Zero roadkill as Amazon canopy bridges secure 15,000 crossings (news.mongabay.com)

195 points by hn_acker 3 days ago

culi 4 hours 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

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynXNzOUI7Xw

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMeui4P6urY

harimau777 an hour ago

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.

embedding-shape 24 minutes ago

I meant look at the titles of the recent videos, it's all about disaster recovery/prevention, saving wildlife & nature and getting the perspective from native populations, some stuff will be happy, some stuff will indirectly/directly be not so happy. Maybe I wouldn't call it "happy news", maybe "pensive" is more fitting?

ynac 4 hours ago

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!

vjvjvjvjghv 4 hours ago

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…"

hombre_fatal an hour ago

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 commanded to enslaved others and take virgins as the spoils of war.

Thankfully over the centuries some people have used their human moral intuitions to gloss over some of the worst parts. But would’ve been much nicer to not have those parts at all.

dylan604 18 minutes ago

harimau777 an hour ago

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.

nvarsj 3 hours ago

Well no king would ever accept and propagate that religion.

lotsofpulp 3 hours ago

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.

mr_toad 2 hours ago

Jensson 2 hours ago

It would look like India.

infogulch 2 hours ago

"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.

rbanffy 2 hours ago

aorth 2 hours ago

This is really cool. We have them in Kenya too. https://www.colobusconservation.org/how-to-build-a-colobridg...

korijn 4 hours ago

For one moment there I thought Amazon had done a good thing!

em3rgent0rdr 4 hours ago

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.

ssl-3 12 minutes ago

nVidia comes from the Latin word invidia, which means things like envy, or jealousy.

Microsoft (originally Micro-Soft) is a portmanteau of microcomputer and software.

Facebook, as others have mentioned, is a compound word that was borrowed from what literal books of faces [and names] were called.

When I think of non-dictionary names, I think of things like Mosptnspg.

manquer 18 minutes ago

Related - companies named after animals or use animal names as part of their name /logo /mascot should at least contribute a share of their profits to its conservation

loloquwowndueo 3 hours ago

Microsoft doesn’t belong in this list after they trademarked Windows, Word, Works (remember, Microsoft Works is an oxymoron) and others.

inigyou 2 hours ago

GaryBluto 2 hours ago

If you count Google as an appropriation of Googol, surely Nvidia appropriates Invidia?

nilamo an hour ago

toast0 3 hours ago

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.

fhdkweig 3 hours ago

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_book

hodgesrm an hour ago

> 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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_machine

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle

wat10000 2 hours ago

I don’t think Google should be on that list. The word is “googol.”

Falimonda 3 hours ago

Selling you dirt-cheap goods with next-day delivery isn't enough for you?

skeeter2020 4 hours ago

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

s1mon 3 hours ago

He also wasn't bald when he started selling books.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-25-the-m...

kotaKat 4 hours ago

I thought for a moment this was some kind of reference to "no more destroyed Amazon Ground trailers on underpasses"...

everyone 4 hours ago

I had the exact same reaction for a moment. But no, of course not.

dmix 4 hours ago

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.

inigyou 2 hours ago

This is the first time Cloudflare has told me I am a bot and can't pass even if I click the box.

roughly 3 hours ago

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...

HaloZero 2 hours ago

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...

nubg 3 hours ago

This is one of the rare headline where Amazon does not refer to the hyperscaler

fritzo an hour ago

I dunno, seems like Amazon the forest is the real hyperscaler

fragmede 3 hours ago

What? Amazon Canopy is their new Global Anycast Load Balancer product(GALB)!

codeddesign 2 hours ago

Do the animals actually understand roads or that these are crossing points? Or a hope that a percentage will stumble upon them?

embedding-shape 2 hours ago

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.

SoftTalker 2 hours ago

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.

acjohnson55 2 hours ago

Apparently, they do

diogenescynic 4 hours ago

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.

megaloblasto 4 hours ago

Whoa that's awesome. I didn't know California had one of those. Keeps animals, humans, and cars safe and looks beautiful too.

diogenescynic 26 minutes ago

At the cost of $115M we could have built a new public university or added more light rail somewhere it's desperately needed like Orange County or San Diego. I am not against land crossings for animals, but the way the government just blows tax money with no accountability on projects the public has almost no direct benefit from is quite extraordinary.

kitd an hour ago

Not exactly apples to oranges though, is it?

diogenescynic 29 minutes ago

Sure, but that's not the point. My point is that infrastructure costs are like 20-50x more in California than in other developed countries for no apparent reason. We spend a million dollars of tax payer funds to build one single public bathroom in LA or even more in SF. There's something fundamentally broken... I appreciate seeing cost effective solutions that actually works. In California, it seems like most government 'solutions' are a complete scam to divert tax dollars into someone's pet project and create a funnel for their own income/profit.

bix6 3 hours ago

Ok what’s your solution? I’m seeing more and more wild life bridges and tunnels so clearly the engineers think they work.

diogenescynic 28 minutes ago

Or maybe it's just a good project for lawyers and lobbyists to get kickbacks...

tokai 4 hours ago

This is a solution specifically for arboreal animals, while the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing is explicitly for mountain lions.

asdff an hour ago

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.

tokai an hour ago