An Environmental History of Roadkill: Road Ecology and the Making of the Permeable Highway

摘要

Road-killed animals are simultaneously one of the most common ways that Americans encounter wildlife and one of the most unexamined phenomena by scholars. Despite this neglect, a handful of American naturalists, landscape architects, wildlife managers, and road ecologists have attempted to understand and even mitigate the conflicts between animal mobility and automobility. Their histories describe the evolution of understanding the different scales of a highway. Early road engineers saw the highway as ending at the macadam's edge. This gave way to the idea of the "complete highway" that included the entire right-of-way. Modern road ecologists go far beyond the right-of-way and see the highway as part of a complex network of fragmented patches and corridors. As this development unfolded, so too did mitigation strategies. Early roadkill mitigation techniques prioritized the hardening of the highway, an attempt to make the highway as uninviting to animal mobility as possible. This order is being replaced by the idea of the permeable highway, building an infrastructure that accommodates animal mobility and lessens the impacts of habitat fragmentation. This transformation in highway ideology occurred when members of natural resource agencies, departments of transportation, and local communities came together at early stages of project design. More important, this transition only happened among those who dispensed with a wilderness ideology and viewed the highway environment as a part-as opposed to the antithesis-of the economy of nature.