About the Guest:
Ben Goldfarb is an award-winning environmental journalist and prolific author known for his focus on the intersection of human activity and wildlife. His works, including Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet, explore groundbreaking ecological concepts and have been recognized by outlets such as the New York Times. Goldfarb's influential book Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter has received critical acclaim for its insightful examination of the ecological significance of beavers. He currently resides in Colorado.
Episode Summary: In this episode of 90 Miles from Needles, host Chris Clarke engages in a thought-provoking dialogue with environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb. The focus is on the nuanced field of road ecology and its implications on desert ecosystems. Clarke and Goldfarb delve into the effects of roads on wildlife, touching on staggering statistics like the million animals killed by cars daily in the U.S. alone. They explore how roadkill, highways, and infrastructures challenge species such as desert tortoises and pronghorns in arid regions, combining environmental insight with ground-level observations. As the conversation unfolds, Goldfarb expands on the transformative role of road ecologyâa growing scientific discipline that examines the relationship between transportation infrastructures and ecological systems. He highlights pressing issues including hydrological impacts, wildlife mobility, and innovative solutions like wildlife crossings to promote ecological connectivity. Clarke and Goldfarb also explore technologies, policies, and community efforts aimed at mitigating the adverse impacts of roads on the environment, weaving in discussions on living sustainability in desert habitats.
Key Takeaways
Road Ecology Definition: Road ecology is a dynamic scientific field focusing on how transportation infrastructure affects the environment, with extended applications from mitigating roadkill to supporting wildlife crossings. Impact on Desert Ecosystems: Roads in desert landscapes alter wildlife movement and hydrology, posing severe threats to species needing extensive ranges like the desert tortoise and pronghorn.
Wildlife Crossings: Successful wildlife crossings such as the Liberty Canyon project are vital in reducing road mortality and ensuring wildlife connectivity, especially in regions with high biodiversity.
Human Infrastructure Influence: The conversation highlights how human infrastructure can drive either positive ecological developments as in beaver habitats or embody detrimental impacts like excessive road development.
Beavers in Arid Lands: Goldfarb emphasizes that beavers once played a crucial role in maintaining riparian ecosystems in deserts, underlining the potential for ecosystem restoration.
Notable Quotes
"Road ecology is this relatively small but fast-growing field of science that looks at all of the different connections between roads and nature." â Ben Goldfarb "Beavers are sort of integral to those systemsâĤ the amount of lush flourishing in desert landscapes is incredible." â Ben Goldfarb
"Every ecological impact stems from a road to some extent. Roads are the root of all evil." â Ben Goldfarb
"We happen to do it in a way that is incredibly detrimental to biodiversity." â Ben Goldfarb
"In some ways, we and beavers are these weird mirror images of each other." â Ben Goldfarb
Resources
Ben Goldfarb's Book: Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet Ben Goldfarb's Book: Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter
Donât miss out on this enlightening episode as Ben Goldfarb shares his invaluable insights into road ecology and its profound impact on desert ecosystems. Follow 90 Miles from Needles for more episodes that delve into pressing environmental issues and explore sustainable solutions.
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[UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT]
0:00:01 - (Chris Clarke): This podcast was made possible by financial support from our listeners. If you're not supporting us yet, check out nine 0 mile from needles.com. donate or text the word needles to 5355.
0:00:24 - (Joe): Think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again. It's time for 90 miles from needles, the Desert Protection podcast.
0:00:44 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you, Joe, and welcome to another episode of 90 Miles from the Desert Protection podcast. I'm your host, Chris Clarke, and today we have a real treat in store, a conversation between myself and Ben Goldfarb, a prolific author who's written a couple of really interesting books on the interface between human and wild wildlife activity. Most recently, the book how road ecology is shaping the future of our planet. Crossings came out a year ago, in September 2023. In a book, Ben travels throughout the
US, and in other places as well to investigate how roads have transformed our planet.
0:01:20 - (Chris Clarke): I was a little shocked, not surprised. But shocked, to learn that a million animals are killed by cars each day.In the US alone. But the harms of highways extend far beyond roadkill. Ben is joining us from his home in Colorado to talk road ecology, a new branch of the ecological sciences that concerns how our transportation infrastructure affects the rest of the planet.
0:01:45 - (Chris Clarke): We talk with Ben about road ecology In the desert and how roadkill, development. Wildlife crossings, and other related things all Fit into the picture of trying to live as sustainably in the desert as possible.
0:01:59 - (Chris Clarke): We also spend a little bit of Time talking about Ben's previous book, eager the surprising secret life of beavers and why they matter. Because there were beavers in the desert. There are still beavers in the desert. And I have famously boasted about my ADHD being a superpower. So that's why we're talking about beavers. In an episode about wildlife crossings in the desert.
0:02:20 - (Chris Clarke): Anyway, I hope you find it interesting. I'm very pleased that Ben had a chance to meet with us, and we'll get right to the interview. But first, I want to remind you that this podcast only happens because of support from listeners. Support from listeners. In fact, like our newest donors, Richard Boutwell and A. Bennett Ernst. Richard and Bennett, thank you very much. You can join Richard and Bennett in their attempt to make sure that we continue this podcast by going to nine 0 mile from needles.com donate. You will see a bunch of different options for how you can kick a Little bit of cash into our coffers Here to allow us to keep doing.
0:02:57 - (Chris Clarke): The work we're doing. And you know, I mention that on Just about every episode. You're used to it by now. But did you know that there are ways to help this podcast that don't involve you cracking your bank account, shelling Out your hard earned cash We recognize that times are tight, things cost more, and there are things that you can do that don't involve any Outlay of cash on your part to help us out.
