity mountain lion. Is our projects like that really capable of addressing the scale of this problem? And by the way, there's just one of the problems with the roads. We haven't even gotten into the others. Yeah. Yeah. It's you know, it's it's it's an awesome question, Adam. I mean, I think that, you know, look, certainly we know that these projects are broadly good. Right. You know, they're I mean, there have been, you know, it's an awesome question, Adam. I mean, I think that, you know, look, certainly we know that these projects are broadly good, right? You know, I mean, there have been, you know, several thousand of them built in the U.S.

and, you know, and many thousands more in Europe and other places. And, you know, we know that they work in reducing roadkill, in many cases dramatically, you know, by more than 90 percent. And, you know, helping animals get to the places they need to get to, right? So, you know, we know that, you know, these wildlife crossings are good. They often actually pay for themselves by preventing lots of dangerous crashes, right? You can imagine that when, you know, when you hit a deer. They're good for, they're good for, for like motorist safety as well. They're good for motorist safety, right? You know, when you hit a deer, you know, that messes your shit up, right?

Of course, yes. You're right. You've got the, you know, you've got the hospital bills if you're injured. You've got the vehicle repairs, the insurance costs, the tow trucks. You know, the average deer collision costs more than $9,000 and all of these different expenses. So, you know, if you can build these wildlife crossings with the fences that, you know, prevent those dangerous crashes, those dangerous and expensive crashes, you know, you can actually save a lot of money in the long run, right? So, you know, we know that these things are good.

But at the same time, you know, as you're alluding to, I think we can't build them everywhere, right? You know, there are just so many thousands of, you know, places out there where, you out there where roadkill is an issue. I mean, certainly, wildlife crossings, they're better than not having them. Absolutely, they work. But, you know, they don't exactly cure all of the problems that, you know, our obsessive car culture creates in this country. That's for sure. Yeah. All right. Well, before we get to what those actual solutions might be or those broader solutions, let's talk about more of the problems. I like

problems more than solutions almost. They're more fun to talk about. Now, we've talked about animals that are crossing by land, getting hit by cars. What about birds? I mean, birds can fly right over. Do birds have problem with roads as well? Yeah. I mean, birds get hit all the time. over. Do birds have problem with roads as well? Yeah. You know, I mean, birds, birds get hit all the time. Um, unfortunately I, I hit an owl. I hit an owl. Yeah. I was, I was pretty traumatized. You wrote this book and you hit an owl. I hit an owl the week that the book came out. That was, that's this, that's one of my great shames. Um, yeah. A wise owl full of knowledge about what we could be doing better. And you killed it with your chevy tahoe or what was it what he wasn't he wasn't that wise clearly adam if he you know swooped

in front of the in front of my subaru cross track um oh subaru all right and you think you're all earthy crunchy with the subaru and here you are murdering owls. Okay. Yeah, I didn't feel great about it. Well, now that I've confessed my sins, what was the last animal that you hit, Adam? I don't drive. I famously don't drive. No. I didn't know that about you. Okay.

You're a better man than me. But the bus I rode probably has hit a lot of finches, I would imagine. A couple pigeons. So, you know, I'm not blameless. And by the has hit a lot of finches. I would imagine a couple of pigeons. Uh, so I, you know, I'm not, I'm not blameless. Right. And by the way, a lot of shit comes to me just because I don't drive doesn't mean like I'm not benefiting from roads. Like all my packages come on roads. You know what I mean? Like, like it's roads everywhere, man. You don't get to opt out of using roads. Yeah. Those are, those are blood packages, dude.

using roads. Yeah. Those are, those are blood packages, dude. Okay. We're all sinners here. We can all admit it. Um, and we'll, you know, we'll, we'll, I'll go home and pray to the owls that we murdered every single night. Uh, what kind of owl was it? Uh, I, I don't, I don't know. I, I, yeah, I, I couldn't, uh, I couldn't, I couldn't find him. Um, I was, it happened, it all happened so fast, you know, how did you know it was an owl? Was it the, was it like, did you hear like a whoop like right before the splat? I did not hear a doomed final hoot, but you know, it was just a, I'm sort of inferring it was, it was a very large bird flying at night.

