Zero roadkill as Amazon canopy bridges secure 15,000 crossings
news.mongabay.com175 points by hn_acker 3 days ago
175 points by hn_acker 3 days ago
Just wanna say, Monga Bay is an incredible publication that doesn't get enough attention. As someone who follows a lot of environmental news, they routinely cover important topics and do original journalism on stories I hear nowhere else. Their YouTube channel is full of extremely high quality videos that often get less than 2k views. I would highly recommend checking them out
https://www.youtube.com/@MongabayTV/videos
Here's a few of my favorites:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2rfy9HkzSs
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZEkt4Ph41M
How do they tend to clock in on the doomer scale? I'm trying to find alternatives to the regular news that don't feed my doomerism.
We just had our first bear crossing on a wildlife here in the Northwest.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/first-black-bear-u...
I know these things are more complicated than they seem at first, but whenever these stories surface, I immediately go to an idealistic childhood cartoon land where we have a prime directive that tells us to go forth(!) and watch out for each other!
I always wonder how the world would look if the bible had said "Respect the earth and all living beings" instead of “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion…"
There are infinite alterations you can make to the bible to make it more moral, like remove the parts where innocent people are punished on someone else’s behalf (raped, stoned, killed) or enslaved.
Thankfully many people gloss over those parts and use their own moral intuitions to correct the bible these days.
A lot of Christians argue that it does say exactly that. In Genesis 2:15, God tells Adam to care for the planet:
The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.
Of course fundamentalists tend not to see it that way.
The tribe with the bible that directed to multiply would have conquered the tribe with the bible that directed respect the earth and all living beings because back then, might was proportional to population.
“ It has not occurred to you that your ancestors were survivors and that the survival itself sometimes involved savage decisions, a kind of wanton brutality which civilized humankind works very hard to suppress. What price will you pay for that suppression? Will you accept your own extinction?”
- Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune
Which is kinda hilarious given that despite being called a tyrant, Leto II had basically created a post scarcity society that was almost entirely castrated of violence or capacity for it. He kept chastising people for that desire to tame those base instincts but he was doing the exact same thing. It's just a funny thing to quote given the context of his character.
"be fruitful" and "replenish the earth" is already aligned
As for "subdue", ask anyone maintaining a large garden how much they have to work to keep it from reverting back to a wilderness. Gardening is choosing which species stay and which are forcibly removed and optimizing the environment to enable your chosen species to thrive. If the words "subdue" and "dominion" freak you out, pick your brains up off the floor and go touch grass.
Western civilization has decided that it wants to keep the primate species and is dissatisfied when they become roadkill, so it altered the environment to enable the chosen species to thrive. This article is a gardening success story. Gardening requires dominion. We have dominion over the primates and we have chosen to be benevolent with that dominion.
> so it altered the environment
The motorway was not a natural occurrence, and neither cars or trucks evolved naturally. Humans went there and installed a limited fix for the destruction they caused in the first place.
This is really cool. We have them in Kenya too. https://www.colobusconservation.org/how-to-build-a-colobridg...
For one moment there I thought Amazon had done a good thing!
Pet peeve: companies that appropriate a dictionary term for their name, e.g. Apple, Google (& Alphabet), Amazon, Oracle. It's really not too hard to create a new name for your company, e.g. Microsoft, Facebook and Nvidia.
> Pet peeve: companies that appropriate a dictionary term for their name, e.g. Apple, Google (& Alphabet), Amazon, Oracle.
Hard disagree. Consider "Oracle," a truly inspired name for a database company. It's an admirable choice. Here's the computer science definition.
> In complexity theory and computability theory, an oracle machine is an abstract machine that can query a black box called an oracle, which is able to give an answer to any instance of a certain problem in a single operation.
There's also the wealth of linkages with classical oracles, e.g., Delphi, Cumae (technically a Sibyl), Dodona, etc. [1] Taken together, it's hard to think of a better name.
Facebook isn't a new name either. Some schools would publish and distribute a book of student photos with names at the beginning of the school year, to help recognize peers; these were called a facebook. Yearbooks are similar, but published at the end of the year and also have a lot of content about what happened that year and organizations and sports.