0:03:20 - (Chris Clarke): If you like an episode, for instance, share it around social media. Just telling your friends, sending links to your mom and dad or your kids. Or that uncle that always annoys you At Thanksgiving with talk about dang environmentalists. You can also write a review of the podcast, which really helps us with Various algorithms on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
0:03:45 - (Chris Clarke): You can just let us know that you like the podcast. It always helps. We sometimes feel like we're laboring in isolation here. Word of mouth is really, really important. As my former co host used to say, word of mouth is both free and priceless. So with that, let's get to my conversation with Ben Goldfarb. I'm calling it a conversation rather than An interview because I talk too much for it to really be an interview, but I think you'll find it interesting.
0:04:41 - (Chris Clarke): I am very pleased to welcome Ben Goldfarb to 90 miles from needles. Ben is an independent conservation journalist of longstanding. His most recent book, how Rhodecology is shaping the Future of our Planet, was named one of the best books of 2023 by the New York Times. He has written for publications ranging from the Atlantic and Orion magazine and Yale Environment 360 to Earth Island Journal, which is very near and dear to my heart, even though I haven't edited the thing for 20 years.
0:05:18 - (Chris Clarke): And I'm just very glad, Ben, that you had a moment to join us and talk about road ecology in the desert.
0:05:25 - (Ben Goldfarb): Thanks a lot, Chris. Thanks for having me. I'm a great admirer of yours and all you've done for our protected areas and for desert ecosystems over the years. And I know we crossed paths a couple of times when you were at NPCA, and so it's a pleasure to be chatting again now. So thanks a lot for having me here.
0:05:40 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you for saying that. And what did we say? $30?
0:05:44 - (Ben Goldfarb): Yeah, that sounds about right. That's the cost of a hardcover book, so excellent. That seems reasonable.
0:05:49 - (Chris Clarke): Cool.
0:05:49 - (Chris Clarke): I got my hardcover book, so I guess we're set. So, as we mentioned when we were talking about having you on the podcast last week, there isn't a huge amount in crossings that made it to the page about the southwestern deserts, though they.
0:06:05 - (Chris Clarke): Do play a role.
0:06:06 - (Chris Clarke): But you agreed that you had found out about a lot of issues in the desert and gone to see places like wildlife crossings north of Tucson and such. So I thought it would be great to just have a conversation about what you found as you were putting a book together over the course of however many years you were doing the research, which I suspect was several.
0:06:29 - (Ben Goldfarb): It was, yeah. And I think that the lack of desert content, that was sort of more circumstantial than anything else. Most of this book I wrote while living in Spokane, and a lot of it overlapped with early Covid when we couldn't get on planes. So a lot of this book ended up being centered in places I could drive to, which meant mostly the inland northwest and the northwest. So there's plenty of Oregon, Washington, Montana, Idaho in there. And I would have loved to have included that a bit more in Arizona, New Mexico, southern California, but circumstances didn't allow. But it certainly. I've subsequently spent a lot of time in those places talking to Rhode ecologists, and I'm looking forward to chatting about roads and desert ecosystems with you.
0:07:12 - (Chris Clarke): Unusually for books that don't include the desert, I really liked this one.
0:07:16 - (Ben Goldfarb): Thanks.
0:07:17 - (Chris Clarke): I'm fully aware how much stuff gets left on the cutting room floor when you're putting together something like that, so I'm just pleased to have a chance to talk. Where would you like to start?
0:07:27 - (Ben Goldfarb): Yeah, it's a great question. I think we could start with road ecology itself, which is a term that I think is increasingly familiar and probably to listeners of a podcast like yours, is nothing, a totally unheard of term, but I think the average person. Rhode ecology is this foreign, novel concept, and it's basically this relatively small but fast-growing field of science that looks at all of the different connections between roads and nature.
0:07:54 - (Chris Clarke): Right.
0:07:54 - (Ben Goldfarb): Everything from roadkill, which is, of course, the most kind of obvious, conspicuous form of interaction between highways and wildlife, to noise pollution, to the impacts of road salt as a de icer, which, of course, isn't that huge an impact in desert landscapes, but certainly in northern parts of the US, it's a gigantic contributor to water quality decline, to the kind of the impacts of old forest service and BLM roads on landscapes, which might not get a huge amount of traffic, but to have enormous hydrological and even geological impact. So road ecology, again, it's this science that looks at all of those different connections and relationships between our transportation infrastructure and our landscapes and ecosystems.
0:08:42 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, and in the book, you explore a lot of different facets of what road ecology can apply to everything from freeways, as in your really wonderful coverage of the Liberty Canyon Route 101 crossing. That's under construction as we speak to the effects of two dirt roads on forest service lands and things like that. So it seems like it's hard to escape the effects of road ecology no matter where you go.
0:09:10 - (Ben Goldfarb): Yeah, we have, what, 4 million mile of road in the US. I mean, it's just crazy how inescapable these structures are, right? I mean, in the lower 48, you can't get more than 20 miles from the nearest road, and that's in southern Yellowstone. And it is just crazy to think about those public land roads especially. I know this is something that you've worked on over the years and thought a lot about, I mean, just how unbelievably ubiquitous those roads are.
0:09:35 - (Ben Goldfarb): I mean, I visited national forests in Idaho that have high, higher road densities than New York City, and you could say a lot of the same about southern Utah. Of course, just to name one desert landscape that's just chock full of old roads that have enormous impact. So, yeah, we just can't escape these things. And I think that part of the reason that I wrote the book is that because roads are so ubiquitous, I think we don't think about them very much, or at least historically we haven't.
0:10:03 - (Ben Goldfarb): And I think that's even true of many conservation groups, which are focused on other impacts and issues, understandably. But because roads are just so abundant and inescapable, we're a little bit blind to them. I think we take them for granted to some extent as these kind of permanent, inevitable features on the landscape. And I think I wrote this book to say, hey, let's look at these things in a new, fresh way and think about them again.
