Traffic may be as important as industrial farming for destroying wildlife

Health professionals have for years been campaigning on the climate crisis, but we have been slower to recognise that preserving nature, of which we are a part, is just as important. The current species extinction rate is between 1000 and 10 000 times higher than natural extinction rates.1 I thought of this as I read Paul F Donald’s book Traffication: How the Car Killed the Countryside.2 I thought too of the line from Joni Mitchell’s 1970 song Big Yellow Taxi: “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”3 That’s exactly what we’ve done.The core argument of Donald, who was the principal scientist of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, is that the spread of traffic may have been just as important as industrial agriculture and climate change in destroying wildlife. Road ecology is a scientific discipline that is strong in the US and Scandinavia, but weak in…
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