If you count Google as an appropriation of Googol, surely Nvidia appropriates Invidia?
Those are different though? At no point in that sentence was I confused about which word meant what. Unlike Amazonian datacenters deep in the Amazon's Amazon.
Microsoft doesn’t belong in this list after they trademarked Windows, Word, Works (remember, Microsoft Works is an oxymoron) and others.
Microsoft Works was such a weird product because it was just half-assed Microsoft Office, but Microsoft Office already existed.
No. Works predated Office by 3 years at least. The first versions of Works ran under ms-dos.
Several other vendors had office "works" suites too. ClarisWorks, AppleWorks, seems like there were some others for the variety of platforms in the 80s/90s but I can't recall them offhand.
A face book is a generic term for a school directory with photographs. That's why Zuckerberg called it The Facebook to differentiate it from all the other face books.
same - I was like "headline reads like PR but I guess it's good..." reminder to self: there was an Amazon before the bald bookseller
He also wasn't bald when he started selling books.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-25-the-m...
I thought for a moment this was some kind of reference to "no more destroyed Amazon Ground trailers on underpasses"...
I remember reading that back in the day North America used to have more trees and dense vegetation that squirrels rarely touched the ground since that was more dangerous for them, so they would use the trees like highways.
This is the first time Cloudflare has told me I am a bot and can't pass even if I click the box.
I don't know what the local fauna looks like, but I'm curious if it'd be possible to start training trees or vines across the bridges as a way to gradually replace the ropes with something more durable - I'm thinking something like the Root Bridges in India[1] that last for centuries.
I worry with projects like this that the first version's easy enough to build and show off, but if you don't keep up with the ongoing maintenance you're right back where you started within a decade, and "monkey bridge maintenance" is an easy budgetary line item for the "fiscal conservatives" to go after.
[1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/living-root-bridges-in...
I've been here! It takes a veryyyyy long time to grow them unfortunately and they're not as durable as they seem though. I don't think they last for centuries...
This is one of the rare headline where Amazon does not refer to the hyperscaler
Do the animals actually understand roads or that these are crossing points? Or a hope that a percentage will stumble upon them?
It ends up being the path of least resistance. In many places, there are wildlife fencing around motorways, but it always ends up with holes and animals crossing via the holes, mostly because the animals want to get to the other side and don't find another way. I've never seen those kind of "hanging jungle bridges" like the article talks about, but "wildlife bridges" which literally are bridges with just earth/tress/vegetation on top I've encountered a bunch of times. When those exists, the animals who want to cross can then find a path to get to the other side, without resorting to making a hole in the fence and crossing the roads.
They probably see it as an easier crossing than coming down out of the trees to cross the road at ground level. They might feel it's safer too, as being on the open ground is more exposure to predators, which they would instinctively avoid.
California would find a much more expensive solution that worked far less well. The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing cost an estimated $115M--a total waste of tax payer funds. Bravo to this practical and effective solution.
Whoa that's awesome. I didn't know California had one of those. Keeps animals, humans, and cars safe and looks beautiful too.
Ok what’s your solution? I’m seeing more and more wild life bridges and tunnels so clearly the engineers think they work.
This is a solution specifically for arboreal animals, while the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing is explicitly for mountain lions.
I think the idea of more opportunities to cross is good but the pricetag is absurd still. After all, they are terraforming a hillside. I think it is a little misplaced though. We assume animals need this to cross but it seems they can take a regular old bridge just fine. You can probably build a cheap "animal only" overpass, e.g. maybe a light load mesh metal or plank bridge or somesuch, for a fraction the cost and offer many fold more crossing opportunities across more of the freeway vs just one big budget spectacle. I'm sure the contractor was connected in some way. A sort of storm drain like underpass design would probably also be cheap if done during routine freeway work.
Instead of guessing you could look into the research literature on animal road crossings. Its a surprisingly large area of study because it is hard to get animals to use these constructions. Maybe they did a bad and expensive job, but you have nothing to base that on at all.