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Zero roadkill as Amazon canopy bridges secure 15,000 crossings
- korijn 3mo agoFor one moment there I thought Amazon had done a good thing!
- kotaKat 3mo agoI thought for a moment this was some kind of reference to "no more destroyed Amazon Ground trailers on underpasses"...
- everyone 3mo agoI had the exact same reaction for a moment. But no, of course not.
- skeeter2020 3mo agosame - I was like "headline reads like PR but I guess it's good..." reminder to self: there was an Amazon before the bald bookseller
- s1mon 3mo agoHe also wasn't bald when he started selling books. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-25-the-magic-that-changed-everything/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-25-the-m...
- em3rgent0rdr 3mo agoPet peeve: companies that appropriate a dictionary term for their name, e.g. Apple, Google (& Alphabet), Amazon, Oracle. It's really not too hard to create a new name for your company, e.g. Microsoft, Facebook and Nvidia.
- toast0 3mo agoFacebook isn't a new name either. Some schools would publish and distribute a book of student photos with names at the beginning of the school year, to help recognize peers; these were called a facebook. Yearbooks are similar, but published at the end of the year and also have a lot of content about what happened that year and organizations and sports.
- em3rgent0rdr 3mo agodidn't know that... In that case I should count "Facebook" as another violater.
- fhdkweig 3mo agoA face book is a generic term for a school directory with photographs. That's why Zuckerberg called it The Facebook to differentiate it from all the other face books. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_book
- loloquwowndueo 3mo agoMicrosoft doesn’t belong in this list after they trademarked Windows, Word, Works (remember, Microsoft Works is an oxymoron) and others.
- inigyou 3mo agoMicrosoft Works was such a weird product because it was just half-assed Microsoft Office, but Microsoft Office already existed.
- loloquwowndueo 3mo agoNo. Works predated Office by 3 years at least. The first versions of Works ran under ms-dos.
- SoftTalker 3mo ago
- Falimonda 3mo agoSelling you dirt-cheap goods with next-day delivery isn't enough for you?
- ynac 3mo agoWe just had our first bear crossing on a wildlife here in the Northwest. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/first-black-bear-uses-the-snoqualmie-pass-i-90-animal-bridge/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/first-black-bear-u... I know these things are more complicated than they seem at first, but whenever these stories surface, I immediately go to an idealistic childhood cartoon land where we have a prime directive that tells us to go forth(!) and watch out for each other!
- vjvjvjvjghv 3mo agoI always wonder how the world would look if the bible had said "Respect the earth and all living beings" instead of “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion…"
- nvarsj 3mo agoWell no king would ever accept and propagate that religion.
- lotsofpulp 3mo agoThe tribe with the bible that directed to multiply would have conquered the tribe with the bible that directed respect the earth and all living beings because back then, might was proportional to population.
- mr_toad 3mo ago“ It has not occurred to you that your ancestors were survivors and that the survival itself sometimes involved savage decisions, a kind of wanton brutality which civilized humankind works very hard to suppress. What price will you pay for that suppression? Will you accept your own extinction?” - Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune
- gambiting 3mo agoWhich is kinda hilarious given that despite being called a tyrant, Leto II had basically created a post scarcity society that was almost entirely castrated of violence or capacity for it. He kept chastising people for that desire to tame those base instincts but he was doing the exact same thing. It's just a funny thing to quote given the context of his character.
- dmix 3mo agoI remember reading that back in the day North America used to have more trees and dense vegetation that squirrels rarely touched the ground since that was more dangerous for them, so they would use the trees like highways.
- ofalkaed 3mo agoTree squirrels are big on digging, they bury food for later retrieval and eat a good amount of terrestrial foods. You regularly see them on the ground even in dense forest. Flying squirrels stick more to the trees but their gliding ability means dense forest is not a requirement for avoiding the ground.
- dmix 3mo agoFunny I just went camping in a provincial park in Canada and I put a tent down on some dirt next to a tree which turned out to be full of buried nuts which was revealed when I tried to sweep away debris. You'd have no idea there were a hundred of them buried right next to the trees.