0:10:26 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, it's interesting that you suggest a bit of a blind spot with conservation organizations. From where I'm sitting, there have been really huge efforts over the last 30 years or so to get a whole lot of the California desert, and certainly Nevada, Arizona, as well protected as wilderness or as national monuments and things like that. And in 1994, the California Desert Protection act established a huge number of wilderness areas in the California desert.
0:10:55 - (Chris Clarke): There are a few that are park service, but most of them are BLM wildernesses. And there's a really easy trick for telling California desert. BLM wilderness is apart from National Park Service wildernesses, and that's the BLM wildernesses are the ones with the tire tracks.
0:11:13 - (Ben Goldfarb): Right.
0:11:14 - (Chris Clarke): And there's sort of a disconnect, I think, between the campaign to get something protected as wilderness and then providing agencies with the funding they need. Having spoken with the California desert district, BLM a lot over the last decade or so, I know that they really wish that they could do something about vehicular trespass in the wilderness and they just don't have the resources.
0:11:40 - (Ben Goldfarb): Yeah, yeah. That's a pretty common story in this book. I write less about BLM, but much more about the Forest Service, which, of course faces similar impacts from vehicles. And I think that one of the lessons, talking to Forest Service folks and reading some of the literature is that a road that is closed on paper is effectively open. Right. And even roads that are gated are effectively open. Anybody in an ATV can find their way around a locked gate and use roads. And I think that's ultimately what has to become of a lot of these redundant, obsolete public lands roads is we have to obliterate them, right. To destroy them altogether.
0:12:17 - (Ben Goldfarb): If we're going to reduce their impacts, we can't just slap a gate over them or close them on paper because, yeah, roads are. Roads have. Roads have this kind of magnetic attraction to people, right. As long as they're on the landscape, somebody in a pickup or a four wheeler is going to find their way out there. And the only way to ensure that roads go unused is to tear them up and erase that scar from the landscape altogether insofar as that's possible.
0:12:42 - (Chris Clarke): Yep, it's been interesting. I've actually found myself stepping in front of vehicles that are a mile into wilderness and telling, with only the authority that I've bestowed upon myself, telling them that they need to turn around and go away.
0:12:56 - (Ben Goldfarb): Wow. How do the drivers react to that?
0:12:59 - (Chris Clarke): Frustrated at the lack of signage. I think people do want to do the right thing for the most part.
0:13:05 - (Ben Goldfarb): Dude, that's good to hear. I thought you were going to say you've had guns pulled on you.
0:13:08 - (Chris Clarke): No. People have been pretty friendly if disappointed. There's definitely a core group of people in the California desert that resent the wilderness designations and the various levels of protection and are primed to do like a southern Utah style 24 77 type reopening of roads. But most of the people that are exploring the California desert these days are. They're younger, they weren't necessarily around paying attention, tension in 1994.
0:13:36 - (Chris Clarke): These wildernesses are the way things have been since time immemorial from their perspective. And they just. They would like to know what's permittable and what's not.
0:13:46 - (Ben Goldfarb): So I'm glad you're doing that in southern California and not North Idaho, then.
0:13:51 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. Yeah. Having being married to somebody that spent some time living in Haley, I'm anxious to get up there and look around. But it's. Yeah, Southern California is an interesting place, and it's got an increasingly diverse group of people working on conservation issues. The typical environmentalist working on desert stuff in California these days is 35 years old and brown skinned.
0:14:12 - (Ben Goldfarb): Yeah, that's great. What a cool conservation culture.
0:14:15 - (Chris Clarke): Tell me a little bit about what you were able to pick up from desert or semi arid ecosystems as you were putting this book together.
0:14:25 - (Ben Goldfarb): One thing that's really striking to me is just the kind of different hydrologic and again, even really geologic impacts that roads have in desert landscapes. I think that a lot of that, it's just about roads as this kind of interceptor and funneler of water, right? The hydrology of desert landscapes in the southwest is so unique, and roads influence that in all kinds of weird, surprising ways. I mean, I'm sure everybody listen to this podcast, right? Has driven around and seen these just incredible roadside bouquets of poppies and lupin, and just the way that roads funnel water off their crests into roadsides and really create these novel ecosystems, which to some extent happens everywhere. But again, because water is so scarce in the southwest, it's really pronounced.
0:15:17 - (Ben Goldfarb): And then, I mean, of course there's all of the desert wildlife that's really affected by roads. I mean, I think about desert tortoises as one, of course, incredibly road impacted species both by highways and by public lands, roads and atving and off roading. I mean, of course you guys have those iconic pronghorn herds in southern California that are being reestablished, and roads are an obstacle to their movements and migrations. You've got desert bighorn sheep, of course, for which some wildlife crossings have been constructed. I think that's one thing about the desert, is that, of course, wildlife is inherently mobile. You have to move around a lot, whether you're an ungulate or a tortoise. You have to navigate the landscape to find water and food and other resources in an inherently resource stressed and limited environment.
0:16:07 - (Ben Goldfarb): And roads get in the way of that. So in that sense of the impacts of roads on desert landscapes are universal in some ways, right? We know that animals all over the place have to navigate landscapes and move around. And yet I think that imperative of wildlife mobility is even stronger, more important in deserts. I don't know, what's your perspective on that?
0:16:29 - (Chris Clarke): It's interesting because the desert southwest is, I've often referred to it as the most intact large ecosystem in North America, south of the tundra, which is one of those superlatives with way too many qualifiers. But it's interesting that where the roads are, like you suggest, are often population sinks for wildlife. I mean, I'm thinking of Morningstar mine road through Mojave National Preserve, which is a continual source of mortality for one of the best pieces of tortoise habitat that's left in the desert for the western tortoise, anyway.
