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Ben Goldfarb

Ben Goldfarb is an independent conservation journalist and the author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet. His previous book, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, received the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.

By combining ecological data-gathering with philosophical contemplation, Leopold bridged the art and science of conservation.

In the Early 1900s, a Young Ecologist Shot a Wolf and Watched the Life Leave Its Eyes. That Changed His Position on Conservation

Aldo Leopold’s writing reconsidered the place of humans in the natural world and challenged people to be less conquerors of the land and more citizens of it

Jonathan Shapiro, a Vermont-based wilderness instructor and certified “specialist” tracker on the East Coast, during an evaluation in the California desert.

Even as A.I. Technology Races Ahead, the Prehistoric Science of Wildlife Tracking Is Making a Comeback

Humans perfected how to identify wild animals over millennia, and now biologists are rediscovering the exceptional worth of the tracks and marks left behind

A logging road in Montana’s Lolo National Forest. America’s woodlands are carved up by obsolete roads that fragment wildlife habitat and degrade fragile ecosystems. Now ecologists are calling in bulldozers to rip them up.

The Case for Destroying Old Forest Roads

Can demolishing abandoned dirt paths point the way to a more sustainable future?

A mule deer crosses a road near Aspen, Colorado.

How Roads Have Transformed the Natural World

A brief history of road ecology, the scientific discipline that is helping us understand our impact on the environment and how to diminish it

Ocean creatures are noisier than scientists first thought.

Biologist Marie Fish Catalogued the Sounds of the Ocean for the World to Hear

Scientists once thought marine life kept quiet. Then the Navy tapped an aptly named researcher with an open mind