And on the seventh day...He created a market.

With this article I venture into what may prove one of my most overtly political topics ever, possibly against better judgment.  Yet I wade into these waters as a deliberate challenge to myself, since I strive to separate the intensive political controversy that this tourist attraction elicits from what I think is more interesting and ultimately more cogent: the sustainability of its business model.  Despite being relatively new, this attraction has already lured millions of visitors.  Although tens of millions more have not visited (and have no intention of doing so), the heated debate generated from its opening in the summer of 2007 has inevitably foisted it further in the limelight than its conceivers had ever expected.

I’m referring to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, in the outer reaches of suburban Cincinnati, just ten miles west of the Greater Cincinnati Airport (CVG) and also a two-minute drive from the I-275 bridge over the Ohio River that leads to Indiana.  The museum is (at this point in time) the highest-profile project of Answers in Genesis (AiG), a non-profit Christian apologetics ministry that principally advocates for a literal interpretation of Genesis.  Both the museum and its parent organization, now housed at the same address at the museum’s campus, owe a great deal of their size and influence to the tireless efforts of Ken Ham, who first founded a creationist organization in his native Australia in the late 1970s.  After several acquisitions and reorganizations that eventually whisked Ham across the Pacific to an American agency, Answers in Genesis was born, bringing together a smattering of creationist enterprises from the US, Australia, South Africa, Canada and New Zealand under one umbrella, all under Ham’s directorship.  In the intervening years, Ham has achieved national recognition for his tireless fundraising, which culminated in the $27 million of private funds to build the 70,000 square-foot Creation Museum—a goal of AiG since its inception.

Even among other Biblical creationists, the Creation Museum has aroused controversy.  It largely serves as the visitor-friendly, public relations arm of Answers in Genesis, which in turn concords with Ken Ham’s theological views.  Ham is a Young Earth Creationist (YEC), meaning that he believes that God created the earth according to the account in Genesis, approximately 6,000 years ago.  Not only does this defy fundamentals to Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory, it also boldly contradicts most geological or cosmogonal studies of the age of the earth and the origin of the universe.  Thus, when compared with competing perspectives such as Old Earth or progressive creationism, whose proponents have also publicly debated Ham and AiG, the Creation Museum is probably the most at odds with contemporary scientific inquiry.

AiG’s creative team could have tried to accommodate other creationist views to expand its audience base, but they wisely decided it wouldn’t be necessary: Young Earth Creationism aligns with the views of a sizable portion of American Evangelical and conservative Christians.  According to a 2012 Gallup Poll, 46% of Americans surveyed believe that God created humans within the last 10,000 years—a percentage essentially unchanged since the polls began 30 years prior.  Thus, the Creation Museum did not need to cast a wide net in order to find its demographic base.  Initial speculation was that the Museum would see 250,000 visitors in its first year, but it ended up achieving that number within five months.  Almost immediately, AiG began planning to double the size of the parking lot, along with a retention pond to capture stormwater runoff, preventing it from flooding or polluting a nearby creek.  By the end of that first year, the Creation Museum welcomed over 400,000 visitors.

The photos featured throughout this article are no longer all that current; they’re from the summer of 2009, when the museum was about two years old.  The Creation Museum seems to be operating on a trajectory that involves steadily expanding its programming and amenities, though it already seemed extensive during my visit.  A few paragraphs back, I consciously used the word “campus” to describe the site, and while the word may be an overstatement, the museum is more than an isolated building.  The park-like grounds are extensive.

Aside from the outdoor seating, the museum’s property features an huge garden, a rope bridge, and a petting zoo.

