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Researchers Find Roads Shatter the Earth's Surface Into 600,000 Fragments (phys.org)
An international team of conservation scientists have released a new global map of roadless areas that shows that the Earth's surface is shattered by roads into more than 600,000 fragments. While roads allow humans to travel to nearly every region in the world, they severely reduce the ability of ecosystems to function effectively. Phys.Org reports: Recent research carried out by an international team of conservation scientists and published in the journal Science used a dataset of 36 million kilometers of roads across the landscapes of the earth. They are dividing them into more than 600,000 pieces that are not directly affected by roads. Of these remaining roadless areas only 7 percent are larger than 100 km2. The largest tracts are to be found in the tundra and the boreal forests of North America and Eurasia, as well as some tropical areas of Africa, South America and Southeast Asia. Only 9 percent of these areas undisturbed by roads are protected. Roads introduce many problems to nature. For instance, they interrupt gene flow in animal populations, facilitate the spread of pests and diseases, and increase soil erosion and the contamination of rivers and wetlands. Then there is the free movement of people made possible by road development in previously remote areas, which has opened these areas up to severe problems such as illegal logging, poaching and deforestation. Most importantly, roads trigger the construction of further roads and the subsequent conversion of natural landscapes, a phenomenon the study labels "contagious development."
600,000 may sound like a big number. But consider that the Earth's land surface is 197,000,000 mi^2 (sorry for the imperial units, figure it out). So, roads "shatter" the Earth into average sections of 328 mi^2. Big woopee-doo.
("Shatter?" Unless the claimant can find lots of roads which have created fault lines in the Earth's crust, that's a troll at best, and more likely a deliberate falsification to support an agenda.)
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Too bad nothing goes under or over, that would shatter this stupid story title.
The article actually advocates the protection of the most ecologically rich already roadless areas, not the destruction of roads. Roads in lots of these areas wouldn't necessarily be beneficial to humankind. It's just that in many of these areas there is insufficient protection of the habitats in them.
Obviously, there can be a smarter strategy for humans than the two extremes of no farming and killing everything that you seem to outline in your post.
And, most environment researchers (or academics of any type) are definitely not rich, especially if you take into account the atrocious salary for early career researchers who make less than bus drivers.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
I was going to mod you down, but I thought I'd take the time to publicly berate you instead.
The article in question is a scientific, scholarly article, written by actual environmental researchers. It appears[0] to have done what you would expect of a scientific article -- it has identified a possible problem (environmental fragmentation due to roads), and had done some measurements surrounding the issue. And that's it. The article isn't judging you. It's not judging society. Indeed, right in the very first sentence of the abstract it says:
Roads have done much to help humanity spread across the planet and maintain global movement and trade.
About the only conclusion the authors draw is that more should be done to protect the existing large tracts of land without roads (totalling about 7% of earth surface). And that's it. They don't call you a bad person for using roads. They aren't trying to guilt people into ripping up existing roads. All they are saying is "roads are great; we need roads; they cause some problems; and we have a measurement to frame the problem". Nothing more. There is no complaining going on. This is science, not ethics, so get a grip already. The one with a huge bias here isn't ./ or the articles authors, it's you.
Yaz
[0] -- I unfortunately haven't been able to access the full article. While I do have access to a number of scientific article databases, this article was just published today, and doesn't appear to be indexed in any of them just yet.
This. For the love of FSM, somebody mod this up. Scientists want to offer their findings to the world with the hope that they will make it a better place to live. Far too many of the posts on this site have called into question the good faith of scientists in this regard.
It tales a lot of study, work, and determination to become a scientist. Despite what some may suggest, the financial rewards are modest. Scientists put their hearts into what they do. They deserve to be heard when they have something to say.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
You clearly didn't read the summary. It skipped over the fig leaf and jumped almost directly into all of the ways that you and your roads are killing the planet.
No, I went one better and went and found the actual paper the article is based on.
The summary didn't make any judgement of you or anyone else either. It listed a variety of problems caused by roads -- and that's it. If you feel personally slighted by the list, that's your problem.
Again -- nobody said anything about tearing up roads, or that we shouldn't use them. Roads cause some problems, and help with others. Adults can discuss the cons of something without it implicitly becoming about trying to ban or tear that item out of existence. Indeed, instead of going insane and assuming they are being judged by a scientific paper, rational adults would instead have a discussion on how we might be able to mitigate the problems, while continuing to enjoy the benefits.
Instead, we seem to have too many babies around here who read a list acknowledging problems with roads and assume "They hate roads! I use roads! Therefore they hate me/civilization/everything I stand for!", when no such things were stated or implied.
Now if you're interested in putting on your adult pants and discussing like an rational human being, a more interesting discussion would be on the relative benefits of mitigation strategies, such as wildlife overpasses/underpasses. Parks Canada is considered one of the major world experts on practical wildlife crossing research, and has some interesting materials online discussing the problems and solutions.
See how that works? Someone identifies a problem. Someone else identifies possible solutions. The solutions are evaluated. Nobody goes berserk and simply tears everything apart, nobody calls anyone names, nobody assumes anyone is a bad person. Like an adult. Try it for yourself.
Yaz
The intention of articles such as this is clearly to make people feel bad about... well, their existence, really.
No, it isn't. And there is something seriously wrong with the psyche of anyone who reads a scientific article and that is what they pull out of it.
The article reported on a scientific paper, and that is all. Stop trying to "read between the lines" on everything to pick out intentions that are not there. You only wind up reinforcing your own prejudices.
Yaz
Agreed, fixing population growth is the only permanent solution to our environmental footprint because otherwise the "greener" we get we'll just grow to be 10 billion, 20 billion, 50 billion and so on until no matter how green we are individually the sheer number of straws on the camel's back will break it. That said, how much environmental impact we make is not insignificant - unfiltered pollution and unchecked use of toxic materials could easily be the difference between a sustainable population of 100 million and 100 billion.
So yes, I think it's a valuable point. But if you're using it as a blocker in that there's no point discussing anything else until we got population growth under control it's an excuse. Not least of which because we mostly have, it's not a population boom anymore because the birth numbers - which are the only thing that ultimately matters - are slowing down. Average children per woman was 5 in 1964 and less than 2.5 now with a replacement population of about 2.1, so from almost +3 to less than +0.4 on a downward trend.
We will be 10 billion-ish because of the fill-up effect of the population pyramid equalizing and the continuing advances in medical science, but nothing like in the past. But the pressing issue is whether the planet can sustain 10 billion people polluting as much as the worst of us or whether we're already past the sustainable limit. If we are we either need to downsize the population a lot - unlikely in the short term, at least - or we need to get so much greener that 10 billion is sustainable. It's certainly not harder than the other option.
P.S. I think the expansion is often far more resource consuming than the mere continuation, like we build houses and roads and as long as roughly the same number of people live there we just need to maintain them and slowly repair/replace them as necessary. If we're growing though we need to make new houses and new roads because in the game of musical chairs there's eventually some people left over that can't fit in what we already have. That in itself is a good reason to limit growth, it's more sustainable to carry on than to constantly expand, which means you constantly have to take resources from somewhere new.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If anyone should examine a topo map of North America and give a reasonable estimate as to which major land contours, lake systems and other land features were either caused (or prevented) by the specific actions of BEAVERS, the rodents would be singled out in an IPCC report as a major cause of 'climate change', exposed by CNN, trash-talked on The View, sold bogus 'log pullers', and hunted down near extinction. We could begin by interesting Europeans in beaver pelt clothing...
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>