Lions, Coyotes, & Bears: Part 5 - Roads & Wildlife

Support for LAFT comes from Pasadena Water and Power, now accepting applications for its annual scholarship program. Winners of PWP's new utility trade scholarship can apply it toward college or a vocational or technical school. Learn more at pwpweb.com/scholarship. This old house radio hour is your new home improvement podcast. In each episode we answer your questions. Whether you're fixing a leak, refinishing a floor, or restoring a centraled house. Our roster of experts have the answers to help you get the job done right. This is Imperfect Paradise, the show about hidden worlds and messy realities. I'm LA's correspondent Jill Replogle, in for host Antonia Cedihito with a special bonus episode of our series Lions, Coyotes, and Bears. Over the last few episodes of Imperfect Paradise, we focused on some of the charismatic wildlife that live among us and have had a major impact on Southern California. Mountain Lions, Coyotes, Bears, and even a celebrity bald eagle couple. These animals challenge our sense of urban and suburban life and what it means to co-exist with them. We've looked at what our attitudes toward these predators say about us, what we value, what we fear. I kicked off the series with my reporting on Hollywood's Mountain Lion Celebrity P22. One thing that came out of my reporting was that P22 was so famous, in part because he managed to cross two major freeways without getting hit. P22 would go on to become the Spokescat for a campaign that raised over $100 million to build a wildlife bridge on the outskirts of Los Angeles at a place called Liberty Canyon. It's officially called the Wallis and Inburg Wildlife Crossing. The Overpass will help reconnect the Santa Monica Mountains to other protected areas to the North of LA, so that young mountain lions like P22 can safely cross the 101 freeway to mate and establish new territory. Wildlife biologists think the crossing will also help other isolated species. The Overpass at Liberty Canyon is expected to be operational in 2025, but even then, roads in Southern California and really across the planet will still be a huge threat to wildlife. One person who's written extensively about the massive impact of human infrastructure on non-human animals is Ben Goldfarb. He's an environmental journalist, wildlife enthusiast, and author of crossings how road ecology is shaping the future of our planet. In this bonus episode, I talk with Ben about the book, the myriad ways roads impact wildlife, and some of the solutions like wildlife crossings that are taking shape right in our backyard. Ben, thank you so much for doing this. It's a pleasure. One of the things that I explore in my episode about P22 is my cynicism about the kind of massive amount of attention that got put on this single animal. And I feel like your book really made me feel differently about that. You talk about a moral mandate to care for the individual animals that we've harmed by roads and cars as well as the kind of big infrastructure projects that can help a population. And I guess I'm curious if you started writing with a similar skepticism to mine about herring so much about a single animal. And if so, how your attitude changed? I did have some skepticism. We're sure in a list, it's our job to be. Skeptical and I think I was skeptical about P22 per se than I was actually about the Liberty Canyon Overpass, which certainly struck me as a great project, but I had this concern, which I've heard from other Rodeologists and Wildlife Crossing advocates, which is that does it potentially set this problematic precedent, right? It's obviously the most famous, well-publicized wildlife crossing in the world. And because of that, are people going to think that they all have to cost $90 million. Right? And was that going to potentially inadvertently prevent some of these structures from being built? Because that Liberty Canyon crossing just gives a false impression of what a typical wildlife overpassed price tag is. Because again, you know, we know that the vast majority of them cost more in the range of $8 to $10 million rather than $90 to $100 million. But I think that what I've found in just talking to hundreds of people at this point in the worlds of Rodeology and Wildlife Crossing is that all of the attention that crossing has garnered has ultimately been a really good thing for the movement. And as you know, in some ways, moved the goalposts about what's possible. I'll give you an example of that. So in Colorado where I live, you know, the big barrier to habitat connectivity is I-70, which runs across the state from east to west. And you know, it's this huge problem for certainly mountain lions, also deer and elk and big horn sheep and links. And for about 20 years, there have been biologists and advocates who wanted to build an overpass and a couple of underpasses at a certain spot along I-70. The reaction from the state was, you know, kind of like, uh, maybe, I mean, probably forget it. That's just too big. That's too crazy. You know, there are 20,000 cars