Though I’m hardly well-versed in landscape architecture, it was obvious that AiG had invested considerably in both the design and the regular maintenance of these grounds.  The results were, at the very least, pleasing to my own two peepers, but I have no idea if Ken Ham and his team intended for these grounds to feature plant species indigenous to northern Kentucky, or an approximate recreation of prelapsarian Eden, or something else.  There was no way I could know.  The entire garden lacked any signage referring to plant species, Biblical relevance, or anything that would explain context or rationale.  It ostensibly existed simply as a treat for the senses, adding to the attraction for a museum that, thanks to the combination of the exhibits and the outdoor amenities, could easily consume an entire day for visitors.  Since the museum sits in the middle of former farmland, with no other commercial presence nearby, it needed something for its patrons to eat during their visit.  And, characteristic of the largest children’s museums, it offers an entire food court.

Since my 2009 visit, Answers in Genesis has added 20 zip lines and a network of 10 sky bridges to the museum, making it the biggest course in the Midwest. http://www.wcpo.com/news/zip-lining-among-new-attractions-at-the-creation-museum

Inside the museum, the curators have added a new section on dragons, based on the supposition that the Bible’s reference to “behemoths” might not just be describing the museum’s much-celebrated dinosaurs but also other mythical creatures that could have existed before the flood.  But these newest features only further beg the question: what do dragons and dinosaurs (not to mention zip lines) have to do with the story of creation, or anything explicitly referenced in the Bible, for that matter?  These inclusion are entirely within AiG’s right, but its hard to see them as corresponding with the organization’s ultimate ministry.  If visitors pay for the museum’s outdoor element and spend all day on zip lines, how are they having anything but a secular experience?  Instead, the attractions outside of the museum’s walls are ostensibly new goodies to enhance the museum’s ambition as a day-long (or even multi-day) destination in an of itself, rather than a museum that amuses the kiddos for 2 or 3 hours.  Ken Ham smartly located the Creation Museum sufficiently close to several important metros: besides Cincinnati, we have Lexington, Louisville, Dayton, Columbus, and Indianapolis within a two-hour drive.  But when I visited, the license plates often came from much greater distances than the tri-state region.

It would seem that the Creation Museum has succeeded overwhelmingly in its aspirations; after all, by April 2010 it was celebrating its millionth visitor.  But a closer scrutiny at those numbers suggests that all is not well.  After all, if it attracted over 400,000 after one year in operation, which equates to May of 2008, shouldn’t it have reached the one million point at some point in late 2009 if those numbers continued to surge?  The fact is, after a booming year one, the attendance has dropped in each subsequent year. http://citybeat.com/cincinnati/article-26546-creation_museum_atte.html The year ending June 2012 reported attendance at 254,000—barely over the original expectations.  The museum blames the persistently weak economy, which surely does have something to do with it—except that the museum opened just months before the Great Recession, and its most successful first year transpired while we were watching Lehman Brothers and Countrywide Financial collapse.  And AiG’s response to sagging sales was to raise the ticket price in July of 2012: from an already steep $24.95 per person up to $29.95.  It seems like some of those new attractions may reflect AiG’s realization that the Creation Museum is in serious trouble if it keeps moving along this path.  It’s declining faster than a Mainline church.

The response?  Answers in Genesis boldly announced its latest project: a $73-million replica of Noah’s greatest achievement, in the Ark Encounter, under construction about 40 miles away from the Creation Museum in Grant County, Kentucky.  In addition to the ark, it will apparently feature a replica of the Tower of Babel, the life of Abraham, the plagues of Egypt, and the birth of the nation of Israel—all as part of a seven to eleven-minute ride.  But it’s facing a few snags: the project is years behind schedule and has only raised about one-fifth of its budget, and the delays are pushing the estimated total budget up to $150 million—almost six times the cost of the Creation Museum.  The situation is so dire that the neighboring City of Williamstown has issued $62 million in bonds in an attempt to salvage the initiative.  Fortunately the city won’t have to repay these bonds back, since anticipated revenues for Ark Encounter will do the trick.  But these bonds aren’t rated, making them little more than junk.  Among the risks to investors: sicknesses transmitted among the ark’s many animal pairs; lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of a religious project receiving tax breaks; those persistently declining attendance figures at the Creation Museum.

