Publishers Weekly
★ 07/24/2023
In this captivating outing, science writer Goldfarb (Eager) explores the negative impact roads have on wildlife. Discussing the danger vehicle collisions pose to animals, he notes that 10,000 garter snakes were fatally hit in one season in Manitoba and that deer need intervals of approximately a minute or longer between passing cars to safely cross. Other harms are less obvious; the difficulty of traversing roadways leads to genetically inbred clusters (“A flightless European beetle disperses so feebly that biologists once found a genetically distinct population encircled by a highway exit loop”), and noise can disrupt ecological checks and balances (chaffinches in Portugal’s oak woodlands avoid loud streets, “allowing unchecked insects to kill roadside trees”). Profiles of individuals working on mitigation strategies are as enlightening as they are encouraging. Among them, Goldfarb highlights biologist Tony Clevenger’s research confirming the effectiveness of wildlife overpasses for enabling grizzly bear populations in Alberta’s Banff National Park to intermingle and ecologist Sarah Perkins’s efforts with Project Splatter to learn more about animal movement patterns by soliciting civilians to report roadkill. Humor leavens the frequently grim subject matter, as when Goldfarb notes that a plan to reduce Dall sheep’s anxiety around vehicles in Denali National Park “runs 428 turgid pages and reliably cures insomnia.” This one’s a winner. Photos. (Sept.)
Mother Jones - Jackie Flynn Mogensen
"The book is teeming with horrifying statistics.… While that may sound bleak, Crossings is at times surprisingly funny."
Booklist (starred review)
"A fresh and startling history of roads, automobiles, and the carnage and destruction they cause…An astute, funny, and imaginative writer, Goldfarb pairs horror with hope as he chronicles the brilliant innovations and tireless advocacy that resulted in lifesaving wildlife crossings, including park-like overpasses and cozy underpasses."
Vox - Marina Bolotnikova
"A badly needed corrective.… [D]eserves to make the reading lists of policymakers around the world."
Tom Vanderbilt
"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."
Robert Moor
"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."
Science News - Amanda Heidt
"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."
New Scientist - Vijaysree Venkatraman
"An eye-opening road trip that spans continents to show how paved roads, seen as markers of civilisation, disrupt the natural world…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."
The Whiting Award Judges' citation
"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."
starred review Bookpage
"Roads aren’t going away anytime soon, but Crossings will spark conversation around the future of motorized vehicles and transportation."
Shepherd Express - David Luhrssen
"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."
Nation - Jimmy Tobias
"An elegant—at times startling—account of how our built environment has become an environmental crisis.… A manifesto against unnecessary death."
Bloomberg - David Zipper
"Chronicles the enormous ecological damage caused by roadbuilding.… Goldfarb guides the reader through an array of often heartbreaking stories."
Ed Yong
"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."
New York Review of Books - Bill McKibben
"Wide-ranging and absorbing.… Brilliant."
Modern Farmer - Emily Baron Cadloff
"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."
Atlantic - Jonathan C. Slaght
"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."
Scientific American - Tess Joosse
"[A] swift and winding ride through the science of road ecology…[A] surprising reflection on what we owe to nature…[T]he roadkill you spot along the highway will never look the same."
Undark - M.R. O'Connor
"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."
Miranda Weissn Scholar
"Crossings is science writing at its best…[A] hopeful reminder of our responsibilities in the Anthropocene."
The New Yorker
"Perceptive.… Goldfarb charts a path toward a less destructive future."
Bookpage (starred review)
"Goldfarb examines the severe impact of roads on wildlife populations and their migration and reproduction…Roads aren’t going away anytime soon, but Crossings will spark conversation around the future of motorized vehicles and transportation."
Michelle Nijhuis
"Ben Goldfarb approaches our fellow animals with delighted curiosity and rare perception. A deeply researched, wonderfully vivid, and genuinely hopeful book."
Jeff VanderMeer
"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."
Science - Sarah Boon
"A deeply researched and compelling read…[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."
Emily Raboteau
"Fascinating and compassionate."
David Gessner
"A powerhouse of a book, a comprehensive and engaging study of the many ways that roads damage natural habitats."
Car and Driver - Brett Berk
"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."
Wall Street Journal - Timothy Farrington
"Vivid [and] engaging."
The Whiting Award Judges' Citation
"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."
Dan Flores
"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."
Seattle Times - Colleen Stinchcombe
"[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."
Smithsonian
"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 Magazine
"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."
starred review Booklist
"A fresh and startling history.… An astute, funny, and imaginative writer, Goldfarb pairs horror with hope."
American Scholar - Miranda Weiss
"Crossings is science writing at its best…[A] hopeful reminder of our responsibilities in the Anthropocene."
FEBRUARY 2024 - AudioFile
Malcolm Hillgartner epitomizes a fine nonfiction narrator. He lets these often disturbing stories of road ecology (annals of roadkills) reveal themselves in an understated way. A master of pace and cadence, his tone works with the dramatic statistics provided: About one million wild animals perish daily from cars, 40 million miles of roads ring the planet, and the fires in Australia in 2019-2020 killed a billion animals. Hillgartner's crisp storytelling style illuminates this powerful audiobook. Goldfarb has written an insightful work on the little-known science of road ecology and demonstrated how most roads, parkways, and interstates were planned with only the motorist in mind. His timely audiobook notes new ways that allow animals from white tail deer to turtles to cross thoroughfares without endangering life and limb. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2023-05-24
A wide-ranging, fascinating exploration of roads, which are “not merely a symptom of civilization but a distinct disease.”
Goldfarb’s follow-up to Eager, his award-winning book on beavers, is another illuminating, witty work. He chronicles his journeys through numerous countries with colleagues to conduct extensive field research and mixes his findings with historical research showing the effects of roads on our ecology. Pavement, he writes, “blankets less than 1 percent” of the U.S., “but its ecological influence “covers a full 20 percent.” Goldfarb sadly notes that it “has never been more dangerous to set paw, hoof, or scaly belly on the highway.” With the rise of cars and roads in the 20th century, the degrading word roadkill was born, and the deer became primary victims. The author bemoans how the “Interstate Highway System lopped off migration routes as neatly as a guillotine,” and roads with more than 10,000 vehicles per day loom as what road ecologists call “absolute barriers to most wildlife.” The sprawling Los Angeles freeway labyrinth, with its “clean as a scalpel” east-west habitat fragmentation, has disrupted practically every species, especially the mountain lion. As a result of roadkill, Goldfarb sadly notes, 21 critters, especially reptiles and amphibians, face extinction, and he reveals how the National Forest Service’s many roads have become “proxy battlegrounds in a cultural war” and how they’re working to reduce them. Excessive road noise is equally pernicious, as is excessive salt on roads. Not to be overlooked, usually on a car’s front, is the ongoing insect liquidation, but many shrubby roadsides have also become insect sanctuaries. “The necrobiome,” Goldfarb writes, “airbrushes our roadsides, camouflaging a crisis by devouring it.” Fortunately, in Europe and Canada, recent innovations in under- and overpasses have helped reduce the number of dead animals, and the author is optimistic about the roles of citizen scientists, self-driving cars, and achievements in Brazil, which “seem[s] to sit at road ecology’s forefront.”
An astonishingly deep pool of wonders.