Um, I think it was probably an owl. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, you were Anyway, you were asking about birds before I just took the opportunity to confess my sins for no reason. And I'm so glad that you did. Yeah, no. You're sort of like a priest. You're taking my roadkill confession. That's what people come here to do, man. That's what the show's all about is this is where we're really honest and we confess what animals we murdered. But back on to birds. Right. Yeah. So.

So, you know, so one of the big problems that roads cause that, you know, I think we don't really think about is road noise pollution. Right. That's a really good one. You've got the engine noise. You've got the tire noise. You actually most of what you're hearing when you hear, you know, an interstate kind of hissing along. That's actually mostly tire noise, not the engine, right? So, electric vehicles are not going to, you know, save us from all of that road noise. And you think about, you know, you think about the owl that I unfortunately hit, you know, I mean, that's an animal with incredibly keen hearing, right? An animal that makes its living with its hearing, you know, has to listen for the little creeping footsteps of a mouse or a vole in the underbrush, right? And, you know, if you have, you know, this half mile wide

strip of noise pollution created by the highway, I mean, that's functionally a half mile of habitat loss, right? If the owl can't hear that mouse because the sound is drowned out by engine and tire noise, you know, the owl can't live there. So again, we return to this idea of the road as being this super narrow strip, and yet that kind of noise envelope can be a couple miles wide, and it's affecting every critter within its purview. Right. And I think we've all had the experience of going on a hike in a place where you're like, what a wonderful natural habitat. And you're enjoying getting out there in nature. Like everything is so fresh and peaceful. And then you things get really quiet and you're like, I can hear the road. I can hear it. It's like it's just over there. And maybe it's a mile away. You can still hear it. And it, you know, the sonic landscape is something that, that animals actually use to navigate, right? Totally.

Yeah. It's, it's really, it's really challenging. And there's, there's this great study, this experiment that I write about in the book called the phantom road. And, you know, basically what researchers did is they, they recorded the sound of traffic and then they played the sound of traffic through speakers in this roadless area. There's no physical road, just the noise pollution of the road. And they found that all of these birds avoided that area. And the birds who stuck around, actually, they were in worse shape. So,

the reason for that is that if you're a little... Imagine being a little sparrow, and you get eaten by everything, hawks and falcons and foxes and bobcats and all kinds of other critters. And you're constantly just listening for the flap of a hawk's wings or the sound of that fox creeping through the brush, right? But again, if those acoustic signals are drowned out by all of that road noise, you have to look around for predators constantly instead of listening for them. And every second that you're looking around is a second that you're not eating berries or insects or whatever you eat, right? So the birds in this case, all of these little migratory songbirds that need to put on fat to complete these multi-thousand mile journeys,

they basically lost weight and they were less fit to migrate because the noise of that road just masked their predators and they were sort of constantly vigilant as a result. That's really, I mean, it's a really cool finding, but can we admit that sometimes scientists, their plans for studies are kind of lazy and obvious, you know what I mean? We went and we played loud sound in the forest and the birds left like, oh yeah, I went to a library and I put on a Motorhead album on a boom box and everyone yelled at me. Like, it's a very obvious, it's like, yeah, of course they don't like, of course they don't like the sound, but I guess it, it sort of illuminates something that we don't, we don't often think about, which is that really powerful effect. And I know that that amount of sound is it's rare now to even find a place that it does not have human sound coming somewhere.

I forget the name of it. I read an article years ago about a guy who does field recordings. And one of his goals is to go to different places in the natural, maybe you know his name, different places in the natural world where there is no human sound and just record the sounds there because these are like endangered soundscapes. Because almost anywhere that you go, you will eventually hear, if you don't hear a road, you'll eventually hear a plane or some other sort of human sound. And when you think about the number of uses that animals use it for finding each other, communicating with each other, listening for prey, listening for predators, you know, all those sorts of things,

it's like we're taking away one of their senses. Yeah, no question. I mean, silence is sort of this scarce and endangered resource, right? And it's, you know, it's not just wild animals, you know, it's us too. You know, I think we're so, we're so kind of awash in road noise that we don't really notice it, you know, and yet road noise is, it's elevating our blood pressures, our stress levels, it's making us more susceptible to cardiac disease and stroke and diabetes and all of these other maladies. I mean, it's literally taking years off of our lives. There was this really just heartbreaking, shocking study. It's