None of the aforementioned news featurettes fully underline why the Creation Museum and perhaps Answers in Genesis are possibly in such serious trouble.  The ministry’s current struggles ultimately foreshadow a cultural misalignment.  When news of the Ark Encounter made its way to some of the Evangelical Christian newsmedia outlets, it understandably elicited reaction, both favorable as well as a fair share of atheist catcalls.  One quote caught my attention: an anonymous commenter who I have no way of finding or reaching; otherwise I would give credit.  I simply copied and pasted the comment.  Here it is:

“What I find so amusing about this whole project is that... Christians don't seem to realize that by giving their Bible stories a Disney like experience... they are essentially highlighting the very mythological basis of their faith. In my opinion for most Christians the [Old Testament] is an out of sight out of mind type thing (because Christians don't actually read the bible) so by bringing focus to these stories in a modern scientific context... only the extremely delusional are going to find the encounter "spiritual" everyone else will gauge the experience by the entertainment value for the dollar...the same as visiting any other cartoon based amusement park.”

Obviously this quote isn’t lacking in condescension toward Christians in general and creationism in particular.  I don’t condone it one bit, nor does it reflect my own sentiments.  I would experience no Schadenfreude if Answers in Genesis were to go bankrupt; it’s obvious the Creation Museum had quite an impact on the tourist economy of northern Kentucky, and it has generated hundreds of jobs for the region.  It would be callous to wish all of this to fail, no matter how dubious the museum’s attempt to reconcile contemporary scientific inquiry with the first book of the Old Testament.  For all the criticism lobbed at the Creation Museum for branding itself as science/history, it suffers no shortcomings as a religious museum, and my philosophy is overwhelmingly laissez-faire when it comes to addressing what matters of faith parents wish to impart on their children—in contrast with what our tax-supported public schools teach.

That said, the comment above nails it in the in the final sentence or two.  Answers in Genesis may have sealed its own demise by embarking on this basic undertaking.  The more goodies it crams into the overall experience and the more it blurs sacred and profane, the more obvious it become that the business model echoes that of Disneyland, regardless of the original intentions.  And if it becomes just another amusement park, even in the eyes of its most ardent Evangelical Christian supporters, it’s not going to be able to sustain itself, because the museum really will end up competing with places like Disneyland (or King’s Island in the Cincinnati area).  Meanwhile, since it does give “their Bible stories a Disney-like experience”, it will make new believers out of exactly nobody.

The other major aspect of the Creation Museum that I think hints at its questionable long-term viability is a simple display sign that, at the time of my visit, was poised strategically near the exit.

Okay, so the kids love those dinosaurs, and you can never go wrong with letting people pet the animals on display.  But is that enough for people to come back—let alone multiple times in a single year?  It would be interesting to know how many annual passes the museum sold even in its wildly successful first year, and, for that matter, how many families actually used those passes.  Color me cynical, but my suspicion is that low sales on the annual pass should have offered the early warning sign.

Over its six years in operation, the Creation Museum has expanded its programming.  But it has never reported any change to its exhibits—a huge contrast with most children’s museums (which are typically heavily science-themed) or most amusement parks.  These attractions recognize that exhibits must come and go all the time in order to keep the overall experience fresh.  Sometimes children’s museums will simply update their exhibits to reflect breakthroughs in scientific discovery.  But the Creation Museum is based on the unchanging Word of God.  It cannot evolve; pardon the pun.  Thus, what incentive do parents have to go back and see it all over again, especially when the museum is trying so hard to serve as a destination for families coming from hundreds of miles away?

When Answers in Genesis opens its Ark Encounter (if it opens), the whole enterprise very likely will benefit from a surge in attendance.  But how long before the Ark Encounter replaces the Creation Museum as the premier Biblical attraction of Northern Kentucky?  Can AiG sustain both, especially with those prices?  And what adult or child is seriously going to want to return within the year, just to experience the exact same spectacle all over again?  All of this ministry’s herculean efforts—and colossal spending—may just become the next incarnation of Heritage USA, the largely forgotten South Carolina Christian theme park that exploded in popularity in the early 1980s, then crashed almost as quickly after America learned of the peccadilloes of its founder, Jim Bakker.  I would never want to analogize Ken Ham to a convicted felon.  But barring a tremendous shift in American culture that has little to do with growing percentage claiming “religion: none”, the quixotic Australian’s empire may prove even more short-lived.