0:17:09 - (Chris Clarke): And at the same time, the roads are responsible for a lot of what we know about the desert. I mean, this is getting to be less and less the case. But ten years ago, if you looked at the equivalent of inaturalist Calflora or Ebert or any of those sort of crowdsourced repositories of scientific knowledge about what's living in the desert, the vast majority of the data is within a couple miles of a road.
0:17:39 - (Chris Clarke): And so there's areas where, for all we know, there could be unicorns that emerge every 15 years out of the ground when the rain's just right. And some of that is just because graduate students have survival instincts and they're not going to hike 10 miles in the summer to see something that blooms only in the summer. Right. But it's a sort of a. I wouldn't say a double edged sword, but it's a little ironic that a lot of what we know about the desert ecosystem is directly because of roads.
0:18:08 - (Ben Goldfarb): Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it's. Look, I think about every herpetologist in America has engaged in driving around at night, looking for snakes, lying on the asphalt, absorbing that last warmth from the day. So, yeah, in that sense, certainly, roads are how we understand nature in a lot of ways. Even our quote unquote protected areas are these fundamentally automotive landscapes. Right. That we drive to in a car and then visit from our car. The historians have called national parks windshield Shield Wilderness is right, which I think is such an evocative term.
0:18:39 - (Ben Goldfarb): I went to Anza Borrego for the first time this spring. And how did I get there? I drove there, obviously. And then I drove around and, yeah, I got out and walked some washes. I fundamentally visited it in a car. And so that double edged sword, as you put it, that duality, roads as these mechanisms through which we experience nature and appreciate nature and understand it, even as those same roads are destroying that nature. I find that contradiction to be so thought provoking and poignant.
0:19:11 - (Chris Clarke): And one of the big issues in the California desert right now sort of extends that even further in that an attempt to get people off the roads is actually potentially presenting a serious obstruction to migration of bighorn sheep, which is the high speed rail between the La suburbs and Las Vegas.
0:19:31 - (Ben Goldfarb): Right.
0:19:32 - (Chris Clarke): That would be in the median of Interstate 15 for almost its entire route. And because you obviously want to keep speeding cars driven by drunk people off of the tracks of the high speed rail, there's six foot concrete barriers on either side of the train right of way. And bighorn sheep do cross I 15 with a huge amount of mortality because people drive like maniacs there. But myself included on occasion.
0:20:03 - (Chris Clarke): It's not judgment. That's just fact. But without wildlife crossings, this train project would turn a dangerous crossing into an impossible one where the fatality rate would go up to something like 100%. And so over the last couple of years, my last job, we spent a bunch of time negotiating with that company and with state agencies and federal agencies trying to get three wildlife crossings added to the overall design before the final approval goes through.
0:20:33 - (Chris Clarke): There's one that might be a little tricky because it's a widely separated highway in one spot, but everything else is put down a pedestrian bridge and call it a wildlife crossing, and it would work.
0:20:46 - (Ben Goldfarb): That's great. Yeah. And there are. I mean, where are the. There are other overpasses for big horns elsewhere in the southwest, right. Are they on I eight somewhere? Where are they?
0:20:55 - (Chris Clarke): I'm not sure about I eight.
0:20:56 - (Chris Clarke): The ones I know about are around between Vegas and Kingman. Okay, so there's one on interstate eleven, which is.
0:21:05 - (Ben Goldfarb): Right. That's what I'm thinking of. Yeah.
0:21:06 - (Chris Clarke): Little freak section of interstate around Hoover Dam. And then on the Arizona side, there are three crossings that Arizona dot put in. And there's actually a really interesting guy named Jeff Gagnon who works for Arizona Dot. And Arizona lends him out to other states to do wildlife crossing research. And he was really helpful in our work to get those wildlife crossings included in the high speed rail lines.
0:21:31 - (Chris Clarke): Just consultation. But Arizona is, oddly, because it's not thought of as a particularly progressive or green leaning state. It's a pioneer in the wildlife crossing.
0:21:43 - (Ben Goldfarb): Yeah, I know. I'm not sure that I've ever talked to Jeff, but I've certainly seen many of his papers and presentations. I've talked a few times to Norris Dodd, who is another Arizona road ecologist who worked closely with him. And. Yeah, I mean, Arizona, of course, built a bunch of elk crossings back in the early two thousands that were extremely effective, paid for themselves fairly rapidly through collision prevention. A lot of the kind of seminal rhodicology research showing that these structures are good and valuable and that animals use them was conducted by Jeff and Norris. I know, and I think lots of states have drawn inspiration from Arizona. I have heard people say that more recently, Arizona has abdicated its role as leader to some extent in this field and probably lots of fields.
0:22:29 - (Ben Goldfarb): So I'm not sure that Arizona is still leading the curve among western states. Now, I think that falls to Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Washington. Historically, a lot of fantastic work done in Arizona for elk and deer and sheep. Definitely.
0:22:44 - (Chris Clarke): I will update my little database entry on Arizona wildlife crossings to say that they're slacking a little bit.
0:22:50 - (Ben Goldfarb): That's anecdotal. Don't throw Arizona under the bus just because I'm running my mouth.
0:22:55 - (Chris Clarke): I mean, they've got things like Carry Lake to deal with right now. I'm sure they have other things on their mind. It's interesting to me just the degree to which some really kick ass scientists have been doing on the ground research about this. I mean, the whole issue of underpasses versus overpasses for certain wildlife species, including bighorn sheep, which are notoriously reluctant to walk into tunnels, has just been wonderful. I mean, there's a study of underpasses between Bullhead City and Kingman in which they were hoping that the bighorn sheep, which are abundant in that area on the east side of the Colorado, would use short underpasses. And just finding out through trail cameras that they're not.