set in Paris where they basically, you know, researchers basically compared people living in the noisiest neighborhoods to people living in the quietest neighborhoods, and the people in the noisiest neighborhoods lived three years less than the people in the quiet neighborhood. So noise alone, and most of that is road noise, is again, it's literally taking years off of our lives. And, you know, when I, as I was writing this book, my wife and I, we were living, you were living in a pretty noisy neighborhood in eastern Washington. We were in this busy arterial next to I-90. We were in a pretty loud environment. And I was reading all of this noise pollution literature.

And I was like, holy shit, this is literally killing us. So we ended up moving. And now we live on a little quiet street in the middle of nowhere, thanks in part, I think, to this realization that road noise is a chiller of humans. And how do you get to that quiet street? A road. A road on which you kill owls. I drive to it, yeah. I'm so impressed that you're a non-driver, dude. I'm really, I'm full of admiration. I didn't know that about you. No, no, no, no. It's because I'm a coward and I have bad eyesight.

I don't like doing it. And, you know, I mean, I take my fair share of Ubers, right? Because that's the, you know, I take public transportation as much as I can. I'm still using the system as much as anybody else. It's a choice that makes me more comfortable. It's not one that, you know, I can even urge upon other people, nor do I think it's sufficient to solve the problem. But I want to talk more about how roads affect us as people, not just wildlife. But we got to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more Ben Goldfarb.

so we're back with Ben Goldfarb we've been talking about how roads impact the environment so profoundly way out of proportion to what you might think based on you know our sort of limited experience with them um and you know there's a contrast there what hurts the environment versus what helps humans I want to talk more about the ways that roads hurt humans though we just talked about noise pollution how that's bad for our health. What about regular pollution? I mean, I read a couple years ago, there was a study, and I'm not gonna know the numbers, but there was a study that living close to a freeway

was very bad for your health and that the study sort of recommended homes should not be built this distance from freeways within however many feet or a quarter mile, something like that. And then the study went on to say that, in fact, most homes in Los Angeles are built that exact distance from a freeway or most people who live in Los Angeles. So are living within the danger zone that this very study said you should not live within. So and that's because of particulate, you know, I assume pollution, you know, better than I like how bad is that problem?

Yeah, it's a huge public health crisis. No doubt about it. You know, I mean, certainly you see really high rates of asthma and heart disease and cancer, you know, living in close proximity to the two major highways. And then a lot of that is, you know, is certainly due to those particulate pollutions that you're talking about. You know, I think it's important to note as well that, you know, look, roads affect all of us in some way or another. You know, again, we think about them as these, you know, these emblems of human freedom. And yet, you know, try getting around, you know, Dallas or Raleigh or, you know, LA without one, right? They're, you know, they're also impinging on our own lives in all kinds of ways. But, you know, they're not affecting us all equally. You know, I think that's another really important thing, too, is that, you know, when you look at rates of

who lives close to freeways, you know, you see that it's disproportionately communities of color, you know, it's African Americans and Latinos and Asians, You know, it's generally disadvantaged people who are sort of forced into these really dangerous and unhealthy living situations. And that's, you know, very much a kind of a deliberate artifact of history. You know, it was those urban freeways that were built through all of these American cities, you know, Miami, Minneapolis, Syracuse, basically as a way of, you know, wiping out these communities of color, these neighborhoods of color that, you know, white urban planners considered slums, you know, so let's just take, you know, I-81 or, you know, I-5 or, you know, you name the freeway and we'll

just plow it through, you know, these neighborhoods and wipe it out. So, you know, the fact that, you know, the fact that communities of color are sort of disproportionately affected by roads today, I mean, that's very much, you know, the legacy of, you know, 70 years of kind of infrastructural racism. Yes. And for those communities, those roads do exactly the same thing to humans that we're doing to the natural world where they divide the habitat in half. I mean, I read a number of years ago when I lived in New York, The Power Broker, the famous biography of Robert Moses by Robert Caro, one of the most incredible books you could read if you like history and biography. But it talks about how Moses drove freeways right through existing neighborhoods. And so imagine if you lived in what was previously a walkable neighborhood,