Even the cows can be crooked.

Across most cultures, the animals that comprise what we would call “livestock” remain remarkably similar. Chickens, turkeys, goats, pigs, sheep, cows, and horses are reliably visible in countries with widely variable climates and levels of industrialization. Some of this may be due to a commonly cultivated taste for the meat, milk, and eggs of these creatures, but I suspect this is a minor contributing factor. The truth is, humans domesticated the aforementioned ruminants and fowl because they proved extremely adaptable—not only to a variety of climates but to varying degrees of co-existence with humans. Centuries of livestock farming have proven that horses and pigs respond comfortably to an environment with a heavy human handprint; deer and moose and wolves do not.

So it shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did to see a small herd of cows in the setting captured in the photograph below, taken across the Mississippi River and downstream from Baton Rouge:



For those who live in states less dependent than Louisiana on a vast network of flood protection systems, the levee is essentially a magnified earthen berm that protects surrounding lands from a crest in the river. With the exception of bridges, views of the Mississippi in Louisiana are therefore relatively scarce. The quintessential River Roads that parallel the river’s trajectory in Louisiana generally offer this vista:



But cows on the levee? It provides a droll sight the first time around, and raises interesting questions regarding the ownership of these vast structures. Historically the Mississippi River was the lifeblood of agrarian commerce for the interior of the nation, with New Orleans serving as the urban gateway. The first wealthy landowners in southern Louisiana settled along the Mississippi, forming a concatenation of plantation properties with elevated homes that often fronted this mighty current, which of course was unprotected by levees at the time. Roads at this point were crude and inconsistent; the river provided the primary access to larger settlements such as New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Natchez. Despite the flood risk, settling by the river made sense because of its transportation role. The riverbanks also offered the only arable land for these Creole settlers; anything more than a few miles from the river often dipped below sea level into unusable swamps. The Mississippi River does not form a valley in south Louisiana—it’s the exact opposite. Essentially, the depositing of silt from the Mississippi has created a natural levee system that made settlements such as New Orleans feasible, since the riparian lands upon which the French Quarter and other neighborhoods rest are the highest points in the region. The Mississippi River is a peak, and everything else around it is low.

Now we have superimposed a manmade levee system on top of the one that Mother Nature provided; the most expensive and sophisticated of these come courtesy of the Army Corps of Engineers, while FEMA provides the standards that allow a classification of floodplain status used for the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). These elaborate protective barriers have amplified the complexity of levee property ownership, as the world became aware during the exhausting controversy of breached levees flooded New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Who owns these steeply sloped strips of land between the River Road and the river itself? It can be a federal agency, but it could also be a State-initiated water management district, a municipality, a district exclusively in charge of levees, or, as is often the case, a private landowner. Maintenance of the levees is always a public responsibility, and in the case of Louisiana the task typically belongs to one of the many levee districts run by each of the parishes (Louisiana’s equivalent of counties) that claims part of the river’s banks. Even if the land is privately owned, the stewards of the levee earned the right of access to the levee top through an easement—various segments of the levee have obliquely angled gravel roads to allow safe vehicular access in a fashion that will not damage the soil or weaken the berm. Some parts of the levee have dirt roads on top. Much of the levee tops in New Orleans and Baton Rouge have pedestrian and bike trails. In recent years, an organization has even sponsored an exhaustive Rouge-Orleans race that stretches the full 124-mile length of the river’s course between the state’s largest metro and its capital.