0:23:43 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, yeah.
0:23:44 - (Ben Goldfarb): Which, of course, makes perfect sense, right? I mean, here's this animal that's adapted to, I mean, less so in the desert, maybe. Generally, this kind of alpine critter that wants to be up in its escape terrain doesn't want to walk through a tunnel. Pronghorn are the same way. Right. They're the fastest land mammal on earth. They don't want to be in a box culvert. They want to be out on the deck of a bridge where they can see their enemies coming from far away and escape them. So that's one of the cool things I think about road ecology, is that just as every animal has its own habitat requirement and ecological niche, they have their own wildlife crossing requirement and passage niche. And I think that's. That's one of the cool trends in road ecology, is that I think going back 20 years, and I've certainly heard this from many people who've worked in the field for a long time, 20 years ago, the attitude is basically we're just going to build a standard pedestrian bridge, throw some. Some dirt on top and call it good. And now you visit a lot of these structures, especially the Liberty Canyon one, which is sort of the most intensively engineered wildlife crossing on earth, probably.
0:24:46 - (Ben Goldfarb): I'm thinking about the precise mix of native vegetation that's going to be planted and exactly where the log and rock structures are going to go to entice rodents and reptiles, and how we're going to plant vegetated berms and rock screens to shield wildlife from noise and light pollution. Right. So it's just, I think that's one of the really exciting trends in this field, is thinking about these wildlife crossings as little ecosystems in their own right. And you mentioned those wildlife crossings on Oracle Road north of Tucson. And I had a chance to visit those structures a couple of years ago, and you see kind of the same kind of care, I think, taken up there.
0:25:29 - (Ben Goldfarb): You get on top of the structure and it feels essentially seamless compared to the surrounding landscape. It's really the exact same vegetative community. And I think that was a very deliberate kind of design decision that might not have prevailed a couple of decades ago.
0:25:46 - (Joe): Don't go away. We'll be right back. You're listening to 90 miles from needles, the Desert Protection podcast. One gallon of water per person per day. And that's if you're not hiking.
0:27:37 - (Chris Clarke): We're talking with Ben Goldfarb, author of Crossings how road ecology is shaping the future of our planet.
0:27:42 - (Chris Clarke): Connectivity comes in a bunch of different forms, and actually not too far from the proposed high speed rail line, the Ivanpah valley has gotten a lot of solar projects built in it over the last few years. And there was a period in which I'm forgetting whether it was two separate solar developers or one that had two adjacent sites. And they were talking about leaving like a hundred yard space between the chain link for tortoise migration. And tortoise biologists were saying tortoises don't think of it in terms of migration, they think of it in terms of their territory.
0:28:22 - (Chris Clarke): And if you have just this bottleneck, they're not going to go into it. And tortoises don't migrate unless we make them do it, but they require large territories that overlap with other tortoises territories. So the gene flow can happen. Obviously, gene flow is a little bit more abstract for people to picture than just a happy tortoise walking across a bridge or bighorn or something like that. But, yeah, that connectivity gets interrupted by a bunch of different stuff.
0:28:55 - (Chris Clarke): The solar is connected to roads, because.
0:28:58 - (Chris Clarke): Who would put in solar if there.
0:28:59 - (Chris Clarke): Wasn'T a road nearby? Right?
0:29:02 - (Ben Goldfarb): Right. Yeah, I think. Look, I think that's one of the things about roads that makes them so challenging to deal with and think about is just like the way that they essentially facilitate all other types of land use change. Right. Before you can drill an oil or gas well or put in a solar facility or build a subdivision, you need a road to access that thing. And so in some ways, it's hard to even define road ecology. Everything is road ecology, right. Insofar as roads fundamentally change the way we use land and develop it and impact the environment.
0:29:42 - (Ben Goldfarb): Right. In that sense, roads are, as I say in the book, they're the roots, routes of all evil, right? Every. Every ecological impact stems from a road to some extent. And that, I think that makes them really challenging to deal with and think about. And I certainly think about that in the desert Southwest is just the pace of housing development I see every time I go there. And of course, roads facilitate all of that stuff. I was talking last year to a wildlife biologist from a native tribe in New Mexico, the Albuquerque outskirts that Santa Ana Pueblo, and he showed me this Google Earth image, planned subdivision near their reservation.
0:30:27 - (Ben Goldfarb): And it was just this unbelievably eerie spider web of new roads just sprawling across the desert, waiting for the houses that would eventually justify their existence. And I think that's one of the immense challenges we're up against, is we're not building a ton of new highways in the US, necessarily, but just the unbelievable proliferation of access roads to new subdivisions in development. And certainly we're seeing that here in Colorado. So those smaller residential and feeder roads that kind of facilitate habitat loss in a lot of these desert landscapes, I think, are almost a bigger, but maybe subtler or more pernicious form of road impact than something like I five or I eight.
0:31:13 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, it's interesting. There was a proposal a few years back that I was involved in working to oppose that I didn't do a huge amount of the heavy lifting, that actually the communities in the eastern part of the Coachella Valley did a lot more. It was definitely an environmental justice issue that they were very concerned about. But there was an upscale resort kind of development planned for right on the south border of Joshua Tree National park.
0:31:43 - (Chris Clarke): And it just happened that the private land that they wanted to develop was the most likely route that proposed experimental population of sonoran pronghorn would take to head north into the park across interstate ten. And I didn't spend a lot of time talking about that publicly because it was, if this happens, then that will happen. And imaginary pronghorn are not really effective counters to arguments about jobs and housing and things like that.
0:32:14 - (Ben Goldfarb): Right.
