Road Runs Through It Reviving Wild Places

When respected conservation biologists Michael Soulé and Reed Noss were asked to name three current policy issues most important to the re-wilding of North America, they answered in unison: "Roads, roads, and roads." The men weren't talking about highways, they were talking about the 500,000 miles of roads built in federal forest lands to access natural resources and abandoned when the resources — timber, coal or other minerals — were removed.

Former Chief of the Forest Service, Mike Dombeck says, "...of all the things that we do on National Forests, road building leaves the most lasting imprint on the landscape."

A Road Runs Through It features a collection of essays by some of today's finest nonfiction writers: Peter Matthiessen, Barry Lopez, David Quammen, David Petersen, Stephanie Mills, Phil Condon and two dozen others. They cover all the angles in, "Why Roads," "Where the Deer and the Antelope Can't Play: Roads and Wildlife," "Got Roads?" "Much Ado About Access: The Link Between Roads and Motorized Recreation," "Ripping Roads for Restoration," and "In Defense of Wildness."

In this important new book, the writers explore the devastation, the carnage, the loss of wildlands, and the uselessness of the modern system of roadworks through public lands. They give us hope for a restored landscape by removing the most egregious roads. They write of future possibilities too, along with ideas about how to preserve what road-less wildlands we have left.

All royalties from the book will be donated to Wildlands CPR, a nonprofit organization established in 1995 to work with grassroots organizations and individuals to consolidate road-fighting information into a single network. Their mission is to revive and protect wild places by promoting road removal and re-vegetation, by preventing road reconstruction, and by limiting motorized recreation.

Through Wildlands CPR, activists can leverage their time with on-the-ground grassroots work by providing tools and strategies to fight road construction, deter motorized recreation, and promote road removal and re-vegetation. Wildlands CPR is the perfect organization to take the roads and motorized recreation issues to the broader public.

Thomas R. Petersen, Development Director of Wildlands CPR, has worked as a fundraiser for not-for-profit environmental groups for eleven years. Tom is also a talented and published nature writer, with essays published in ISLE, Orion Afield, Northern Lights, and Camas: An Environmental Journal.