British Columbia’s caribou herds have dwindled to furtive bands, in part because logging and mining roads have permitted the ingress of wolves-a human-caused disaster disguised as natural predation. ![]() The repercussions of roads are so complex that it’s hard to pinpoint where they end. If you’re a grizzly bear, they might as well be prison walls. If you’re a Kerouac reader, you grew up steeped in the dogma that highways represent freedom. Hike two miles more, and you’ll still see fewer mammals. Park your car on the shoulder and bushwhack half a mile into the woods, and you’ll still see fewer birds than you would in an unroaded wilderness. A 2000 study found that pavement itself blanketed less than 1 percent of the United States, yet its influence-the “road-effect zone,” to use ecological jargon-covered up to 20 percent. The little red fire ant, a merciless insect notorious for stinging the eyes of elephants, has exploited logging tracks to spread through Gabon 60 times faster than it would have otherwise. Phytophthora lateralis, an invasive fungus that attacks cedar trees, hitchhikes in the patterns of truck tires. than its surface began to shed sediment into Lago di Monterosi, spawning algal blooms that permanently distorted the lake’s ecosystem. No sooner was Rome’s Via Cassia completed around 100 B.C.E. ![]() Roads distort the planet in other, more insidious ways. It has never been more dangerous to set paw, hoof or scaly belly on the highway. A half-century ago, just 3 percent of land-dwelling mammals met their end on a road by 2017 the toll had quadrupled. (More birds die on American roads every week than were slain by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, with the road deaths accompanied by a fraction of the hand-wringing.) And it’s only getting worse as traffic swells. Sometime during the 20th century, scientists have written, roadkill surpassed hunting as “the leading direct human cause of vertebrate mortality on land.” Name your environmental ill-dams, poaching, megafires-and consider that roads kill more creatures with less fanfare than any of them. To us, roads signify connection and escape to other life-forms, they spell death and division. They epitomize freedom-the “architecture of our restlessness,” per Rebecca Solnit, the “two lanes take us anywhere,” per Bruce Springsteen. Roads are both logistical essentials and cultural artifacts. “Everything in life is somewhere else,” wrote E.B. Today it’s impossible to imagine life without the asphalt arteries that connect goods with markets, employees with jobs, families with each other. ![]() Roads predate the wheel: Mesopotamian builders began laying mud-brick paths in 4000 B.C.E., centuries before anyone thought to drop a chariot onto a couple of potter’s disks. Our planet is burdened by perhaps 3,000 tons of infrastructure for every human, nearly a third of an Eiffel Tower per person. Some 40 million miles of roadways encircle the Earth, from the continent-spanning Pan-American Highway to the hundred thousand miles of illegal logging routes that filigree the Amazon. When alien archaeologists exhume the rubble of human civilization, they may conclude that our raison d’être was building roads.
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