you know, you walk to work, you walk to the store, you've got your neighbors, et cetera, and suddenly there's a freeway going through your neighborhood that you either have to go under an underpass where it's all dark and scary, or you have to walk over an overpass like a little pedestrian bridge. Suddenly you are cut off from your own neighborhood. You used to live, you know, in a in a walkable sort of human environment. Now you live on the side of a wall full of, you know, like you say, a moving fence going 80 miles an hour that is loud and noisy and polluting you and cuts you off from your

neighbors that happened to millions and millions of Americans. Yeah, absolutely. You know, and I mean, one of the places that I went working on this book was Syracuse, where I-81 was the freeway that was just punched right through the middle of the city, again, in a very deliberate way,

sort of targeting this, you know, this vibrant African-American community that, you know, to the city's planners looked like a slum because it, you know, it had African-American community that, you know, to the city's planners looked like a slum because it, you know, it had black people in it. And, you know, and there, I mean, what, you know, what happened, you know, there was sort of the initial displacement caused by the freeway. But then there was, you know, decades afterwards of this sort of slow motion decay of neighborhoods,

you know, where people could not reach businesses, you know, grocery stores and dry cleaners and churches and each other, you know, and so you've got the sort of the immediate trauma of the freeway being built. And then you've got, you know, decades and decades subsequently of, you know, this kind of slow motion deterioration. And, you know, now Syracuse is, you know, is one of the most segregated cities in the country, you know, in large measure because, you know, this freeway just kind of plowed through the middle of it. But, you know, but there they're actually in the very gradual process of removing that viaduct, that big elevated section of freeway. They're in the

kind of the planning process right now. And, you know, The long-term plan is to tear that down and replace it with this street-level boulevard known as the community grid that's going to have houses and businesses and hopefully restore some of that vibrant urban life to this impacted neighborhood. Just because we made these infrastructural mistakes decades ago doesn't mean that we can't rectify some of those errors today. And we just so rarely think about, as I said at the beginning, even though that roads connect us, they also separate us. That, you know, the bigger a road is, the more cars can move on it. Well, the more people it connects across long distances, but the more it separates someone standing on one corner from the opposite corner.

Right. That like if you want to if you want to cross a, you know, a slow moving city street. Hey, you can probably step out into the street and just like all your friends across there. Oh, hey, how's it going? Just step up, you know, look both ways and walk. But if you're trying to cross an eight lane road, you are you might as well be looking across the Grand Canyon like you have to wait for your little prescribed moment of time, your 20 seconds that you get every five minutes that it's going to be safe for you to cross. If you're lucky, it'll be safe. And the fact that we have subdivided our entire world, we are with these chasms, these trenches of cars, these walls of

cars that make it harder for us to move around is just, we almost never think about it. How did we get ourselves into this fix where, you know, a hundred years ago, right. We hadn't, that's not what roads were to us, you know, uh, now they are, how do we get ourselves into this situation? How do we make this infrastructural mistake? Yeah, that's a really good question. You know, I think that one of the ironic things about the history of cars and roads, right, is that, you know, we think of America as having this love affair with the automobile, right? That's a term that you hear thrown around all the time, right? As though, you know, we sort of, we love these things because they permit us, you know, freedom and mobility and so on. But, you know, when the car first proliferated on American landscapes, you know, we freaking hated them, right? And, you know,

this is something that the historian Peter Norton has written about a lot, you know, the fact that, you know, when cars first enter civic life, you know, there are these giant safety parades, you know, where all of these, you know, there were these giant safety parades, you know, where all of these, you know, these children and mothers are out in the streets protesting against this dangerous new, you know, usurper that's taking over, you know, that's taking over urban life. And, you know, and early cars were, you know, they were incredibly, I mean, they're still, of course, incredibly dangerous. But, you know, at the time, per capita, pedestrian death rates were even higher. You know, nobody knew how to drive. There were no signs. There were

no safety features. You know, these things were incredibly dangerous. So people hated the car. You know, the car and the car was also, you know, it was the tool of the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers. Right. That was, you know, that was sort of who could afford early, early cars. You know, it was sort of the the hoi pollo. It was, it was the rich person's murder machine. They would, some rich guy fucking barreled through my working class neighborhood at 50 miles an hour and killed my son on his way to the child labor factory. And now, now we lost a source of income and our beautiful little boy,

