Ben Goldfarb: Road ecology and the normalized violence of transport systems

With a significant part of the global population now reliant on paved road systems for the daily functioning of our lives, it is easy to overlook the impacts they have on our human and more-than-human communities.

But how did so many of us become seemingly locked into this dependence on the “normalized violence” of these networks? And what does it mean to support harm reduction in the context of built infrastructures — or even dare to lean into possibilities of regenerative road ethics?

In this episode, second-time guest Ben Goldfarb of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future of Our Planet (previously featured here) calls on us to confront the harmful-by-default impacts of our road systems. Join us as we uncover the various forms of highway pollution that communities of color are disproportionately subjected to; how roads impact our more-than-human communities beyond roadkill; what road decommissioning projects have entailed in practice; and more.

What does it mean to alchemize change for transport systems that are quite literally being rigidified as they further expand — entrenching us deeper into these status quo ways of world-making?

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