- culi 3mo agoJust wanna say, Monga Bay is an incredible publication that doesn't get enough attention. As someone who follows a lot of environmental news, they routinely cover important topics and do original journalism on stories I hear nowhere else. Their YouTube channel is full of extremely high quality videos that often get less than 2k views. I would highly recommend checking them out https://www.youtube.com/@MongabayTV/videos https://www.youtube.com/@MongabayTV/videos Here's a few of my favorites: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2rfy9HkzSs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2rfy9HkzSs - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZEkt4Ph41M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZEkt4Ph41M - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynXNzOUI7Xw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynXNzOUI7Xw - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMeui4P6urY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMeui4P6urY
- harimau777 3mo agoHow do they tend to clock in on the doomer scale? I'm trying to find alternatives to the regular news that don't feed my doomerism.
- embedding-shape 3mo agoI meant look at the titles of the recent videos, it's all about disaster recovery/prevention, saving wildlife & nature and getting the perspective from native populations, some stuff will be happy, some stuff will indirectly/directly be not so happy. Maybe I wouldn't call it "happy news", maybe "pensive" is more fitting?
- cindyllm 3mo ago[dead]
- culi 3mo agoI'd actually say climate/environmental news has had an optimism bias because there was a strong strain of thinking reporting on how dreadful certain things are would cause people to give up. I'd say Mongabay is mostly focused on solutions but does not shy away from covering environmental injustices. If you want something more hopeful, it's hard to suggest news in general, but I really like Shareable's focus on community solutions https://www.shareable.net/stories/ https://www.shareable.net/stories/ And I also enjoy updates from certain orgs that are actually doing projects: - Andrew Millison taught permaculture at Oregon State and then worked for the United Nations. His channel is an incredible gallery of amazing climate solutions around the world: https://www.youtube.com/@amillison/videos https://www.youtube.com/@amillison/videos - Mossy Earth is a nonprofit that does a lot of cool restoration and rewilding projects that have had tremendous success: https://www.youtube.com/@MossyEarth/videos https://www.youtube.com/@MossyEarth/videos - Ecosia (yes the search engine) also does similar work. They collaborate with a lot of nonprofits around the world so its also a good jumping off point to find other groups: https://www.youtube.com/@Ecosia/videos https://www.youtube.com/@Ecosia/videos
- diogenescynic 3mo agoCalifornia would find a much more expensive solution that worked far less well. The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing cost an estimated $115M--a total waste of tax payer funds. Bravo to this practical and effective solution.
- tokai 3mo agoThis is a solution specifically for arboreal animals, while the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing is explicitly for mountain lions.
- asdff 3mo agoI think the idea of more opportunities to cross is good but the pricetag is absurd still. After all, they are terraforming a hillside. I think it is a little misplaced though. We assume animals need this to cross but it seems they can take a regular old bridge just fine. You can probably build a cheap "animal only" overpass, e.g. maybe a light load mesh metal or plank bridge or somesuch, for a fraction the cost and offer many fold more crossing opportunities across more of the freeway vs just one big budget spectacle. I'm sure the contractor was connected in some way. A sort of storm drain like underpass design would probably also be cheap if done during routine freeway work.
- tokai 3mo agoInstead of guessing you could look into the research literature on animal road crossings. Its a surprisingly large area of study because it is hard to get animals to use these constructions. Maybe they did a bad and expensive job, but you have nothing to base that on at all.
- asdff 3mo agoI base it on the mountain lions in question already urbanized enough to walk on sidewalks in los angeles. I mean there were people seriously claiming the griffith park mountain lion was somehow isolated to griffith park, and yet it was showing up on people's ring cameras miles away from the park. I think a lot of people assume that animals are only found in "nature" and don't know what to do in an unnatural setting. They can figure it out. Look at your housecat figuring out your entire home, and realize this is basically a smaller brained mountain lion.