a day I-70. It's four lanes of traffic with a big divider between. That's not going to work. But in the last couple of years, that project has become not only possible, but you know, it seems almost certain to eventually happen and talking to biologists and advocates. They say that a lot of that is because of the 101 crossing, because of Liberty Canyon, which basically shows that, you know, it is possible to build these things over really densely trafficked big freeways. So, you know, ultimately you can say, okay, yeah, you know, P-22 single animal who received a disproportionate amount of attention, but many, many wildlife crossings will be built thanks to him that will save many, many thousands and thousands of animals lives and probably some human driver lives as well. And so, you know, his, you know, all of the hoopla around him ultimately is justified. That is- that is the conclusion I came to. Yeah, good. Yeah. And what exactly is road ecology? And can you tell me a little bit about its origins? Road ecology is this relatively small, but I would say really fast growing field of science that looks at all of the different ways that roads affect nature. And you know, when you think about the origins of road ecology, you know, in a sense, it begins a hundred years ago with the proliferation of cars on American landscapes with the Model T rolling off assembly lines and immediately crushing ground squirrels and turtles and woodpeckers and garter snakes and all kinds of critters. And, you know, in the mid 1920s, you see this wave of scientific papers being published by wildlife biologists driving around the country, including California and saying, wait a second, what is this new fangle technology, the automobile doing to our wildlife? You know, certainly nothing good. Part of road ecology or maybe part of the applied science that you were talking about is this idea of wildlife crossings that to help animals get across or underneath in some cases roads. What are some early examples of wildlife crossings that you came across while researching for the book? The first wildlife crossings date back to the 1950s. Actually, France built the first ones mostly at the behest of hunters who wanted deer to be able to move across the landscape. They inspired lots of imitators in all of these Western European countries started doing a lot of this stuff really in the 1960s and 70s. And that was also around the same time that wildlife crossings came to the US. Most of the early wildlife crossings were built in come of these rocky mountain states, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah. That's where the first crossings really start to pop up in the 1970s. Yeah, because it seems like we're starting so late, right? I mean, to fix these problems that we've really sort of just built up and built up and built up and continue to build up for decades and in some cases centuries. Am I right just to think that we are starting late? We're starting so late. Now we have this really calcified highway network that we can't do a whole lot to fix, right? I mean, yeah, we can retrofit it in some cases. We can build stand-alone overpasses like the Wallace-Anonburg crossing, but ultimately we're kind of saddled with several million miles of concrete that is going to be harmful to some extent, whatever we do. You wrote or you indicated that the gold standard of wildlife crossings is in Canada's Banff National Park. How did that crossing come about? And why is it the gold standard? So Banff National Park has a highway running right through the middle of it, the Trans Canada Highway. So it's kind of a protected area in name, but obviously having a highway running through the middle of a park is not ideal and lots of elk and deer and bears and other animals were being hit. So in the 1980s, Parks Canada basically began building these crossings at the same time that they were upgrading and expanding the highway. And they ultimately put in around 40 of these crossings. There are a bunch of underpasses which are relatively inconspicuous, and there are around a half dozen overpasses with fences in between them because obviously the fences are really important and kind of directing the animals to the crossings and keeping them off the highway. You know, I think what's cool about Banff is that it just, it really taught us a lot about which animals use which kinds of crossings. Initially when they put in these underpasses, you know, those got used a lot by elk and deer, but they really didn't get used by the large carnivores, especially the grizzly bears. And grizzly bears are a challenging animal in some ways to help across the highway because they're very wary, cautious animals. In the 1990s, the park built six of these overpasses, these over crossings. And the bears didn't use them immediately. It took them a few years and actually at first people kind of thought the overpasses had failed. But you know, over time bears figured out how to use them, saus with cubs actually used them and taught their cubs where to cross and their cubs became crossers. And there's kind of this cool intergenerational knowledge transfer. And there was so much great research that came out of Banff. And so when environmentalists and cal trans talk about how effective the Wallace-Annenberg overpasses likely to be for mountain lions in Southern California, we know that in part thanks to Banff. After the break, more from my conversation with Ben Goldfarb. We'll talk about how LA's new wildlife crossing compares to the ones in Canada's Banff National Park. In perfect paradise is supported by Shopify. If you own an online business, how often has this happened to you? A customer has the item they want in their cart. They move to the checkout page to pay and then what was my login info and password for this website? 