people were pissed about it. Exactly. Yeah. You know, and one of the, I mean, one of the fascinating things that, you know, I did in this book was just, you know, try to sort of read about the early history of, of roadkill as well. Right. And, and, you know, one of the fascinating things is that like, you know, the early biologists, you know, who, who go out and, you know, in the 1920s to count dead woodpeckers and garter snakes and ground squirrels, you know, they're all thinking about roadkill in exactly those terms. You know, they're like, hey, cars are, they're destroying American cities, they're killing our, you know, our child on the way to the child labor factory, and they're also

killing woodchucks and, you know, and porcupines and all kinds of other critters as well. So it's, you know, this sort of concern about animals and nature emerges, I think, from this concern about cars' impact on humans. And then what happens is basically that the car wins, right? I mean, the car has really good lobbyists. You know, they're the car companies, they're the oil companies, they're the contractors who are building roads. You know, there's the, I mean, the federal government itself, you know, the Bureau of Public Roads and, you know, and all of this this sort of popular dissent, both about, you know, pedestrian deaths and about wild animal deaths all kind of gets like swept

under the rug by this, you know, incredibly powerful automotive lobby. And we still have those lobbies today. I mean, if you look at, you know, the Inflation Reduction Act, which is, you know, one of the biggest infrastructure bills we've had in a generation that's like going to create all these, you know, new green initiatives. Well, a big part of it is that, you know, the biggest investment in the green transition is for electric cars, right? Which are going to drive on roads. Like we are not investing in, you know, trains or other systems of transportation that can move more people more efficiently using less space with less destruction.

We are doubling and tripling down on roads. We're just changing the engine that's in the vehicle. And I mean, are we perpetuating the same mistake? I think in a lot of ways. Yeah. You know, I think I think that often when we think about when it were when the general public thinks about, you know, the environmental impacts of transportation, they think about the carbon emissions, right? The contribution of cars to climate change. And that's certainly that's a big thing, right? I mean, transportation, I think, is something like a quarter of our country's carbon footprint. So certainly, you know, cars are a big contributor to climate change. But, you know, it's not as though you can just, you know, go from an internal combustion engine to

a battery and suddenly our transportation infrastructure is ecologically benign, right? I mean, you know, those electric vehicles are not going to do anything about, you know, the problems we've been discussing, the roadkill, the barriers to migration, the road noise problem, the road salt problem. You know, road salt is turning all of our rivers and lakes into, you know, brackish estuaries. You've got tire particles that are, you know, killing salmon in some cases, right? You've got this whole suite of ecological problems that cars cause. And, you know, and again, as you say, you know, changing from, you know, a conventional engine to a battery is not going to solve any of those problems, right? So I think that's a lot of what,

you know, my book's about ultimately is that, look, you know, climate change is part of the ecological problem of transportation, but, you know, it's by no means the only one. And, you know, you can even imagine a world in which electrification makes some of those problems worse, right? Once it's, you know, when it's cheaper to drive because you're just plugging your car into the grid rather than filling up your gas tank, you know, you drive more more and, you know, more driving means, you know, more of all of the problems we've been talking about. So anyway, yeah, this episode is basically, you know, Adam ruins your road trip. I mean, so what do we do about this?

Because when we talk about it on that scale, it seems like part of the problem here is the problem of humanity, you know, that we have an impact no matter what we do. I remember reading years ago, I think we actually covered this on Adam Ruins Everything, that even the act of creating a path in a natural wilderness, just people walking from one place to another, you know, has some of the effects that you're talking about, where it creates a wildlife dead zone. Animals don't want to go there because they can tell some large mammals have been walking around, you know? And that's just what humans, you know, 10,000 years ago, that's what humans were doing, was creating a path from one place to another.

And once we had those paths, of course we naturally wanted more efficient ways to go from one place to another. Bad roads were a curse in America before we had the interstate. You know, we had gravel roads everywhere. It was like one of the most important infrastructure projects to improving human life in this country

was reforming our roads, paving them, you know? Like it improved people's lives. And I think about, you know, I have a very good friend of mine bought some land in Joshua Tree out in the desert. He built a home out in the desert. The very first thing he had to do was build a road to the property so he could get there. He rented a bulldozer.