It’s amazing, considering all these interventions, that private landowners have still found a way to stake their claim on the lands. Clearly this specific one chose to use it as pasture land. Is it healthy for the cows to graze on such a heavy slope? Surely the dairy farms of Wisconsin and California aren’t perfectly flat, so that should not prove a major impediment. And it could very well imply a sort of mutual benefit agreement between the landowner and the levee district: while the district ideally maintains these structures that protect all the abutting lands from floods, the owner of these cattle has saved the district the trouble of using potentially destructive tractors to mow the levees. Why is it necessary to keep the levees mowed? An excellent question, to which I’m not certain I have an answer, though I suspect that a completely unkempt levee may impede access for vehicles that inspect the structure, and it may attract undesirable wildlife: muskrats and nutria are known to pull grasses by the roots that help stabilize the soil of Louisiana’s levees and wetlands. At any rate, whether a landowner, State agency, or levee district is doing the maintenance, a carefully manicured levee lawn remains the norm and not the exception. The landowner in this case seems to have a permanent operation with cows on the levee, as proven by the legitimate fencing and gates.



Perhaps this sight isn’t as rare as I am inclined to believe. A Flickr photo of a much more crowded levee/pasture provides some dialogue that suggests this is a common occurrence. A state institution such as the Hunt Correctional Institute (the women’s prison) may actually employ the cows principally as grazers for maintaining the portion of its property that fronts the river. At any rate, the cattle of sweaty south Louisiana seem as placidly adaptive to this unconventional milieu as they have to whatever climate, topography, or confinement method humans have subjected them. Levees may or may not be difficult on the ankle tendons of livestock, but considering the conditions of the modern industrial cattle farm, the steeply sloped banks of the Mississippi are a bucolic paradise.

A new shade of pastoralism.

An exploration in unfamiliar territory can often make the typically mundane landscape features pop out. This doesn’t require a great understanding of psychology: when we don’t know our surroundings that well, the employment of the senses becomes more of a conscious act. Much of western Kentucky, of which I am more familiar, is embedded in the agrarian traditions of the lower Midwest, with endless acreage of cornfields, presided over by lumpy foothills that usually sit some distance from the road. Eastern Kentucky’s highways capture some of the most august Appalachian vistas, with nary a square foot of land that could truly be considered flat—the sparse population merely draws more of the visitor’s gaze to the topography. And what remains is central Kentucky, south of Cincinnati and east of Louisville. This Inner Bluegrass Region may offer one of the most powerful agglomerations of industry in the country that still falls within a rural milieu. Kentucky’s enduring icon—the thoroughbred—owes its association with the state primarily through the pastures surrounding Lexington. A simple Google search using some combination of “Kentucky”, “horse”, and just about any third word of choice reveals an incredible concentration of establishments in the center of the state.

The emergence of “horse country” no doubt explains why a new painterly accent emerges upon the landscape as one travels along Interstate 64, west of Frankfort, toward Lexington.

Fencing along the interstate is virtually unheard of in the Midwestern Corn Belt, for obvious reasons. But along this stretch of highway, it is ubiquitous.

So the horse farmers and breeders of central Kentucky need to protect their most critical assets through a predictable, straightforward impediment. But is that all that is distinctive about these fences? Though hardly the dominant use of the land, cow pastures are still relatively commonplace throughout the lower Midwest, and yet the fences around dairy farms are unlikely to leave as strong of an impression. They only occasionally punctuate the verge of a road that is otherwise overwhelmed by cornfields, and the fences lack uniformity—farmers adapt a hodgepodge of structural approaches to prevent cattle from escaping or predators from intruding. Horse farms in central Kentucky not only dominate the landscape, but they seem dependent on a single design for the fencing. The lines of charcoal leave a powerful impression against the tepid green backdrop of early spring.
The fences straddle both sides of the highway, and I offer my regrets that I failed to capture this in my photos. So why black? I think it looks fantastic, but is it solely to impress people as easily impressed as I am? Surely it’s not aesthetics—the plots of land are too vast for that to likely even enter into the consideration of the proprietors.

