Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet

"Wide-ranging and absorbing.… Brilliant." -- Bill McKibben - New York Review of Books "Fascinating and compassionate." -- Emily Raboteau - New York Times Book Review "[A] swift and winding ride." -- Tess Joosse - Scientific American "Vivid [and] engaging." -- Timothy Farrington - Wall Street Journal "Perceptive.… Goldfarb charts a path toward a less destructive future." -- The New Yorker "Beyond the staggering data and the constructive ideas, Crossings is an important book because it is timely: Road ecology is bleeding into the public consciousness at a moment when we can still act on its lessons." -- Jonathan C. Slaght - Atlantic "A badly needed corrective.… [D]eserves to make the reading lists of policymakers around the world." -- Marina Bolotnikova - Vox "Deeply researched and compelling.… [O]ffers readers a look behind the scenes of a rich but underappreciated field of study that has the potential to affect our everyday lives." -- Sarah Boon - Science "Engrossing.… Goldfarb invites us to contemplate a future of roads that could be much brighter, if we would just adopt an ethic, he says, in which roads embrace the land instead of conquer it." -- Smithsonian "Delves into the burgeoning field of road ecology and introduces the impassioned, sometimes eccentric scientists who invite us to perceive our roads as animals do to better understand the ecological impacts." -- Amanda Heidt - Science News "Goldfarb’s absorbing, highly intelligent book gently shakes us awake from our ethical torpor and helps us confront the conservation problem we perpetrate each time we get behind the wheel, accept a package, or use public transportation." -- M.R. O'Connor - Undark "An elegant?at times startling?account of how our built environment has become an environmental crisis.… A manifesto against unnecessary death." -- Jimmy Tobias - Nation "The book is teeming with horrifying statistics.… While that may sound bleak, Crossings is at times surprisingly funny." -- Jackie Flynn Mogensen - Mother Jones "Chronicles the enormous ecological damage caused by roadbuilding.… Goldfarb guides the reader through an array of often heartbreaking stories." -- David Zipper - Bloomberg "[Crossings has] so many cool stories…frogs and turtles being ushered across roads by volunteer hands, a wildlife crossing for cougars in California, citizen roadkill reporting networks. In many ways, it’s a book about the people trying to correct our mistakes." -- Colleen Stinchcombe - Seattle Times "Goldfarb traveled across the country, and the globe, to learn more about how roads have shaped not just our communities but the natural world around us.… [R]oads may be nearly invisible to the modern human, just another necessary part of everyday infrastructure. But to the other species on this planet, roads have fundamentally changed their existence." -- Emily Baron Cadloff - Modern Farmer "Through expert interviews, compelling research and analysis, and dogged experiential reporting, Goldfarb brings to life some of the core impacts our 40 million miles of roads have had, and are having, on the natural world." -- Brett Berk - Car and Driver "Eye-opening.… This is a rare, beautifully written book, which tells us hard truths about roads, cars and life on Earth, but still manages to make us feel positive about the road ahead." -- Vijaysree Venkatraman - New Scientist "Crossings is science writing at its best.… [A] hopeful reminder of our responsibilities in the Anthropocene." -- Miranda Weiss - American Scholar "Written elegantly and convincingly, Crossings acknowledges that most of us can't make do without automobiles but urges individual responsibility…as well as public works initiatives of global proportions." -- David Luhrssen - Shepherd Express "A fresh and startling history.… An astute, funny, and imaginative writer, Goldfarb pairs horror with hope." -- Booklist, starred review "Illuminating, witty.… [Crossings is] an astonishingly deep pool of wonders." -- Kirkus Reviews, starred review "Captivating.… This one’s a winner." -- Publishers Weekly, starred review "Roads aren’t going away anytime soon, but Crossings will spark conversation around the future of motorized vehicles and transportation." -- Bookpage, starred review "Goldfarb writes with such grace, flair, and wit, and he reveals just how thoroughly roads have reshaped the animal world. This is one of the very best science books that I read last year." -- Ed Yong, best-selling author of An Immense World "Ben Goldfarb is the kind of gonzo environmental journalist Hunter S. Thompson would have loved. Crossings, his meditation on the ecological devastation roads and highways inflict?and on the very clever responses from humans and other creatures that road life demands?is an absolute shining star of a book. Modernity and the mobility all we Earth animals require is never going to look the same again." -- Dan Flores, best-selling author of Coyote America and Wild New World "A brilliantly panoptic look at our planet’s sprawling network of roads: what’s wrong with them, how they got that way, and how they could be set right. Precise in detail but vast in scale, Goldfarb’s storytelling carries echoes of Michael Pollan and John McPhee, but with a wry humor that is uniquely his own." -- Robert Moor, best-selling author of On Trails "Ben Goldfarb approaches our fellow animals with delighted curiosity and rare perception. A deeply researched, wonderfully vivid, and genuinely hopeful book." -- Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts "Like some David Attenborough of the asphalt, Ben Goldfarb has written a fascinating guide to understanding the wilder side of roads, both symbols of freedom and harbingers of unnatural selection." -- Tom Vanderbilt, best-selling author of Traffic "A truly important and landmark book on a subject whose full impacts continue to be disregarded or underestimated in considering conservation efforts. Crossings is a moving, compassionate, and indispensable guide to navigating the issue of wildlife survival?and our own." -- Jeff VanderMeer, best-selling author of the Southern Reach Trilogy "Crossings, Ben Goldfarb’s impassioned quest to understand the ecology of roads and its impact on the natural world, is a marvel. The reader learns something new on every page, disturbed and amazed in equal measure. Goldfarb moves us briskly along the manipulated ecosystem of the highway, with vivid, evocative pitstops for environmental history, ecology, and the built environment. With 15 million additional miles of road scheduled to be built over the globe in the near future, the time for this book is now. Crossings adds a new perspective to conversations on how humans have reshaped life on earth." -- The Whiting Award Judges' citation