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High school seniors can submit a video essay application to win up to $5,000 toward a two or four year college. PWP also now offers a utility trade scholarship for vocational or technical schools for current or aspiring students in the trades. Application info at pwpweb.com/scallorship. You're listening to imperfect paradise, lions, coyotes and bears. I'm Jill Reblow-Bull. I'm speaking with environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb, author of Crossings, How Rodecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet. I'm curious if you anticipate seeing some of the same skepticism that you mentioned came right after the vamp crossing was completed with this sort of much, much, much more expensive Wallace-Annenberg crossing that's being completed in Los Angeles. And you know, if you have any kind of advice for skeptics to how to really think about the value of that crossing. There are two things I'd say about that overpass. First is that it really does not need a whole lot of usage from mountain lions to be really effective from a genetic standpoint, right? You know, when you look at the research that wildlife biologists have done, what they found is that one mountain lion using it every couple of years and mating on either side of it basically is enough to heal that genetic divide, right? So, you don't need this constant parade of mountain lions crossing it. You just need a little bit of new blood entering the population every couple years to refresh that stagnant gene pool. So, that's one thing. And then the other thing too is that mountain lions are the flagship species for this overpass, but they're just one of many species that's going to use it. There's been lots of research that has shown very clearly that the 101 is an obstacle, not only to mountain lions, but to bobcats and coyotes and lizards and deer and even some birds like rent hits, you know, which don't fly super well and so aren't going to soar over 10 lanes of traffic. So, we're going to see the whole ecosystem hopefully benefiting from it. And you know, those animals are all really important too. If BAMF is the gold standard up to now, how does this new crossing at Liberty Canyon compare? It's a very different project in a couple of key ways. I mean, the 101 is just this completely different environment. I mean, it is the most busily traffic freeway in the country. And so, there's this deafening noise pollution that's coming off of it. There's a ton of light pollution. And so, the landscape architects and designers who are creating this thing have had to be really thoughtful about vegetated screens and berms and rock walls, all of these different features that kind of block some of that noise and light pollution that could potentially deter animals from using this structure. That's one thing that I think is really important to emphasize as well as that sometimes people say, so wait a second, this wildlife overpass is going to cost between $90 and $100 million. Does that mean that they're all going to cost that much? That seems like a lot of money. But there really isn't any other overpass in the country or potentially even the world like this one. This one just has to be so big, so meticulously and extravagantly designed and engineered. That makes it an incredibly exciting project because if you can build an overpass over the 101, you can build one anywhere. One of the things that has been used to justify wildlife crossings and to help get them paid for in the past is when big animals like deer are involved in crashes that tend to damage cars and sometimes people are also killed in those collisions. Of course, in this case, on the crossing of the 101, we had this sort of incredible advocate, you know, P22 to help drive that. But has it gotten any easier to get wildlife crossings built for smaller creatures where there isn't such an obvious cost benefit analysis? The average deer collision cost society more than $9,000 in vehicle repairs and hospital bills and insurance costs. We know the average elk collision costs more than $20,000. So, you know, if you can build a crossing that prevents a few dozen of those crashes per year as many crossings do, those structures, even multi-million dollar structures, can pay for themselves very quickly. You