- nubg 3mo agoThis is one of the rare headline where Amazon does not refer to the hyperscaler
- roughly 3mo agoI don't know what the local fauna looks like, but I'm curious if it'd be possible to start training trees or vines across the bridges as a way to gradually replace the ropes with something more durable - I'm thinking something like the Root Bridges in India[1] that last for centuries. I worry with projects like this that the first version's easy enough to build and show off, but if you don't keep up with the ongoing maintenance you're right back where you started within a decade, and "monkey bridge maintenance" is an easy budgetary line item for the "fiscal conservatives" to go after. [1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/living-root-bridges-india https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/living-root-bridges-in...
- HaloZero 3mo agoI've been here! It takes a veryyyyy long time to grow them unfortunately and they're not as durable as they seem though. I don't think they last for centuries...
- inigyou 3mo agoThis is the first time Cloudflare has told me I am a bot and can't pass even if I click the box.
- codeddesign 3mo agoDo the animals actually understand roads or that these are crossing points? Or a hope that a percentage will stumble upon them?
- SoftTalker 3mo agoThey probably see it as an easier crossing than coming down out of the trees to cross the road at ground level. They might feel it's safer too, as being on the open ground is more exposure to predators, which they would instinctively avoid.
- acjohnson55 3mo agoApparently, they do
- embedding-shape 3mo agoIt ends up being the path of least resistance. In many places, there are wildlife fencing around motorways, but it always ends up with holes and animals crossing via the holes, mostly because the animals want to get to the other side and don't find another way. I've never seen those kind of "hanging jungle bridges" like the article talks about, but "wildlife bridges" which literally are bridges with just earth/tress/vegetation on top I've encountered a bunch of times. When those exists, the animals who want to cross can then find a path to get to the other side, without resorting to making a hole in the fence and crossing the roads.
- jofzar 3mo agoThey actually learn it, what's more crazy in Australia is that we have videos of some birds (bush turkeys/swans) using zebra crossings to cross because they know it's safe.
- aorth 3mo agoThis is really cool. We have them in Kenya too. https://www.colobusconservation.org/how-to-build-a-colobridge/ https://www.colobusconservation.org/how-to-build-a-colobridg...
- bitwize 3mo agoOh snap, I'm so Hackernews-brained I thought Amazon (company) had sponsored the construction of special animal-crossing bridges for San Francisco freeways.
- jofzar 3mo agoHuh I'm surprised these aren't more common around the world? We have these in Australia and they work great
- throwitaway222 3mo agoWow - that's actually incredible. Happy to learn people have done this.
- NooneAtAll3 3mo agodid you know that there are 0 (zero) bridges crossing Amazon river?
- syngrog66 3mo agoUpon first read of headline I assumed, not unreasonably, that it was a story about how Amazon.com was paying for some wildlife crossings as a kind of community philanthropy.
- honkycat 3mo agoThis is the kind of stuff Republicans in the US hate. "big government wasting their money on a bunch of critters" I'm pretty left. The one thing I will never understand is how the right does not care about nature. Just insane to me.
- perilunar 3mo agoYes, you would think 'conservatives' would be big on conserving "god's creation", but no. Apparently having 'dominion' over nature means killing it, not looking after it. Also, the disconnect between Jesus's politics and what the Christian Right practices is pretty jarring.
- psd1 3mo agoYou two have put multiple constituencies in a small box so you can beat more people with a single stick. Even just in America, the only overlap between fundies, incels, and technolibertarians is the "R" they tick. Likewise, on the left, there's not much in common between labour activists and eco-hippies.
- tanyongsheng 3mo agoSingapore have done something similar. https://preview.redd.it/there-is-an-eco-bridge-in-singapore-for-animals-to-safely-v0-edu2v196i9hb1.png?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=b8a94a3487c9151d9e15af2c207fc3b91ce4ece2 https://preview.redd.it/there-is-an-eco-bridge-in-singapore-...