0:32:14 - (Chris Clarke): But for other reasons, we got a unanimous vote from Riverside county to deny the project having to do with essentially really abstruse environmental planning that I probably should do an episode on at some point. But, yeah, I mean, that community, which would have been a bad idea for a bunch of other reasons, including for the people that live there, because it's on a floodplain. It would have been a permanent cork in the one really realistic pronghorn migration route towards the north.
0:32:46 - (Ben Goldfarb): Yeah, I mean, I think that just attests to the fact that literally everywhere you look, I mean, every species you talk about, there's. There's some crazy new road project threatening their future along with climate change. I think it's probably the most significant kind of existential threat that so many of these populations and even species in some cases are facing. Right. I mean, I think about ocelots, another great example of a road impacted species. Right. Something like 100 ocelots left in south Texas. And road mortality is 40% of ocelot mortality. Right. That's a species that we're quite literally driving to death right now. And so it's just. I mean, it's almost hard to name an organism that isn't severely jeopardized by roads at some point in its habitat.
0:33:31 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, I'm looking forward to setting up an episode. There's a group called the Texas Lobo Coalition that is working on restoration of populations and then working on connectivity for large carnivores in western. Oh, cool.
0:33:46 - (Ben Goldfarb): Wow, that's exciting.
0:33:47 - (Chris Clarke): And, yeah, they're thinking about jaguars, they're thinking about ocelots, they're thinking about mexican wolves. And, yeah, it's just that's a different world from what I'm used to in California because there's almost no public land there. And obviously the proximity of the border is really huge thing there. And it's pretty much everywhere you look, you have connectivity issues with critters that I would rather share the planet with.
0:34:14 - (Ben Goldfarb): Me, too. Yeah. And I think you alluded to this earlier when you mentioned all of the Ivanpah solar development. But, I mean, it's true that the roads are just, I mean, one form of obstacle, obviously. We haven't even talked much about barbed wire in this conversation yet. And yet there. There are, I think, something like 15 times more barbed wire fences on earth than there are roads. So it's just this unbelievably inescapable structure that we all drive by a thousand times a day in the american west and don't really think about. And, I mean, that's just, of course, a gigantic obstacle to wildlife movement and a killer of ungulates directly, of course, all of the fawns and calves who get tangled up in those fences and perish.
0:34:55 - (Ben Goldfarb): And again, I mean, so many of those, those fences parallel roads. A few months ago, I was driving through Colorado, and I came upon this little herd of elk, and most of the herd had made it across the highway and across the barbed wire fence. On the opposite side of the road, there was a calf or maybe a yearling. I was running back and forth trying to find a way through this barbed wire fence, and it was just heartbreaking. He was actually, his chest was covered in blood from all of the places he'd been cut up trying to get through this fence. I just pulled over and watched for a while, figure out how to help him and really couldn't. And then eventually, he ended up sort of unable to cross the fence. He ended up running back across the road and almost got hit by a car as he had to go through traffic. And it was just this tragic, heart stopping moment that I also think speaks to the cumulative impacts of all of these different forms of infrastructure that we've put on the landscape and impeded wildlife movement with.
0:35:53 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, and then, of course, there's the mother of all barbed wire fences along the border. Border, yeah, right. Which we have covered in some detail. Listeners can go to our interview with Miles trap Hagen in Tucson from. I think we aired that in March. I mean, the border wall or border fence, it actually looks a lot more like the border. Venetian blinds on their side. But it's not just the wall. There is the entire road infrastructure on the north side of that, and they're in a lot of places I'm familiar with along the wall, like at Oregon Pipe and Cabeza Prieta. There are two roads that go along the wall. It's just insult to injury, really.
0:36:38 - (Ben Goldfarb): Yeah, I know. I mean, lots of saguaros were just obliterated right in the construction of that border road network. And. Yeah, that's. It's crazy. Yeah.
0:36:49 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. Yep. So, as you were putting the book together, were there places that, I mean, the Liberty Canyon crossing is probably the best known one, and that's in part.
0:37:01 - (Chris Clarke): Due to the size and scale of.
0:37:03 - (Chris Clarke): It, but also because Beth Pratt is an amazing person for getting people to sign in and building publicity, and it's also because P 22 is a pop star.
0:37:14 - (Chris Clarke): Quick explanation here. Beth Pratt is the California regional executive director for the National Wildlife Federation and the driving force behind the Liberty Canyon Route 101 wildlife Crossing, which is designed to establish continuity between Mountain lion populations in the transverse ranges of California and the Santa Monica Mountains on the south side of the freeway. In the Santa Monica Mountains, mountain lions have been inbreeding, trying to cross freeways to meet new mates or get new territory, and dying as a result of trying to cross our transportation infrastructure.
0:37:48 - (Chris Clarke): That crossing is a really impressive project, and it wouldn't have happened without Beth, who is a force of nature. P 22 for those of you who are not familiar with the reference was the Griffith park mountain lion, thereby making him the mountain lion with the smallest.
0:38:04 - (Chris Clarke): Known range in the US.
0:38:05 - (Chris Clarke): And he is missed by all of us who knew him, but by no one more than Beth Pratt.
0:38:11 - (Chris Clarke): Aside from the Liberty Canyon crossing, are there projects or places where projects are needed that struck you as especially important in the west? Any place where the need is more acute than average?
0:38:27 - (Ben Goldfarb): Yeah, I mean, so certainly here in Colorado, the one that I always think about is I 70 at East Vale Pass specifically, and this will hopefully happen in the next few years, thanks to a lot of the federal funding for these sorts of projects that's come online through the Infrastructure Act. I 70 East Vale Pass is this place that's incredibly biodiverse. We've got elk, deer, moose, mountain lions, black bears. It's a northern boundary for our lynx population in Colorado, and it's this divided four lane highway that has both big roadkill impacts and really big connectivity impacts. And I think one of the interesting things about that project, actually, is that, I mean, there have been biologists at institutions like the Denver Zoo who have been trying to get wildlife crossings over I 70 for 20 years. This is not a new idea.
