Traffication

Paul Donald

Description

Traffication develops a bold new idea: that the trillions of miles of driving we do each year are just as destructive to our natural environment as any of the better known threats, such as habitat loss or intensive farming. The problem is not simply one of roadkill; the impacts of roads are far more pervasive, and they impact our wildlife in many subtle and unpredictable ways. 

Using the latest research, the book reveals how road traffic shatters essential biological processes, affecting how animals communicate, move around, feed, reproduce and die. Most importantly, it shows that the influence of traffic extends well beyond the verge, and that a busy road can strip the wildlife from our countryside for miles around. In the UK, almost nowhere is exempt from this environmental toll. Yet the final message here is one of hope: by identifying the car as a major cause of the catastrophic loss of wildlife, the solutions to our biodiversity crisis suddenly become much clearer.

The first step to solving any problem is to recognise that it exists in the first place. But with road traffic, we are not even at that crucial initial stage in our recovery. Quite simply, Traffication does for road traffic what Silent Spring did for agrochemicals: awakening us from our collective road-blindness and opening up a whole new chapter in conservation. This urgent book is an essential contribution to the debate on how we restore the health of our countryside – and of our own minds and bodies. 

Preface: Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre

A note on units, definitions and data sources

Acknowledgements

1 The King of the Road

2 Traffication

3 ‘An Inconspicuous Splotch of Red’

4 Living with Roadkill

5 Traffic Islands and Invasion Highways

6 Thunder Road

7 Emission Creep

8 In the Zone

9 The Sixth Horseman

10 Winners and Losers

11 Five Reasons for Hope

12 The Road to De-Traffication

Notes

List of scientific names

References

Index

Sujets

• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Rural
• Sociology
• Rural area
• General officer
• General
• Agriculture
• Campagne

Informations

• Publié par: Pelagic Publishing
• Date de parution: 30 mai 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781784274450
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