In his book, Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845 [Yale University Press, 1982], John Stilgoe observes that early English colonial fencing strategies borrowed heavily from European design, echoing the old continent’s need to conserve wood when under constant threat of scarcity. But as soon as the settlers realized that North America enjoyed an abundance of forested land—within a decade of Plymouth’s founding—wood quickly replaced stone as the principal means of containing livestock. And before long, topography and climatological differences across the eastern seaboard prompted further ramifications in fence design, so that various regions used distinct vernacular fencing styles, with appearances as divergent as the construction and architecture of their homes. New Englanders were more conservative by necessity—only the infrequent valleys and plains between granite protuberances supported much agriculture, so farmers had to engage in careful crop rotation, while staying put on their smaller plots of land. They couldn’t move frequently to stake new territory because there was virtually no fertile land nearby. Southern colonies, particularly the Mid-Atlantic tidewater and piedmont regions, enjoyed an abundance of rich soil suitable for the increasingly lucrative cash crop of tobacco. These settlers moved routinely because tobacco exhausted nutrients quickly, yet it paid so well that they had little incentive to rotate the land with less profitable alternatives. Thus, Virginia and North Carolina (and eventually the less mountainous parts of Kentucky) hosted a much more transient population, farr less likely to cluster in large settlements than the booming mill towns to the northeast of the Hudson Valley. Essentially, bad soil helped accelerate the industrialization of New England, while doing the opposite in Jefferson’s Virginia.

The fencing designs reflect this remarkable divergence in settlement patterns between the North and South. As Stilgoe continues:

“[S]outhern colonists firmly believed horses, cattle, swine, and sheep could fend for themselves in the temperate climate and lush woods. Men turned out livestock to graze on native grasses and cane. . . Although conservative settlers warned that such stock would become almost wile, Virginia and later Maryland, the Carolinas, and later Georgia made official the open-range system and required all settlers to fence in not their livestock but their fields of corn and other crops” (p. 62).

The coupling of this ethos with the almost nomadic approach to tobacco cultivation elicited the archetypal worm fence, a seemingly crude stack of split rails that join at obtuse angles, creating a zigzag pattern. It required no vertical posts. To the untrained eye, the worm fence seemed shamefully flimsy, but it required little time investment due to the ease of assembly, and it generally achieved its goal of impedance—particularly when it was used primarily to protect crops from intruding wildlife rather than to retain grazing livestock. Worm fences could last for over twenty years, and they were easy to dismantle when farmers had exhausted their soil of nutrients and needed to move on. New Englanders did not have it as easy: they needed to extract numerous fieldstones from the ground and continued to depend on difficult, laborious stone walls as enclosures (p. 189-90).


My speculation is that the post-and-rail fences that stretch across central Kentucky loosely fuse the northern and southern colonial paradigms. Early settlers attempted dozens of varieties of post-and-rail fencing; while this design wasted the least space of all the varieties, the vertical posts tended to rot quickly. The limestone beds that saturate the Ohio River valley endow the soil in central Kentucky with a high concentration of calcium and foster the growth native bluegrass, making particularly suitable pasturelands for horses. But horses apparently have a greater tendency to wander than other, grazing livestock, placing them in particular danger of high-speed traffic along the interstates. Regardless of the history of the open-range farmsteads further south, Kentucky horse farms need fences. My research indicates that black color of the fencing in the above photos is probably due to the layering of creosote, most likely of the EPA-approved wood tar variety. This widely used preservative can protect the wood fences from rot, mold, shrinkage, and termite infestation. In addition, some forms of creosote serve as a repellent to horses, who may otherwise try to chew or eat the wooden posts.

Kentucky’s horse fixation is indelible, but horses themselves are easy to come by in just about any place where they can survive the climate. Horse farms—the breeding of thoroughbreds as an industry—are the portal to the state’s unique relationship with animal. The Lexington area has managed to massage a bit of cultural tourism out of the concentration of horses there, but is it really as visible of an opportunity as it could be? With an unemployment rate hovering around 11%, even Kentucky’s venerated horse industry is feeling the pinch, with reports of a spike in abandoned animals across the Inner and Outer Bluegrass Region. While I would hate to devalue the industry by reducing it to a tourist commodity, it could offer a chance for proprietors to connect with horse-lovers at a time when revenues are down. Advertisements along the highway are non-existent. No doubt the state has prohibited billboards, and I won’t begrudge the citizens for defending the pastoral character against commercialization.

