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INTERVIEW: Talking Crossings with author Ben Goldfarb

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INTERVIEW: Talking Crossings with author Ben Goldfarb

BY DAVID KINNEY

In Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet, writer Ben Goldfarb surveys the field of road ecology, which began as a discipline that largely involved counting roadkill but has evolved beyond car-on-wildlife collisions to consider broader impacts of roads on nature: how culverts harm fish, how road noise changes ecosystems, how road salt turns freshwater rivers brackish. Goldfarb, who during his reporting spent time with Trout Unlimited seeing how the Salmon SuperHwy project is reconnecting hundreds of miles of rivers in Oregon, sat down with us to talk about the intersection of roads and wild fish.

TU: Crossings feels like the flip side of Eager, your conservation-world cult classic about beavers and how they are key to healthy ecosystems.

BG: Humans and beavers are the two species on Earth most motivated to build structures and transform our environment. The difference is, they do it in a way that is beneficial to nearly all other life forms, and we do it in a way that is catastrophic to nearly all other life forms, salmon and trout included. So both books are trying to reveal the hidden impacts of these landscape-changing forces that we take for granted.

TU: It’s rare to find somebody who even thinks about culverts, let alone cares about them.

BG: You’re right. Culverts are completely invisible to us. They’re these structures that we drive over every single day and basically ignore, but they’re weak points in our infrastructure. They get blown out by big runoff events, they get clogged with debris, they cause roads to wash out. They’re the fault lines in our transportation network. They’re also one of the primary forces affecting fish migration. Many culverts were built too small from the get-go. And as a result, they concentrate the flow of streams and turn them into fire hoses that prevent fish from moving upstream. Culverts are these little battered corrugated pipes that we all drive over a million times, and yet they’re denying fish access to huge swaths of habitat.

TU: With two million of these roadstream crossings across the country, it can feel like another overwhelming conservation problem. But the team behind the Salmon SuperHwy project in Oregon is working smarter.

BG: They’re very strategic in the culverts and the watersheds that they choose to address. They’re working in these coastal rivers in Oregon in part because there are no giant dams in those rivers. You can open up huge amounts of habitat by just dealing with a few culverts. So they brought together community and nonprofit and agency partners to pool their resources and systematically address culverts that are barriers to fish migration.

TU:There’s a lot of doom and gloom in this book about the loss of species to road networks. What gave you hope?

BG: There are times when I feel really hopeful and there are times when I feel totally despondent about the future of biodiversity on Earth. I feel hopeful about how nonpartisan road ecology issues are. We live in this hyperpolarized society, but road ecology issues don’t follow political allegiances. Salmon SuperHwy is a great illustration of that. Here’s this initiative that has plenty of support from the fish huggers, but is also close to the hearts of county commissioners and planners and dairy farmers in Tillamook County. Nobody wants their roads to wash out. Everybody cares about the stability and longevity of rural infrastructure and this is a project that leverages salmon recovery funding to ensure that.

TU:You spent a bunch of time on the road for this book. Surely you have a good fish story or two.

BG: When I went to coastal Oregon, I did a bunch of fishing in the Nestucca, the Wilson River, the Kilchis. I tried to fish as many of those rivers as possible. I had really never caught coastal cutthroat trout before and it was fantastic. One of the great things about these fish is how flexible they are. It was so cool to think that basically the same species I catch at 11,000 feet in high lakes in Colorado is living this amazing anadromous lifestyle in Oregon coastal rivers. They are just such adaptive fish that take advantage of whatever opportunities nature gives them.

INTERVIEW: Talking Crossings with author Ben Goldfarb

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