Extrait

‘Mind-blowing. Everyone who cares about nature should read this book.’
James Rebanks, author of The Shepherd’s Life and English Pastoral
‘A very informed, impressive book. Essential for understanding the horrifying impact of roads and motor vehicles on nature.’
Derek Gow, author of Bringing Back the Beaver
‘Remarkable! An immensely readable eye-opener. How could we have been so unaware of something so obvious and so damaging to wildlife?’
Tim Birkhead, author of Birds and Us
‘ Traffication is a book to slow down for: provocative, eye-opening and painstakingly researched. It’s going to make me rethink the ways we impact our planet through one of the most simple of acts.’
Stephen Rutt, author of The Eternal Season and The Seafarers
‘Paul Donald’s Traffication is undoubtedly one of the environmental books of 2023. With perfect timing and tone, the author takes us through several essential learning curves and shows us how the car crisis, which most conservationists have long missed, is overwhelming large parts of nature. I could not recommend it more highly.’
Mark Cocker, author of One Midsummer’s Day
‘Every so often, a book comes along that has a profound impact on how we think and “do” transport. Traffication is one of those books, showing how the narrow focus on making car travel easier and faster is fundamentally harming the systems that wildlife depends on and restricting nature into tighter and tighter pockets. It’s a really readable, clear and compelling case to put the countryside more at the heart of how we manage our transport system.’
Richard Hebditch, UK Director, Transport and Environment
‘A brilliant and comprehensive expose of what roads are doing to our wildlife: meticulous, persuasive, challenging and brilliantly researched.’
Ben Macdonald, author of Rebirding and Cornerstones
‘This book gives a well-researched and engagingly written account of what is arguably one of the major conservation issues of our time. In drawing attention to the greatly underestimated problems posed to wildlife and the wider environment by our ever-increasing road networks, traffic volumes and speeds, Paul Donald provides an important wake-up call, and importantly, discusses mitigating measures.’
Professor Ian Newton FRS, ornithologist and conservationist
‘As the realisation of our treatment of the earth grows, a reassessment is underway, and Traffication adds a new and vital dimension. The benefits and the conveniences of the car are weighed against the devastating toll on wildlife and our own health and, increasingly, it doesn’t add up – but is it possible to see a different future? This book says it is. A masterful analysis of a hugely important elephant-in-the-room topic, humanity’s addiction to the car.’
Mary Colwell, author of Curlew Moon and Beak, Tooth and Claw
‘A meticulously researched exposé of how we’ve been asleep at the wheel for years. This is a thought-provoking, and brave, examination of the damage we’ve caused that will hopefully jolt us from complacency and help us to modify our road-building and driving behaviour for the benefit of wildlife and human health. Traffication is the conservation conundrum we need to address with urgency.’
Dr Ruth Tingay, conservationist and co-director of Wild Justice
‘We normally think of road transport as an urban problem but the creeping harm from traffic is suffocating our rural environment like an invasive species. This carefully researched book completely reframes the way that we should view traffic and highlights a blind spot for many conservation organisations.’
Dr Gary Fuller, author of The Invisible Killer: The Rising Global Threat of Air Pollution
‘We know that traffic kills people through injuries, air pollution and inactivity, but Paul Donald shows with convincing science in his very readable book how, almost unnoticed, traffic has been destroying wildlife and the countryside. He shows too how we can take action that should not be painful.’
Richard Smith, chair of the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change
‘ Traffication tells the story of how quickly the car transformed our world and how, equally quickly, scientists highlighted the downsides. But despite several decades of growing evidence, the impact of traffic on the environment remains focused upon congestion, climate change and air pollution, while ignoring the more rural issues that impact directly on nature. The author offers beautiful, heartfelt writing and some hopeful concluding chapters.’
Baroness Jenny Jones, UK Green Party
TRAFFICATION
TRAFFICATION
How Cars Destroy Nature and What We Can Do About It
PAUL F. DONALD
PELAGIC PUBLISHING
Published by Pelagic Publishing
20–22 Wenlock Road
London N1 7GU, UK
www.pelagicpublishing.com
Copyright © Paul F. Donald 2023
The moral rights of the author have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Apart from short excerpts for use in research or for reviews, no part of this document may be printed or reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, now known or hereafter invented or otherwise without prior permission from the publisher.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78427-444-3 Hardback
ISBN 978-1-78427-445-0 ePub
ISBN 978-1-78427-446-7 ePDF
https://doi.org/10.53061/PXIN6821
Typeset in Chennai, India by S4Carlisle Publishing Services
Cover illustration by Jo Walker
Contents
Preface: Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre
A note on units, definitions and data sources
Acknowledgements
1 The King of the Road
2 Traffication
3 ‘An Inconspicuous Splotch of Red’
4 Living with Roadkill
5 Traffic Islands and Invasion Highways
6 Thunder Road
7 Emission Creep
8 In the Zone
9 The Sixth Horseman
10 Winners and Losers
11 Five Reasons for Hope
12 The Road to De-Traffication
Notes
List of scientific names
References
Index
PREFACE
Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre
I grew up in a carless household. My parents have never driven, largely on aesthetic and environmental grounds. They have always considered the car to be a noisy, intrusive and largely unnecessary machine. They have proved the last point with a lifetime of walking, cycling and developing advanced skills in the interpretation of complex rural bus timetables. Their lives have not suffered at all as a result of being carless. If anything the opposite is true; the fact that they remain fit and active well into their 80s may be one of the rewards of their lifelong pedestrianism.
I do not have the moral fibre of my parents and learned to drive almost as soon as I was old enough, largely so that I could go birdwatching in ever more remote locations. But their dislike of the infernal combustion engine has engendered in me a lifelong sense of guilt for being a driver. So when in the 1990s a team of Dutch researchers published a series of scientific articles that demonstrated more clearly than anything before the profoundly damaging impact that road traffic has on our wildlife, I took note. Surely, I thought, this is going to be the start of something big in conservation. The UK has just as dense a network of roads as the Netherlands, and if the results of Rein Reijnen and Ruud Foppen’s studies reflected conditions here, then our entire countryside must be at risk. Over the years I have kept a close eye on the scientific research linking road traffic to declines in wildlife populations, and have watched this new branch of science expand and mature since the turn of the millennium into a discipline that has gained sufficient momentum to warrant its own name: road ecology. In its short life, road ecology has built up a body of scientific evidence that permits only one conclusion: road traffic has wrought immense damage on the world’s wild plants and animals, and it has done so in many different ways.
All the while I waited for the conservation world to sit up and take note of this mass of new scientific research, to open its eyes to the fact that road ecologists were finding more and more evidence to link our collapsing wildlife populations to a rising tide of road traffic. I saw issues such as agricultural intensification and climate change emerge as big new threats to wildlife, and contributed in a small way to research in these areas, and I watched from the inside as large conservation organisations rose to meet those challenges. But I am still waiting for the conservation movement, along with the general public, to wake up to the reality that road traffic poses threats to wildlife that are every bit as serious.
Then it occurred to me that perhaps part of the reason that roads are not generally seen as an existential problem for wildlife is that nobody has tried to pull all this new research together, to make a case that everybody can understand that here is something huge, something of global concern that somehow got overlooked. It seemed to be an inexplicable omission from the catalogue of popular science books. I know of at least ten popular books that have as their subject the impacts of agriculture on wildlife, and a similar number that discuss the impacts of climate change, yet as far as I am aware this is the first attempt at a book (in any country or language) that tries to synthesise in plain language all the many impacts of road traffic on the natural world.
My initial intention was to focus as much as possible on the situation in my home country, the UK, but for reasons that I cannot fathom the new science of road ecology has almost entirely bypassed us here. I have therefore had to discuss the many problems that our wildlife faces from road traffic using examples from countries where this new branch of science has really taken off over the last two decades. The USA, Canada, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Poland, Brazil, Australia and a number of o