"It’s Delightful, It’s De-Lovely, It’s De-Roaded" by Stephanie Mills

Even though my conscious mind knows uncomfortably much about the sterilizing effects of fragmentation on the land, my eyes want to see animals. When I drive along the county roads and state highways, things trick my wishful eyes into seeing badgers or wolverines. Rain-darkened stumps in the fields are, for a tantalizing second, black bears. Black plastic garbage bags and white plastic grocery bags hung up in roadside shrubs or tree branches appear to be great birds—ravens, snowy owls, big fierce animals. Then manmade reality reasserts itself and the passing terrain viewed at fifty or sixty miles an hour resumes its aspect of ecological poverty. Foolish of me to expect to roam the countryside in my automobile and encounter a complete ecosystem, to mistake a flapping shred of refuse for a wild thing. When I do see animals from the road they’re either cows or corpses—bloated flyblown coons, possums, skunks and deer, suffering the indignity of public mutilation. These pathetic remains shout shame and reproach. All kinds of roads want rescinding.

Long before the ubiquitous two-tracks and asphalt ribbons, railroads did plenty to slice and dice the wilderness. In my neck of the former woods, logging trains sizzled like lit fuses through doomed pineries. And across the prairies, iron horses served as shooting platforms for the bison massacre. My mind’s eye sees The Road as an immense circular saw cleaving a linear track across the land, chewing up any living thing that crosses its path. This image holds as true in rural areas and small towns as in old-growth forests.

Just as a logging road leads to the exploitation of timber, the introduction of exotic plants and animals, and the wastage of soils and aquifers, so, for instance, paving the road over the Himalayan passes into Ladakh (“Little Tibet”) allowed strategic military installations, the prostitution of traditional culture, and the introduction of alien communities and values. In both instances, the road led to a wholesale disruption of a climax community’s equilibrium.

In effect, all roads do lead to Rome. Like all megatechnology, the technology of the road tends to confer most of its advantages on the powerful. Roads allow human populations both to concentrate and to disperse in the most ecologically damaging ways. By accomodating wheels and permitting greater speed; by diminishing the need for sensitivity to the terrain and attention to the journey, a road serves the charioteer or legionary far better than the ambling pilgrim. Roads are the premier technology of empire, of centralization and homogenization (or, as they say in the World Trade Organization, “harmonization”); they are the literal avenues of conquest and colonialism. The trade and transport of goods, and the enslavement of beasts of burden follow the military uses of roads as night follows day.

While the Roman construction of roads was meant to facilitate the movement of governors and legions, commerce inevitably ensued. In our time, Old Ike, the military man, gave us the Interstate Highway system for national defense. For some reason, said defense came to involve a great deal of heavy truck traffic. These rumbling conveyances reverberate in the deep past. The archaic (and still used) bullock cart, integral to the emerging technology of roads, helped initiate a quantum shift in the relation of humanity to more-than- human nature: the fateful shift from communion to commodification. And it is not just the plants and animals that are reduced by this change.

Road-RIPorter readers don’t need persuading that roads in wildlands have ever and always been monstrously destructive of ecological integrity. However, the delusion that driving into a wildland in some gross sport utility vehicle or barging in on a stinking noisy ORV consititutes an experience of Nature is similarly destructive of human integrity. It’s a kind of self- infantilization and self-diminution. We expropriate a power that wrecks the landscape and imagine that to be freedom: rendering ourselves blind, deaf, and numb to the richness of the natural world by the intoxications of internal combustion. I must confess to understanding the appeal. There are times when cruising down a county road in my liitle Toyota with the tape deck playing at top volume provides the movie-style exhiliration of a magic carpet ride, miscellaneous engine and exhaust noises, lard butt notwithstanding.

I don’t recall ever having been advised that seeing the USA in my Chevrolet was going to fracture the landscape, wreck the atmosphere, change the climate, and slaughter the four-footed multitudes. Which is not an excuse or plea of innocence. I, too, have croaked a few furry and feathered pedestrians in my driving career.

Considering that I was almost roadkill myself, you’d think there’d be no love lost between me and motor vehicles. Even now I’m experiencing twinges in the right leg that got all smashed up in that head-on collision twelve years ago.

Ordinarily I’m blissfully bipedal, thanks to modern orthopedics’ ability to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Unlike the smeared squirrels, smashed skunks, and eviscerated coons that come to woe on the pavement, we humans sometimes get second chances. And the mission of Wildlands CPR is for humans to give second chances to the land itself; to create the conditions that will allow the edges to knit themselves back together again.

Perhaps roads are by now such a given of our experience that we can no more appraise them than fish can water. But try this thought-experiment: Imagine not just forests without roads, but a whole Earth without roads (which I will not refer to as “arteries” of transportation because that connotes a vital, organic means of circulation). A world without roads, mind you, but not without traces, tracks, pathways, trails, and water routes. At those scales we’re down to capillary gauge and the circulatory analogy begins to fit. These more delicate and dignified means of human travel are permeable to the body of the Earth and suitable to its unhurrying time. The wayfarer is enveloped by the world she moves through—both taxed and feasted.

Freed from roads, life loathes straight lines, moves to efface them. Enshrined and revered in the Basilica of All Beings is the Primordial Pavement-Prying Pick-Axe, a symbol of the work that returned the world to flourishing. The trees grow back and overshadow the weeds. The odds are evened up between humans and the animals. Martian astronomers speculate wildly about the inexorable disappearance of Earth’s “canals” and its spreading mantle of green. Snowshoeing along a trail through a beech-maple forest, the wayfarer offers prayers of gratitude to ancestors who, with words, incantations, and vigils slew the metal hearted monsters, and who with seedlings and hoedads did away with their spoor.

Stephanie Mills is author of “In Service of the Wild: Restoring and Reinhabiting Damaged Land” and editor of “Turning Away From Technology: A New Vision for the Twenty-first Century.”