Something strange happened the first time I encountered an article online that I wrote for a print magazine. The article was an old-fashioned feature that had taken me months to report, then perhaps six weeks to write, plus another six to eight weeks to edit and rewrite with the help of capable editors, copy editors and fact-checkers who helped give the magazine prose of yesteryear its distinctive glossy finish. The layered process by which such texts were produced meant that I had read through my article with close attention over a dozen times before it was published, by which point I could recite long passages of my prose by heart.
Yet the sentences and paragraphs that I saw swimming before me on the screen clearly weren’t mine. Rather, they read like a raw, unfinished version of my actual article—an undergraduate parody of something that took me months to write. I was gesticulating wildly where I should have been quiet, drawing attention to myself at weird junctures, and making weird faces at the camera. Points I had made in a sensible, even-toned fashion had been washed out or faded into the background, making it hard to follow my argument. I was living the dream of going into an important meeting with no pants on, except I wasn’t dreaming. Hundreds of thousands of people would soon be seeing this unwonted version of my prose self, stammering and half naked.
I am one of the luckiest girls in the whole world. This is what they told me when I walked into the lobby. It was a white room with a white desk and behind the desk is where they sat. They had beautiful long yellow hair and pretty blue eyes and they were on their computers clack clack clacking away. It was amazing to behold. To see them at work. I wondered what it was that they were typing on there. I bet they were looking at websites, blinking at them. Making deals. Perhaps they had accessed the part of the internet where you can buy a boyfriend or a child servant or some strappy high-heeled shoes.
They asked me how my flight went. They asked me if I got their gift beforehand and I said yes it was so cool, and thanks to your amazing gift what happened was I washed it down with the complimentary glass of ginger ale in a little red cup and then I fell asleep. They said that sounds so nice and they all smiled at me.
The dream of road ecology is the dream of connectivity, of reconnecting these islands of habitats with overpasses, underpasses, culverts and other green paths. It is the work of literal and metaphoric bridge-building.
If the dream is hopeful, so is the “species empathy” — the ability to see beyond ourselves, to imagine our way into lives beyond the human — that the work requires and embodies. It is a tall task, but if we fail to do this, or at least fail to try to do this, we end up on an island of our own, isolated and cold, forever apart from all the other beings that share our planet.