## Metadata - Author: [[Ben Goldfarb]] - Full Title: Crossings - Category: #books ## Highlights - When alien archaeologists exhume the rubble of human civilization, they may conclude that our raison d’être was building roads. Some forty million miles of roadways encircle the earth, from the continent-spanning Pan-American Highway to the hundred thousand miles of illegal logging routes that filigree the Amazon. Our planet is burdened by three thousand tons of infrastructure for every human, nearly a third of an Eiffel Tower per person. ([Location 95](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BWGJBTDB&location=95)) - Sometime during the twentieth century, scientists have written, roadkill surpassed hunting as “the leading direct human cause of vertebrate mortality on land.” ([Location 105](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BWGJBTDB&location=105)) - Road ecology was an act of interspecies imagination, a field whose radical premise asserted that it was possible to perceive our built world through nonhuman eyes. How does a moose comprehend traffic? What sort of tunnel appeals to a mink? Why do grizzly bears prefer crossing over highways while black bears go under? These questions had empirical answers, but they also required ecologists to think like wild animals—empathy manifested as science. ([Location 208](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BWGJBTDB&location=208))