He had a lot of fun building his own road. He probably knows more about roads than you do. Or at least he has some hands-on experience because he built one himself, right? hands-on experience because he built one himself. Right. So this is like, to some degree, creating an efficient corridor for movement is just part of what humans do on this planet. So are we just cursed to always have this effect on the world around us? Or is there something that we can actually do about it? That's a, that's a good, a good and big question that I don't really have a great answer to. I mean, you know, I think that, look, certainly, you know, giving people more transportation options is really important, right? Creating better transit systems that get people out of their cars, you know, is really,

really vital, you know, and that applies in sort of many different contexts. You know, you've got, I mean, certainly that's, you know, something you can do in a city and many cities are, you know, engaged in that work of, you know, improving transportation options. But, you know, you could also imagine, you know, the symbol of the American road trip is basically forbidden. And you have to, you know, get on a bus like a damn European and, you know, and experience the landscape that way. You know, I think that's an important point, right? Is that, you know, is that, yes, you know, we as humans, we are this road building species, you know, we're an infrastructure species, but, you know, it's not always we are this road building species. You know, we're an infrastructure species.

But, you know, it's not always the road itself that's the really catastrophic thing. You know, it's the traffic that drives on the road, right? And if you can reduce that traffic dramatically by consolidating people in a single bus rather than having them all strung out in their personal vehicles, right? That's, you know, that's a huge improvement for nature in a lot of ways. And it gives you options too, you know, like in Denali where, you know, they have this wonderful bus system, you know, they operate the bus system in such a way that there have to be gaps between the buses for animals to migrate, right? And that's something you can't really do that. You know, if you have 100,000 people in 100,000 personal vehicles.

Right. That's the kind of thing you can do when you have a mass transportation system. So, you know, getting people out of their cars, I think, is however you accomplish that is one of the most important things we can do for this planet. It makes me think again about Griffith Park and the city where I live, Los Angeles, one of the big tourist attractions here. There's an observatory at the top people like to go to. But you know how people get there is they drive. There's a road through the park all the way to the top. And every single time you go to this park, you know what there is?

Traffic in the park, people bumper to bumper driving to the top so they can get out and walk around a little bit. And every couple of years, someone has a plan of let's build what they have in other cities. Let's have a gondola or a funicular or something that'll get people up to the top of this park. And a lot of the neighbors say, no, that's going to destroy the park. It's a wild, natural place. There is a road in the park. We have a road in the park right now. What if we got rid of the road, turned that into a walking path or a natural habitat, and then had some sort of mass transportation up to the top? We would have a more vibrant, verdant park with more space for wildlife in it. So along those

lines, you know, if you could make some policy prescriptions for the next hundred years of transportation or roads in America, right. What, what would you suggest in terms of, you know, making sure that we aren't perpetuating these problems? Is there a, is, you know, is there a better way to organize our transportation? What is it? Yeah, good. That's a, that's another really good and big and difficult question. I mean, you know, certainly.

And we're going to end on it. And so you better have a good answer. All right. Well, I'll do, I'll do my best. I mean, you know, look, certainly we're going to end on it. And so you better have a good answer. All right. Well, I'll do my best. And that, you know, look, certainly there's no, I mean, there's no silver bullet, right? You know, you think about, okay, you know, a city like Los Angeles, I mean, certainly, you know, increasing public transit options is really important. You know, getting people out of cars is vital. But, you know, then I think about where I live. I live in rural Colorado, and it's sort of hard to imagine, yes, you know, okay, you could potentially imagine better bus service here. But, you know, it's also really hard to, like, we just don't have a dense enough population

for, you know, public transit to really be widely adopted, I think. It's just hard to imagine the transit system that is going to get people out of their cars, you know, here in the Arkansas Valley in rural Colorado, where there are, you know, 7000 people and, you know, 100000 square miles of land or something like that. Right. So, you know, and the challenge, I think, is that, you know, these rural areas tend to be where these sorts of ecological problems are concentrated right here. This is where we have, you know, big herds of elk and antelope and deer. You know, we've got mountain lions and black bears and so on, right? You know, the rural places are the places where the wildlife tends to live, you know, Santa Monica Mountains notwithstanding. And, you know, they also tend to be the places that, you know, where I think the car has America in its strongest grip and where, you know, sort of automobility is like most intractable in some ways. Right. So, you know, I think I think that it's these kinds of places, rural areas where, you know, it's hard to get people out of their cars.

