When was the last time you started a journey but failed to arrive because you ran out of road? What is a once in a blue moon occurrence for us is a common problem for wildlife. For their roads are habitat, sliced and diced by our need to be everywhere as quickly as possible. While we've been gifted road networks with immense connectivity, our wildlife has had to settle for compromise, restricted movement and a daily dice with death. Our endless ribbons of asphalt could be the difference between finding shelter, food or a mate more than we'll ever know. There is an urgent need to break down these barriers and redress the balance in favour of our animal neighbours, and wildlife crossings are one key way of doing so.
These vital linkages carry a symbolic value too. They bring humility in place of domination, with an enlightened sense of our place in Nature, as opposed to looking down on it with that all-too-familiar attitude of entitlement and a deluded belief that Nature exists to serve us. Instead, it puts us back onto a path where we embrace untrammelled wild Nature in all its forms. A Nature that is free to move wherever it wants, as it once did before we began meddling. It is that freedom that is the very essence of wildness and wilderness. The freedom to eat, fight, play, shelter, reproduce and migrate without the risk of running out of road. If you're an inbred mountain lion in Southern California, these bridges and underpasses can also be a lifeline for more genetic diversity too.
But perhaps the most compelling case for more wildlife crossings comes from the Pandora's box reality of climate breakdown and the need to adapt to a new normal at unprecedented speed. A recalibrated normality that comes with increased chance of flood, fire, storm, drought, disease and parasitic outbreaks, temperature extremes and the need to head to higher - or lower - ground. We opened the lid of this 'adapt or die' dilemma, and it will never be fastened back on. So, we must do what we can to help wildlife navigate through an evolutionary minefield where the fast forward button is well and truly jammed on. Overpasses and tunnels can be escape routes from extremes that are increasingly anything but. They're infrastructure built for the future as much as the here and now.
As the burgeoning field of Road Ecology is teaching us, climate breakdown needs to be built into policy and planning from conception. It should now be the guiding factor for shaping how our transport network looks in 20, 50, 100 years time, as the ranges of wildlife shift and the need to optimise their chances for survival becomes ever-more pressing. It's about working at Nature's scale, which means giving wide-ranging species such as wolves, bears and wolverines - and migratory animals like caribou, mule deer and salmon - as many natural connections to use as possible at a time when the odds are stacked heavily against them. Could modular crossings be the long-term answer, able to be disassembled and rebuilt as animal movements continue to alter?
And intertwined with this is that humility and a deeper sense of empathy and kinship with our wild Nature, from which we evolved. Can there be a better monument to that than a wildlife overpass? An ultimate expression of coexistence. Some countries already embrace the need for wildlife crossings, with the first examples emerging during the 1950s in France. The Netherlands began constructing 'Ecoducts' in the 1980s and they're a familiar sight throughout the nation - the longest of which runs for over 800 metres across a main road, railway and golf course. The visionary work of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative has seen 126 crossings integrated across vast swathes of Canada and the United States since 1993, reducing collisions with vehicles by up to 95% in places. And in Brazil, every new motorway comes with wildlife bridges or underpasses. But many countries - the United Kingdom being a prime example - have an embarrassing lack of these. Slowly though, they are making their way onto and up government agendas around the world.
Beyond the obvious moral argument to do the right thing, and provide more corridors for wildlife movement, these crossings bring the often hidden - and for some intangible - habitat fragmentation and connectivity out of the shadows and put it front and centre in the minds of countless motorists and outdoor enthusiasts. We walk, even just for a few fleeting seconds, in the footsteps of wildlife as we pass under or over. We may contemplate the hundreds of millions of animals killed on roads around the world every year along with a multitude of human tragedies and injury, and then want to do something about that. So, why not lend your voice to growing calls for more of these carriers of hope and pragmatism to be propped up by policy that sees them not as a trivial indulgence, but an essential component of a more foresighted and compassionate society that works with wild nature in a warming world, not against it.
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