Yesterday, I gave a presentation titled, “Do we need an Ethic of Road Ecology?” at the 10th International Conference on Ecology and Transportation (ICOET) The talk was well received (in fact, I won an award for best student presentation). Lot’s of folks were interested in this critical topic; so, I’ve include the notes from the presentation below.
The next step is to take the points below (along with any comments that you might have!) and work them into a manuscript formally calling for an Ethic of Road Ecology. Please let me know if you have thoughts, would like to contribute a case-study, or would like to be involved in any other way with this project.
Do we need an Ethic of Road Ecology?*
As a field, road ecology is built on the fulcrum of balance between contending goals: acknowledgement of human need for development and concern for the environment. At its heart, the field is laden with an ethical quagmire that goes almost entirely unaddressed.
To illustrate this point, I’d like to have you consider the Trolley Problem.
The trolley problem goes something like this, imagine you are in the control station for a train approaching a fork. On the main track, you see four people asleep on the track. You cannot alert the folks on the track, but you have the lever to switch the train onto a side track. Unfortunately, there is a single person on that track.
What would you do? Would you have two options, take no action and watch the train run over four people on the main track. Or, actively pull the lever to switch the track, killing the single person.
This thought process is useful because the binary here forces us to grapple with moral valuations—are multiple lives more valuable than one, and regardless of the choice, do we feel morally responsible for action versus inaction.
Now let me change some of the parameters here to show how transportation engineers are presented with real life trolley problems every day.
Now imagine that, rather another person on the side track, switching the train onto the side track would just take the train on a more circuitous route and extend the trip.
I think everyone would argue to flip the switch. In fact, it would probably be hard to imagine an amount of delay to the train passengers that would justify loss of life. And yet, this is exactly the dilemma we face when designating speed limits.
A universal speed limit of 5 mph would prevent almost all traffic-related mortality, but we probably also all agree that that’s an outlandish solution. After all, we want not only “safe” transportation, but also “efficient” transportation, as codified in the mission statements of most DOTs.
What if, on the side track, is a pile of money that would be completely obliterated by the train? How many dollars would for us to think it ethical not to flip the switch?
Again, hopefully you can see the analogy: in a world with finite budgets, allocations for transportation safety forces us to take out a moral calculator and determine the amount of money in the bag?
Dilemmas like these illuminate the ethical foundations of decision that we otherwise wouldn’t think had anything to do with ethics. It also forces us to uncover our internal moral calculators and really think about how we plug in the moral values behind the valence we reflexively feel toward the outcomes.
Thus far, these examples have involved humans which implies a moral valence. They force us to contrast our deontological or duty-based ethics against utilitarian ethics.
We can take humans out of the equation and imagine dilemmas that force us into a valuation of aesthetics, too. And we can imagine analogies not only to existing transportation management, but to the dilemmas inherent in planning new projects. For instance:
What if the alternative track forever routed trains through the middle of Notre Dame?
What if it routed the train through your neighborhood or right through your front lawn?
What if we replace the human on the track with a herd of deer?
How big does the dollar sign have to be to decide not to switch the tracks? Or conversely, how many deer?
What if instead of deer, this is the last wild rhino?
What if it is the last swam of an endangered mosquito?
These cases invoke an environmental ethic. This also bring this preamble to the topic of this conference, road ecology.
As practitioners of transportation ecology, we are all involved in this ethical project. Folks on the science side help us to define the variables: “how big is the dollar sign, how many deer?”, while folks on the engineering and management side help us define the alternative tracks. Ultimately, as citizens, we all collectively determine which parameter are important to consider and their relative value.
In reality, the field and practice of road ecology is not simple dichotomies. It looks more like this. Where the ethical decision involves complex valuation of trade-offs between combinations of moral, ethical, and aesthetic impacts.
If you had a hard time naming exact values in those first couple iterations of the trolley problem, then you should recognize just how difficult it would be to put finite ranks to all these alternative routes.
Determining the most ethical path requires lots of science and lots of project evaluation. Doing it well can take a LONG time and lots of effort. But all that effort and time can be fraught if those valuations and the process are opaque and unexamined.
A good example is the reconstruction of US93 through the Flathead Indian Reservation. That project was stalled for 15 years because the first iteration of the project plan did not consider the broad scope of ethical factors that were important to the local residents and Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.
We propose that our field is in urgent need of adopting an ethic of road ecology.