you know, and there's lots of wildlife where, you know, we really need to be investing a lot, lot more in those wildlife crossings, you know, which really do work, you know, giving animals opportunities to cross highways that are inevitably going to have traffic on them, you know, and you mentioned, you know, the Infrastructure Act earlier. I mean, that, that Infrastructure Act had, you know, $350 million just for wildlife crossings, had $350 million just for wildlife crossings, which is a good pot of money. Of course, it also had $110 billion for highways and bridges, right? So we're investing more money in these sorts of solutions for animals, but we're not investing nearly enough, right? So that's something that I would certainly do as, you know, as transportations are in your hypothetical future is, you know,

in urban areas, you know, I dramatically increase transit options. And in rural areas, you know, I tack another zero or two onto the funding that we're allocating to wildlife crossings and habitat connectivity and, you know, give animals more options. And how do you reckon with on a personal level, you know, you know, all this about roads and you, you still need to use them to get around. So how do you, how do you reckon with, you know, when you're in your, your, uh, Subaru Crosstrek, uh, how, how do you feel when you start the car every morning, you know? Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, fortunately I work,

I work from home and I live in, I live in a very walkable and bikeable little town. So, you know, I'm definitely able to minimize my driving, but, you know, I certainly do it. And yeah, I feel like shit, Adam. Thanks for asking. I don't feel great about it. But, you know, I also feel like, look, I'm, you know, I mean, at risk of abdicating personal responsibility, you know, I live in this automotive society, right? You know, we live in this country that's kind of oriented around the car. And, you know, it's, I don't, I don't, I don't, you know, in the book, I really try hard to avoid blaming or shaming individual drivers for their decision to drive, right? I mean, it's, you know, it's sort of like, to me, it's sort of like climate change, right? It's like, you know, for a while, the climate movement was really focused on getting people to change their light bulbs, right? That was like the thing that was going to save us from climate change was changing their light bulbs. And then, you know, people realized that, oh, wait a second, you know, first, that's just not nearly sufficient. And second, you know, when you just kind of hector people about their

light bulbs, you know, you tend to turn them off, right? The real solutions are, you know, holding fossil fuel companies accountable for their emissions and, you know, creating a decarbonized world, right? And I think that, you know, road ecology problems kind of pose the same dilemma. You know, the issue is not that, you know, we individual consumers choose to drive. It's that we live in a world that doesn't give us many other options besides driving. And that's really the answer is to, you know, create a world in which, you know, getting in the car every day is, you know, not the only rational option for a consumer. God, I want to live in that world. And thank you for bringing us a vision of it. And the book is incredible.

It's called Crossings, How Rotacology is Shaping the Future of the Planet. You can get it at our special bookshop at factuallypod.com slash books. And when you do, you'll be supporting not just this show, but your local bookstore. Ben, where can people find your work other than that? Yeah, my personal website is bengoldfarb.com and I am perpetually on Twitter, so hit me up there, too. Ben, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been incredible. Thanks a lot, Adam, and thanks for not driving. Again, I really admire that. I respect you. Thanks for handling my good-natured ribbing about the owl. We'll all grieve later. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. later. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Well, thank you once again to Ben for coming on the show. If you loved that conversation as much as I did, consider picking up a copy of his book

at factuallypod.com slash books. And please consider supporting this show on Patreon. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free for 15 bucks a month. I will read your name at the end of this podcast and at the end of my YouTube video monologues. Most recently, I want to thank Michael Frasco and Alex Sull. Thank you so much for your patronage. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover to join them and support this show and keep it free for everybody. I want to thank my producers, Sam Rodman and Tony Wilson, everybody here at HeadGum for making this show possible. You can find me online at Adam Conover. All my standup tickets and tour dates are available there too. And I'm at Adam Conover, All my standup tickets and tour dates are available there too.

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