the elephant whisperer by lawrence anthony

Not to be overlooked, usually on a car’s front, is the ongoing insect liquidation, but many shrubby roadsides have also become insect sanctuaries. Excessive road noise is equally pernicious, as is excessive salt on roads. 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.

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. 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. 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.

Goldfarb’s follow-up to Eager, his award-winning book on beavers, is another illuminating, witty work. A wide-ranging, fascinating exploration of roads, which are “not merely a symptom of civilization but a distinct disease.”

The elephant whisperer by lawrence anthony