I don’t know if Kentuckians hold their creosote horse fences in the same regard as the British do with their fences made of stone, or New Orleanians prize their gas lamps. But the remarkable sprawl of immaculate charcoal fences between Frankfort and Lexington offer an excellent opportunity for expanding upon the horse farm brand to inevitable curiosity seekers. It could serve as a gateway for the entry to horse country—it already feels a bit like one—but it isn’t necessarily conspicuous to those who aren’t attuned to it. The potency of the image is already there, but the associative linkages remain tucked away. Reinforcing this association without overt advertisements may be challenging, but the most difficult aspect—to interrupt the landscape’s monotony with something new—already sits there as an organic piece of agrarian vernacular. Kansas has its yellow brick road; Kentucky already has the interesting topography to surpass it.

Four-Legged Pedestrians?

As I prepare for a significantly longer essay on the introduction of complete streets into the American landscape, I wanted to include a few images of a quiet but growing concern among planners and civil engineers: biofragmentation through the construction of roads. In his book Road Ecology, Richard T. T. Forman estimates that 1,000,000 animals are killed every day from collisions with cars. (This doesn’t include the countless insects who succumb to our windshields.) While some countries in Europe have been trying to reduce animal fatalities through wildlife crossings for several decades, they remain a relatively recent development in North America. Perhaps the best known are the underpasses for Interstate 75 in Florida, which engineers have designed specifically to prevent car collisions with the Florida panther, one of the most endangered large mammals on the continent. As many people know, the deer that are abundant in many parts of the continent can be particularly hazardous, causing significant damage to the car and injuries or death to the passengers within. They are among the most frequent mammals to cause collisions, because of their tendency to graze on food along the periphery of a road—a bitter irony, because much of this roadside food has been disposed by humans, thrown from the windows of their cars.

Below is a busy stretch of the Concord Turnpike in the Town of Concord, Massachusetts, which features four subtly introduced box culverts that serve as wildlife underpasses.

The tunnel pictured below does not target any particular specie, but is part of a general effort to reduce collisions between cars and animals; as the photo proves, the tunnel is clearly large enough for a human to pass through. Also critical is the earthen floor, which helps create a more seamless habitat for a traveling animal than an abiotic strip of cement.

The Sudbury Valley Trustees have installed cameras to monitor the success of the tunnels; their website confirms that they do enjoy use from mammals (and even a few birds) of various sizes.

The Town of Concord, formerly home to Transcendentalist writers Thoreau and Emerson, has a history of strong environmental stewardship, and my suspicion is that the population largely embraced the introduction of such an infrastructure improvement, whereas in other locations it might arouse remonstrations as a frivolous use of taxpayer dollars. However, the town’s Natural Resource Commission apparently partnered with the state highway department to include these box culverts during a broader infrastructural upgrade, in which the Commonwealth installed retaining walls and median dividers, while integrating the wildlife underpasses into the overall design process. This appears to me to be a politically savvy move, because it could mitigate most of the fallout among taxpayers that would take place if the Commonwealth introduced the wildlife improvements as a separate highway project on its own terms. These box culverts most likely cost slightly less as well, since they were part of a larger improvement and did not demand any demolition or structural alterations on their own terms.

In all likelihood these projects will become more prevalent in the United States with each passing year; I believe New Jersey has a few wildlife overpasses, which serve much the same function as a pedestrian bridge but are usually much wider and again covered with an earthen floor. If other jurisdictions adopt the Concord approach and integrate the design with broader street improvements, these wildlife crossings could ascend among the public perception from a luxury to a desirable safety feature that protects both humans and animals.