0:39:18 - (Ben Goldfarb): And yet, I think largely because of the Liberty Canyon project, it now seems possible in a new way. Right. I was up at East Vale Pass on I 70 last year and talking to some of the folks who've worked on that campaign, and they basically said, yeah, for a long time, when the Colorado Department of Transportation basically said, forget it. We've got four lanes of highway, 20,000 cars a day. That's just too big. It's not possible.
0:39:42 - (Ben Goldfarb): And then all of a sudden, California goes and builds a crossing over ten lanes of traffic and 300,000 cars a day, and suddenly I 70 doesn't seem that daunting anymore. And so there's this great proposal that I think will eventually get funded to build an overpass and two underpasses across I 70. And so I think that's just one of the cool things about Beth, as you mentioned, is that she has this great way of making the impossible seem possible. And I think the Liberty Canyon project has really moved the goalposts in a really good, positive way for wildlife passage projects.
0:40:18 - (Chris Clarke): I wanted to ask you about a previous book. First off, if listeners are interested in picking up a copy of crossings, Ben Goldfarb's book on road ecology, you can go to 90 milesfromneedles.com crossing and that'll take you to the bookshop.org page, where you can buy that from a local independent bookstore.
0:40:41 - (Ben Goldfarb): Hey, thanks for putting that up.
0:40:42 - (Chris Clarke): But previously, a book, the surprising secret life of beavers and why they matter, which is a fantastic book and which I made some of the rewilding advocates in northern California really happy when I hypothesized that we could be making that standard text in high school english classes as a way of just getting people to think that English connects to a bunch of other stuff that's really cool and nine 0 mile from needles.com
0:41:10 - (Chris Clarke): eager to read the Beaver book but when I was reading eager a couple of years ago, I really wanted to ask you what you had found out about beavers in arid lands.
0:41:22 - (Ben Goldfarb): Yeah, it's a great question. First, I guess I'd love to hear your experience with beavers in arid lands as well. I think. Think one thing that is important to remember is that, look, I mean, I think that there are arid places that are arid because there are no longer beavers there, right? I mean, of course that's not true of the Mojave desert, but certainly we know that a lot of our seasonal riparian washes that are dry a lot of the year in the southwest, we know that many of those systems would have held much more perennial water thanks to beavers. And so in that sense, beavers are sort of integral to those systems and the places where they're still present.
0:42:01 - (Ben Goldfarb): I mean, just the amount of lush flourishing in desert landscapes is incredible. One of the places I went work on that book was moab. I mean, nobody thinks about moab as a beaver y place, right? And yet you go up Mill Creek and it's just chock a block with beaver dams. Or it was until some anonymous vandal ripped a bunch of them out. And you just see these incredible, incredible oases in the red rock desert. So we know these animals are unbelievably important in arid places, and it's pretty cool to see that thinking really take off in the last few years. I mean, now I think about some of the same states that are road ecology leaders are also beaver leaders, and they're not necessarily places you think about. Utah comes to mind as a place that has some, for a very red state, has some really progressive policies when it comes to both beaver management and wildlife crossings.
0:42:56 - (Ben Goldfarb): Obviously, California as a state that, when I wrote, when it came out in 2018, I included a chapter about how backwards California was when it came to beaver policy. It was a state that historically didn't recognize beavers as even being native to much of the state. And in the last few years, that's thankfully reversed. And California has totally changed its laws around beaver relocation and management and has invested a lot of funding into creating beaver specific positions at calfish and wildlife. So California is sort of this state that has dramatically reversed course on beavers in a really positive way.
0:43:34 - (Ben Goldfarb): But I don't know. Chris, I'd love to hear your own beaver experiences in arid landscapes.
0:43:38 - (Chris Clarke): I have two beaver experiences total, and one was in downtown Martinez, California.
0:43:43 - (Ben Goldfarb): No classic place for beaver experience.
0:43:44 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, but the other was on the Green river on the Utah side of dinosaur national monument around McKee Springs. And I did not expect to find them there. It was, the main stem of the river was really big and probably about a half mile across, and they were just hanging out, presumably eating the willows and such. And I wouldn't have known they were there, except that my dog came up to join me and we heard that slap of tail on water, so.
0:44:15 - (Chris Clarke): But I'm given to understand that they were in a lot of places in the Mojave, up on the Virgin river and in the Mojave river, especially the sort of the upstream reaches. It's really fun to think about beavers in Victorville and places like that.
0:44:30 - (Ben Goldfarb): Yeah, I think that's one of the great challenges of beaver restoration today, is that we just don't have a lot of great records from places like that, that those overland trappers, Jedediah Smith and their ilk wiped those animals out before biologists like Joseph Grinnell could get in there and record their presence. And I think as a result, we sort of internalized this very degraded, beaver less landscape as normal, when, as you say, I mean, they would have been present in all of those headwater systems.
0:45:00 - (Ben Goldfarb): One of the cool kind of desert places where beavers really coming back today is the San Pedro river, which was, I think, at one time actually known to trappers as the Beaver river. And of course, they were wiped out, but now they've come back, I think, of their own accord. And now there's this really cool transboundary beaver population that lives in the San Pedro, another species that's cut off by the floodgates. On the border wall where the San Pedro crosses the border.
0:45:26 - (Ben Goldfarb): There's some spectacular beaver ponds up in the headwaters of the San Pedro in northern Mexico, which is pretty cool. So we don't think about this. I mean, it's just. It's crazy to go to the San Pedro. And you're right, driving through cactus desert and then there's this little beaver influenced riparian corridor. It's pretty incredible.
