Political ecology approaches to develop wildlife loss mitigation strategies: a case study of mitigation strategies for urban and regional planning to address wildlife vehicle collisions on existing roads

Date
2017
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Road networks play a significant role in shaping the ecological environment. Many roads were built before the rise and spread of ecological preservation through society. Some ill-considered road projects act as barriers to fauna movement. WVCs occur when animals attempt to cross roads to reach different habitat patches. Many animals in human-dominated landscapes are exposed to a high risk of WVC. However, despite high occurrence rates, WVC mitigation measures have not been implemented widely. There seems to be a consensus of opinion that in most cases WVCs do not demand immediate action because they do not impose significant impacts on the total populations of species, and a species often found killed on roads may simply reflect the presence of large thriving populations. There is a long-standing method to identify the alarm threshold for WVCs—the proportion rather than the total number of a population killed in WVCs is used as an indicator. WVCs that involve medium- and small-size animals get even less attention because they do not lead to high economic and human health costs. This opinion discourages efforts toward WVC mitigation. ☐ This dissertation explores solutions for WVC by focusing on the underlying ideology of urban planning. The prevailing anthropocentric ideology is challenged by deep ecology and is proposed as a complementary approach to conventional economic analyses used by urban planners. This complementary approach addresses the deficiency of current decision-making processes in urban planning. Deep ecology presents a new scenario to develop WVC mitigation strategy. ☐ The premise of this research is that planning departments could and should play leading roles in mitigating WVCs. Every stage of WVC mitigation—planning, designing, constructing, and maintaining—requires interdisciplinary collaboration. Political ecology encourages an integration of politics and environmental science. Urban development has a ‘co-produced’ social and ecological change with a distinctive distribution of effects on and in the natural and social worlds (Byrne et al., 2002). Planners can be especially creative in combining procedural and substantive skills from once-separated disciplines and, thus, become leaders in the battle against WVCs. In addition, only the planning department through its regulatory powers, has the ability to enact standard rules to ensure that the benefits of non-human life will not be ignored. ☐ Illuminated by deep ecology, this dissertation offers a new perspective to examine WVCs—all life forms should be examined in terms of what is ethically right instead of what is socio-economically manageable. Deep ecologists have been characterized as ‘questing for ways to liberate and cultivate the ecological consciousness’ (Devall, 2015, p. 317). They criticize the dominant anthropocentric paradigm and suggest alternative visions of man-in-nature. This research offers initial efforts in this direction. Theoretically deep ecology maintains that non-human beings are equal in fundamental worth in biosphere. Applied in urban planning, I propose to deploy deep ecology not to advocate an absolute egalitarianism; instead, I suggest its use to offer a strong motivation to develop a WVC mitigation strategy—to preserve life and reduce suffering rather than maintain the local ecosystem or reduce economic losses. At least for the purpose of this dissertation, this is the interpretation I have used to characterize deep ecology in practice. ☐ Urban planning has a long tradition to serve human beings. Ecologies are normalized as the fate of urban development—a necessity regardless of its implications for justice (Byrne et al., 2002). This research questions this strand of urban policy research, and examines value-based biases in the current paradigm of urban planning research. Through introducing deep ecology to urban planning, this dissertation suggests that urban planning research should spur a paradigm shift from anthropocentrism to eco-centrism. The new paradigm calls for planners to be more respectful of the intrinsic value of life, and to pay more attention to non-human species. The motivation to mitigate WVCs should be not only to ensure human safety but also to save animal lives. It is necessary to understand that humans and wildlife share a common need to move. Wildlife issues should be considered during every stage of road planning to improve the ecological outcome of a road. ☐ Under the new paradigm, this dissertation develops a WVC mitigation framework. The framework uses ecological information to develop effective local WVC mitigation measures and describes how to implement them on local existing roads. The ecological information includes knowledge about the following: a) Species’ crossing behaviors. Knowledge of whether animals would avoid roads, how they choose crossing locations, frequency of crossings, behavioral mechanisms in response to approaching vehicles, and numbers of documented WVCs forms the premise for the deployment of mitigation measures. b) Typical species behavior and habitat characteristics. These information sources predict animals’ reactions around roads and help us to choose appropriate mitigation measures. Only with respect for life and profound ecological understandings will we be able to design sufficient and effective mitigation measures to fight WVCs on existing roads. ☐ As an application of the framework, this dissertation develops detailed species-specific mitigation strategies for four frequent WVC victim species—European badger, eastern gray squirrel, house sparrow, and northern leopard frog. All the four species are frequent WVC victims, but due to their small body sizes, as well as their population abundance, they have received little attention for WVC mitigation. They are still crossing roads without any protection. The strategies developed under the new paradigm contain detailed information on preparation, development, and implementation.
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Keywords
Biological sciences, Social sciences, Health and environmental sciences, Deep ecology, Mitigation, Political ecology, Wildlife-vehicle collision
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