First Tuesday: Road Ecology with Ben Goldfarb

When: Tuesday, January 5 at 7pm
Where: Online via Zoom (Registration coming soon)

Join us for a talk by Ben Goldfarb discussing the vast ecological challenges posed by the roadways we often take for granted, and the ways we can utilize our understanding of road ecology create a better, safer world for all living beings, including in the Methow Valley.

Some 40 million miles of roadways encircle the earth, yet we tend to regard them only as infrastructure for human convenience. While roads are so ubiquitous they’re practically invisible to us, wild animals experience them as alien forces of death and disruption. More than a million animals are killed by cars each day in the U.S. alone; creatures from antelope to salmon are losing their ability to migrate in search of food and mates; and the very noise of traffic chases songbirds from vast swaths of habitat. Today road ecologists are seeking to blunt that destruction through innovative solutions. Conservationists are building bridges for California’s mountain lions and tunnels for English toads, engineers are deconstructing the labyrinth of logging roads that web national forests, and community organizers are working to undo the havoc highways have wreaked upon American cities. In his talk, Ben Goldfarb will discuss the ecological harms wrought by transportation and the movement to redress them.

Ben Goldfarb is an environmental journalist whose work has appeared in National Geographic, the Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, the New Yorker, and many other publications. His most recent book, Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet, was named one of the best books of 2023 by the New York Times and received the Rachel Carson Award for Excellence in Environmental Writing and the Banff Book Competition’s Grand Prize. His previous book, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, won the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. He lives in Colorado with his wife, his daughter, and his dog, Kit — which is, of course, what you call a baby beaver.