Beaver author Ben Goldfarb has an important article about wildlife infrastructure in Vox today. Apparently there are very very few places that he cannot get published. And all the animals are lucky.

Animals need infrastructure, too

Earlier this month, the House passed the INVEST in America Act, a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that President Joe Biden is expected to soon sign into law. The bipartisan package earmarks billions of dollars in funding for highway maintenance, broadband internet, and airport upgrades — as well as $350 million for animal-friendly infrastructure like bridges, underpasses, and roadside fences. Although that provision is a tiny slice of the bill, it’s easily the largest investment in wildlife crossing.

The construction of such crossings has never been more urgent. Roadkill rates have risen over the past half-century; today, around 12 percent of North American wild mammals die on roads. And new satellite-tracking and genetic technologies have revealed subtler harms. Busy interstates prevent herds of elk and mule deer from migrating to low-elevation meadows in winter, occasionally causing them to starve. In California, freeways have thwarted mountain lions from mating, leaving the cats so inbred that they’ve fallen into an “extinction vortex.” Wildlife crossings allow animals to find food and each other across sundered landscapes, and help them access new habitats as climate change scrambles their ranges.

Wonderful! Why should even selfish humans care about coyotes and cougars crossing the street? Because fewer crashes on the road when one unlucky mazda runs into a darting deer or five other cars crash into the car behind it. Wildlife crossing makes us all safer. But I’ll let Ben explain because he’s way better at this.

These innovations are not only wildly effective at preventing roadkill, they’re also an underappreciated way to protect people. Hundreds of Americans die annually in car crashes with animals, and tens of thousands more are injured. “Whether it’s human safety or habitat connectivity or fiscal responsibility, there’s something in this bill for you,” said Renee Callahan, executive director of ARC Solutions, a group that studies and promotes crossings. “This has become a staunchly bipartisan issue.”

Roads have few equals as a destroyer of animal life. Vehicles claim more wild terrestrial animals — perhaps more than a million per day in the US alone — than any other form of direct human-caused mortality, like hunting, oil spills, or wildfires. And it’s not just common critters like squirrels that get flattened (though we should worry about their welfare, too). At least 21 species are imperiled by cars in the US, and one recent study found that collisions may soon wipe out globally threatened creatures like maned wolves, brown hyenas, and leopards. We are, quite literally, driving some of the world’s rarest animals to extinction.

Of course Washington got a wildlife overpass before California. Why wouldn’t they? And it doesn’t surprise me one bit that it’s connects King county one of the first counties to install flow devices for beavers and wayyy smarter than Contra Costa.

As wildlife crossings proved their worth, transportation agencies took a new interest. Highway acts in 2012 and 2015 expressly allowed states to spend federal dollars on wildlife infrastructure. New overpasses and underpasses popped up, particularly in western states like Wyoming and Montana, where deer and elk followed predictable migration routes that highways happened to bisect. Their approval ratings soared, too: One poll found that more than 90 percent of voters in Nevada — hardly a state that habitually embraces government interventions — were in favor of more crossings.

But crossings remained underfunded. Wildlife projects drew from the same pots as basic transportation needs, like lane repaving and highway repairs. Pitted against America’s crumbling infrastructure, animals got short shrift. (This was especially true for small species that didn’t endanger drivers — it’s likely no one has ever totaled their truck by slipping on a salamander, for example.) In 2013, when researchers asked nearly 500 officials why crossings weren’t more common, two-thirds chalked it up to money.

Well now suddenly infrastructure legislation is sounding a lot more interesting to me! I like where this is going.

In 2013, road ecologists began to discuss securing more permanent funds. Scientists at the Center for Large Landscape Conservation, ARC Solutions, and the Western Transportation Institute wrote policy papers, met with congressional aides, and hammered out the basic framework for wildlife-crossing legislation. As the proposal developed, it gained supporters. Animal welfare groups like the Humane Society backed crossings to reduce wildlife deaths and suffering. Conservation organizations like the Wildlands Network touted crossings as a way of stitching up fragmented ecosystems. Even pro-hunting organizations trumpeted the restoration of healthy deer and elk herds as a selling point.

“We use the lingo ‘win-win’ a lot, but in this case this was truly a win-win-win-win,” said Susan Holmes, federal policy director for the Wildlands Network. “Almost everyone could see the value in this.”

With backing from hunters and highway safety advocates alike, animal-friendly infrastructure racked up unlikely congressional support. In a 2019 hearing on crossings, Sen. John Barrasso, a Republican from Wyoming and a former surgeon, said that he’s taken care of patients injured in collisions with wildlife. “It happens every year,” he said. Although Barrasso has a history of impeding climate-friendly initiatives — and a 7 percent lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters — he included a wildlife crossing program in the highway bill that he sponsored later that year. (That version of the bill never passed.) Crossings also garnered support from Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican senator who chairs the chamber’s Environment and Public Works Committee — perhaps because Capito’s home state of West Virginia leads the country in deer crashes

 Well sure, safer wildlife. Safer drivers. What’s not to love about that? Maybe get some insurance car companies to invest too because it’s in their interest not to have more claims to pay. It all makes sense.

As exciting as all that may be, it’s important to remember that the new funding for wildlife crossings is merely a good start. While $350 million may sound substantial, it is, as Cramer puts it, “decimal dust” compared to national transportation budgets. It’s also a fraction of what’s ultimately needed: According to one recent report, it would cost $175 million to deal with roadkill hot spots in California alone. What’s more, wildlife crossings can’t do much about traffic noise, salt pollution, stormwater runoff, or many of the other byproducts of roads — some of which will, ironically, be exacerbated by the infrastructure bill, which allots millions to highway expansion projects. And all the crossings in the world won’t help unless we get better at protecting the habitats that animals must move between.

Well, sure. It’s never enough. We are doing more to ruin wildlife than we could ever possibly do to repair it. But it’s something. Something that reminds us we share the planet. And something that reminds us we can solve problems.

And those are two very important things.