Why it matters:
- Practitioners are asked to grapple with difficult decision-making tasks without the proper skills and tools. To date, the field has focused almost entirely on the pragmatic tools to solve the symptoms of roads, but none of the tools with which to diagnose the problems.
- Even worse, when decisions are made and projects developed, there is no established way for vetting the process or outcomes (positive or negative) in a way that contributes to and accumulates knowledge within the field.
- Best-practices and guidelines are insufficient. We write best-practices and guidelines, but we don’t have a mechanism to critically compare and contribute to them as a field. Nor a mechanism to ensure that those documents are addressing all of the potential problems.
- As a field, we are really good at answering pragmatic questions about the interface of transportation and ecology. We are really bad at evaluating which questions to ask in the first place.
- There is a danger that road ecology could be used as a justification for greater impact.
- There is a strong argument that as parties to the development of roads, we are moral responsible for fully recognizing and addressing their impacts.
- We can only expect more roads and infrastructure in the future, so these ostensibly minor cracks at the foundation of the field will only grow into larger faults if unaddressed.
The solution:
That we need an ethic of road ecology is easy to say in the abstract, but what would it look like?
There are good examples of how entire fields grapple with the ethical issues inherent in their practice.
For instance, the medical field has a robust sub-field of medical ethics that dates back to the Greeks.
Biologists have the field of bioethics and animal welfare ethics.
Even within ecology, there is a wealth of literature in environmental ethics that deals specifically with the ethics of ecological restoration that dates back to Aldo Leopold and his contemporaries, but flourished in the 80s and 90s.
To date, the ethics of ecological restoration have been considered in numerous articles and books. Even the primary organization of the field, the Society for Ecological Restoration has adopted a Code of Ethics and publishes a full text: Ecological Restoration: Principles, Values, and Structure of an Emerging Profession that deals explicitly with the ethics and values embedded in the practice.
Given those models, the ethical conversation in ecological restoration could be the best analog upon which to build an Ethic of Road Ecology.
But we argue that Road Ecology, as a field, is mature enough and the issues it deals with are distinct enough to warrant its own specific discussion of ethics.
We already have great case studies (good and bad) within the field to work from:
In the U.S.:
- The Paris-Lexington Road
- S. Highway 93
- I-90 Snoqualmie pass
- US Hwy 260 Arizona Tonto NL
- I-75 Alligator Alley FL
- And there are multiple international case-studies in the Handbook of Road Ecology
Specifically we propose:
- Drafting a Code of Ethic for Road Ecology similar to SER.
- Encourage conversations and publications about the ethics of road projects by soliciting presentations, panels, and/or symposia on these topics at conferences.
- Create a platform for discussing case-studies, either in article form through journals or dedicated sessions at conferences.
- Develop guidance in ethical decision-making for practitioners involved in planning transportation projects and include this in best-practice guidelines and future manual and texts about road ecology.
The utility of explicitly addressing road ecology with an ethical framework can extend beyond the practical aspect of a mechanism for evaluating the best project alternatives.
- Most importantly, an open discussion about the values and priorities as a field will bring to light the internal contention we all feel when forced to weigh outcomes, as evidenced by any reflexive confusion you may have felt about the trolley problems I presented.
- Being upfront about values and trade-offs prevents the field from inadvertently becoming a tool of greenwashing to justify even greater degradation.
- Explicating value structures will force us to define the boundary conditions for ethical projects and provide ground for determining, when necessary, where no alternative can be justified.
- It will push the field forward. In much the same way that Forman’s concept of the “road-effect zone” expanded our conceptual jurisdiction of ecological impacts of roads, an ethical framing will force us to further reconsider the extent our responsibility bleeds out from roads. For instance, even if we can fully mitigate a proximate section of road, are we responsible to also mitigate the distal effect if the road section opens up a pristine watershed to development?
- Transportation infrastructure is probably the main driver of ecological change across the globe, and there is no indication it will abate. Unfortunately, we cannot stand still on a moving train (multiple puns intended). The alternative to our proposal of explication ethics is that we either ignore them or make opaque decisions without critical evaluation. This is too often the case in transportation projects. But ignoring the foundation of an action, or lack of action, does not absolve us of the responsibility. Whether we flip the switch or let the train run its course, we are still culpable for the outcome. There is no absolution in inaction.
In the near-term we would like to formally propose and ethic of road ecology in a journal article. If you would be interested in helping to develop that manuscript and in particular if you have case-studies you’d like to contribute, please, let’s talk.