know, and we've seen that in Wyoming and Arizona and Colorado and all over the country. But, as you say, if you take this cost benefit approach, you end up focusing on those larger animals, right? We're going to deal with the biological impacts of roads, not just the driver safety impacts, building underpasses for those smaller animals as well as really essential. Or, you know, even better than an underpass or at least different would be a road closure. There are spots in Michigan, for example, that are closed seasonally for salamander migration. I feel like somebody is going to hear that and think, well, but how am I going to get to the place I need to go? But from reading your book, it seems like we have enough roads to pretty much get anywhere we need to go with, like, quite a bit of redundancy. Do you think that's true? I think redundancy is the perfect word. We just have this mindset in the US that we should be allowed to go everywhere at all times and that any interruption to traffic or our driving ability is this kind of infringement of our rights as Americans. But, you know, you can arrive at your destination three minutes later for the sake of newt's. That's not going to be an immense hardship to most people. I've never hit a large mammal, fortunately. Neither. Thank God. Yeah, but if you know, certainly hit plenty of birds and rodents and snakes and other critters too. Look, that's one of the challenging things about dealing with this problem and about talking about this problem, right? Is that, you know, in a sense, we are all part of it. We're all implicated in the colossal violence of our road networks. But, you know, I do think that talking about it and thinking about it is essential to solving it. After the break, I continue my conversation with Ben Goldfarb. We'll talk about more solutions and what we can do to support the wildlife in our midst. High school seniors can submit a video essay application to win up to $5,000 toward a two or four-year college. Application info at pwpweb.com/scholarship. I'm Jill Reblogel. I'm speaking with environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb, author of Crossings, How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet. I have to admit, I love road trips, I love driving around the west. It's something that, you know, I think as I became more environmentally aware as a young person, I started feeling really guilty about. But I still love it. And I just wonder how you think about personal responsibility when it comes to protecting wildlife. As opposed to these larger structural changes in infrastructure projects like wildlife crossings. Yeah, you know, it's a really difficult one. As you say, you know, the history of understanding and caring about and protecting and conserving our landscapes is so bound up in the history of the car, right? I mean, one of the earliest advocates for properly funding the National Park Service was the American Automobile Association because they wanted to give drivers places to drive to, right? Going to Yosemite and Yellowstone and Glacier, you know, this is kind of this fundamental right of passage that so many Americans and international tourists have. It's kind of hard to imagine our protected areas without car access. You know, in some ways it calls to mind climate change in the sense that I think for a long time, you know, the climate movement was very focused on personal responsibility, right? Getting people to change their light bulbs as like sort of the ultimate, you know, sort of standard climate action that we were all encouraged to undertake. You know, I think about that in regards to the road ecology issue, right? I mean, look, if we all stopped driving, that would obviously solve the problem. But you're just not going to get Americans to stop driving. You know, we just have this landscape that has been built for cars. So, you know, I think that ultimately the work of making our roads less damaging to nature, it really is about those big infrastructural solutions, you know, both creating those wildlife crossings that allow animals to safely navigate the landscape, but also creating the public transit systems that allow us humans to navigate the landscape without having to get into our private cars. Yeah. And you write that there is a good chunk of change in the 2021 infrastructure deal for wildlife crossings, right? And other road ecology projects? Yeah, there there is. I mean, it's interesting to think about what it means to be a good chunk of change, right? So there's $350 million for wildlife crossings in the 2021 infrastructure law through this kind of matching grant program, essentially, that gives federal funding to states and native tribes and other entities to build crossings. And so, you know, look, I mean, that sounds like a lot of money, right? $350 million. That's certainly the most money that the federal government has ever allocated at one time to this issue. On the other hand, if you took that $350 million and just gave it to California by itself, you know, you wouldn't quite cover all of the