Had I not read Ben Goldfarb’s 2018 book, “Eager”, I probably wouldn’t have picked this one up. Why would I want to read an entire book on ‘roadkill’? But I trusted him. And so I read it. 

I found his writing here crisp and engaging, like his other work, but I was still hesitant and did my reading in fits and starts. I’ve read several books lately about impending environmental crises and I didn’t really have the energy to do another, but I did finish it and found it a worthwhile and satisfying experience. Amongst these earlier books was Slaght’s, “Tiger’s Between Empires” which returned repeatedly to the problem of how devastating even the relatively little travelled roads of Russia’s remote Primorye Province are for its endangered population of Amur Tigers. In the world of ecology, roads routinely bring death to the wildlife they literally impact, as well as because of the discontinuities they create in the landscape, physical and chemical changes they visit upon the animal’s environment and the surrounding biotic communities. This is about the wholesale implementation of a technology ‘alien’ to the animal world, that purports to meet the ‘needs’ of humans while making little allowance for the uncounted species that reside alongside them. Continue reading →