0:45:45 - (Chris Clarke): It would be very cool to see at some point there's more efforts to preserve and protect the various watercourses in Tucson. It'd be really cool to see beaver dams adjacent to downtown Tucson, places like that, or on the Gila and the vicinity of Phoenix. And just a lot of places where they would do some good.
0:46:06 - (Ben Goldfarb): Yeah, absolutely. And I'm sure you're familiar with the watershed management group in Tucson, and Lisa Shipeck, who's the leader of that group, but she's done a lot of work documenting how so many of those seasonal reitos that run through the city were these kind of perennial strings of wetlands and were incredibly lush, and we lost that. And, of course, part of that was just water withdrawal, but part of it was the elimination of beavers from those systems. There's no question that beavers could do a lot of good in Arizona and many other places.
0:46:39 - (Chris Clarke): So it struck me that there's a sort of pleasing symmetry between these two books. In the eager is a book about how we would be better off if we let beavers build what they want to build, even if it cramps our style. And then crossings is about how if we build whatever we want to build, wherever we want to build it, then we're cramping the style of wildlife. I really recommend that people read both books because it's just both of them have a glimpse of. Of a better North America, I think a more sustainable and more interesting and happier North America, at least for those of us who value sharing the planet with other species. And I'm just really grateful to you for having written both of them.
0:47:21 - (Ben Goldfarb): Thank you so much for saying that, Chris. And, yeah, I think you're certainly right. They're both, on some level, I think they're both about infrastructure. Right? The beaver books, about this incredible industrious whose infrastructure is profoundly beneficial to all other life in North America. And crossings is about this other species, these not so wise apes whose infrastructure is generally incredibly detrimental to all other life forms on earth. So in some ways, we and beavers are these weird mirror images of each other where they're the two species who are most fanatically driven to build and modify our environments. And, you know, they happen to do it in a way that promotes biodiversity, and we happen to do it in a way that is incredibly detrimental to biodiversity.
0:48:04 - (Chris Clarke): So we need to send people to beaver school, clearly.
0:48:06 - (Ben Goldfarb): Exactly. Yeah, we need to. Or to send beavers to us. Beavers could enter our communities and train us if only we're willing to open our minds to their lessons.
0:48:16 - (Chris Clarke): Yep. I will have to have a talk with my dogs before that happens, but that's fair. So is there anything that you were hoping I would ask you that I have failed to ask you.
0:48:25 - (Ben Goldfarb): That was really thorough, Chris. I so appreciate it.
0:48:28 - (Chris Clarke): Ben Goldfarb, independent journalist on the environment and writer of fantastic books, thank you for joining us on 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast.
0:48:39 - (Ben Goldfarb): Hey Chris, thank you so much for having me, and thanks for all you do for deserts and our planet in general.
0:50:00 - (Chris Clarke): And that wraps up another episode of 90 miles from Needles, the desert protection podcast. I want to thank Ben Goldfarb, author of Crossings and Eager for talking with us on this episode. You can read either of those books by going to nine zeromilesfromneedles.com Crossings, or eager to order either or both books from your local independent bookstore. I also want to thank Joe Jeffrey, our voiceover Guy, and Martin Mancha, our podcast art guy.
0:50:32 - (Chris Clarke): And again, thank you to the newest supporters in our 90 miles from Needles family, Richard Boutwell and a Bennett Ernstein. Richard and Bennett, welcome to the fold. Thank you so much for helping us out. You can join them in supporting this podcast by going to 90 milesfromneedles.com. donate to see different options for how you can support us financially to keep this podcast going. Also, did you know that we have a YouTube channel that you can find by searching on 90 miles from needles when you're at YouTube?
0:51:02 - (Chris Clarke): If you subscribe, it helps us out. Our theme song, moody western, is by Brightside Studio. Other music in this episode is by Desert Dive, a group whose name suggested that they might be appropriate for this podcast. Go figure. We have some really good episodes coming up, including one about a fantastic exhibition on Joshua trees at a museum in the West Mojave and a companion book.
0:51:26 - (Chris Clarke): That, full disclosure, has some of my writing in it.
0:51:29 - (Chris Clarke): It's also got some wonderful writing and artwork from several dozen different contributors.
0:51:36 - (Chris Clarke): Definitely worth checking out.
0:51:38 - (Chris Clarke): We also have a conversation coming up with representatives of the Texas Lobo coalition, which has been working on wildlife connectivity and reintroduction of large carnivores in west Texas that should be really fun. I want to thank you for listening as well. You're the reason that we do this well, you and the desert. I know that Venn diagram has significant amount of overlap. The weather is getting a little cooler.
0:52:04 - (Chris Clarke): We had an extreme heat warning that was extended by quite a number of days over the last week and a half. It just ended last night. I'm actually sitting in our studio here without the ac on which, truth be told, I always do when I'm recording. But this time I'm not taking my life in my hands by doing it, and that's pretty nice. Nonetheless, be careful as you hike out in the desert, it's easy to get overenthusiastic and head out kind of unprepared.
0:52:29 - (Chris Clarke): When it seems a little cooler.
0:52:30 - (Chris Clarke): Remember, you're going to need water. Remember that the wildlife you don't necessarily want to have really close interactions with might be also enjoying the cooler temperatures just as much as you and being out visible in the desert while you walk around with open toed shoes that are just really inviting for little snake teeth to make friends with your little toes. So just please, please take care.
0:52:51 - (Chris Clarke): Be good to yourself.
0:52:53 - (Chris Clarke): Be good to the desert. The desert needs you. And I will see you at the next watering hole. Bye now.
0:55:08 - (Joe): 90 miles from needles is a production of the desert advocacy media network.