road kill hotspots in the state of California, let alone the entire country. So, you know, we just need to reconceptualize, I think, how much or how little these sorts of wildlife friendly projects cost in the context of all the money we spend on transportation? How optimistic are you about our ability to continue to better coexist with wildlife? Probably like a lot of people who love wildlife in nature. I kind of oscillate between hope and despair. Certainly, on the hopeful side, we know that we're getting better at this in a lot of ways, right? And we're allocating more money towards it. We're building more wildlife crossings. We have much better understanding of where the collision hotspots are on the landscape that we have to deal with, you know, than we did even 10 years ago. There's so much more political will and interest around building wildlife crossings, you know, these very visible billboards for coexistence and habitat connectivity. So that, you know, that makes me feel hopeful, but at the same time, I mean, we also know that so many trends are going in the wrong direction, right? In the American West, we lose a football field of habitat to development every two and a half minutes. You know, it's like the horrifying statistic that I always think about. You know, we know that we're driving more and we're certainly going to drive a lot more as the whole car fleet, vehicle fleet becomes electrified and maybe eventually autonomous. You know, we know that those two trends are going to lead to more vehicle miles traveled. Then, you know, then you think about the situation globally and think about all of the highways that are being built through tiger habitat and elephant habitat and orangutan habitat and gorilla habitat, you know, all of these countries like Nepal and India and Bangladesh and Kenya and Brazil that are now emulating our American autosensric infrastructural patterns. If you built an American style highway system in every country on earth, that would be catastrophic to wildlife. I mean, one exciting thing that you see in countries like Myanmar and India and Kenya, they're building out their highway system now for the first time. They also have opportunities to learn from our mistakes and do it right the first time in a way that we fail to. And, you know, one great example of that is in India where, you know, a new highway was built through a tiger sanctuary, which, you know, isn't ideal, obviously, but they actually elevated the highway on concrete pillars for about 10 miles. So, instead of having individual wildlife crossings, you know, here and there, you know, the whole forest floor is just wide open and animals can go back and forth with the highway far over their heads, right? I mean, that's far more creative and adaptive, you know, than anything we've done in the US. And so, I think there's a lot we can learn from observing what other countries are doing about this problem and we're kind of stuck with our highways, but maybe there's still an opportunity to tweak them. I'm not saying that we should now eliminate cars from the landscape. I drive all the time and I enjoy it and it gets me to cool places. Let's just create a world where we don't have to drive as much and when we do drive, it's not as catastrophic to animals. Ben, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate your time and your insights. Thank you so much for having me, Jill. I appreciate it. Ben Goldfarb is an environmental journalist and author of crossings, how road ecology is shaping the future of our planet. Next episode, our host, Antonia Cedihito, has a conversation with artist and documentarian, Jess Shane. Her latest project is the podcast, Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative. It's a provocative look at how audio documentaries are made, the tries to rewrite the rules of the genre. I'm hoping that like some people went away with an awareness that like even the most ethical documentary process, like is messy behind the scenes. That's next episode on Imperfect Paradise. This episode of Imperfect Paradise, Lions, Coyotes and Bears, was written and reported by me, Jill Reppelogal. The show's host is Antonia Cedihito. Catherine Mailhouse is the executive producer of the show and Shane at Naomi Crock Mall is our vice president of podcasts. Emily Garen and Angelie Sastre Kerbicek are the senior producers, production and sound design by Emma Alavaster. The editor is Sophia Polisa Carr. Jen Campbell is our production coordinator, fact checking by Caitlin Antonios, mixing by E. Scott Kelly, additional engineering by Donald Poss. This podcast is powered by listeners like you. Support the show by donating now at laist.com/join. This podcast is supported by Gordon and Donna Crawford, who believe quality journalism makes Los Angeles a better place to live. This program is made possible and part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people. We offer our offer to the producers and producers. We wish them a happy, peaceful day. We wish them a happy and a happy day to the producers and the producers.