I wrote earlier:
> It is not my nature to be an alarmist, nor do I tend to get too
substantially
> upset over future government plans simply because most never come to pass,
> but I am a little surprised that no one has yet mentioned on this list the
> potential for substantial negative effects on wildlife due to the proposed
> US-Mexico border fence.
I received a number of replies, all privately. I'll try and summarize the
responses I've gotten so far, anonymizing each.
Two people wrote and mentioned that the fence will not be a solid, physical
fence for its entire distance:
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I think it is mostly election year rhetoric. A recent contract won by
Boeing inc. wil be structured on the basis of imrpoving camera and infr-red
survaillence with very little actual fencing. It will be a "virtual" fence,
the concertina wire press shots are just for visual effect. It could
actually be a boon to wildlife researchers when it get's "de-militarized"
similar to the way Navy Sonar serves for marine mammal surveys.
Believe me, I'm the last guy that would praise Bush. Even though this is
motivated by crazy paranoia and vote pandering, it might be actually good
for research in the long run.
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It will not be a solid, impermeable fence along the entire border. I am sure
if you were a landowner with a ranch whose livestock was being slaughtered in
the field, fencing destroyed allowing injury and loss of livestock, employees
threatened and attacked, your family threatened and attacked so that you
feared for your safety and your lives - a fence alone wouldn't be sufficient.
Try
looking at the problem from a different point of view. It is a complex
problem with no simple answers but we have to start somewhere.
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It's true that the fence won't be a physical fence for all of its distance,
but the planned virtual fence is only Phase I of presumably a 1,920-mile fence.
Phase II, which was just passed by the House of Representatives two weeks ago
calls for the construction of 700 miles of double-walled high fence by 2008.
The currently House-authorized fence segments available in this Christian
Science Monitor article from yesterday:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0925/p01s04-uspo.html
The map of interest appears at the bottom of the page. Presumably, Phase III
would complete the entire fence.
Let me respond especially to the second comment above. I live in Las Cruces,
NM, just to west of El Paso, TX and slightly north of the proposed fence. The
level of fear and distrust expressed by the second correspondent is not at all
characteristic of people's reactions here.
Because people are now being forced into the desert by crackdowns at the
traditional crossings, the Border Patrol is now acting as much as a desert
search
and rescue and air ambulance operation, rescuing Mexican nationals as they
attempt to cross the desert here, as it is an immigration patrol. To the best
of
my knowledge, very few people here fault the illegals for attempting their
tries at entry. For the most part, they are some of the nicest, hardest working
people you are ever going to meet. They are certainly not terrorists.
The crackdown on illegal crossings is already having an unintended effect.
Before border crossing became so difficult, people came to work in the US for a
short period of time and then returned home, only to come back later during
the next harvesting season. People are now staying in US and returning less to
Mexico for fear of not being able to cross back later.
As for the ecological consequences of the fence, two other people wrote and
mentioned that the effect on wildlife of the proposed fence has not gone
unnoticed. The first mentions that the proposed Senate bill allows the
Department of
Homeland Security to exempt the construction of the fence from all applicable
laws, which I presume to mean environmental impact statements as well.
The second correspondent below writes that the ecological impacts of the
proposed fence were the subject of a session at the most recent Society of
Conservation Biology meeting:
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Border 'Berlin Wall' will harm endangered species!
Call your Senators now!
The Senate is
about to vote on a bill that would build a 'Berlin wall' on the US-Mexico
border creating an enormous wildlife barrier, spanning 700 miles of the
international boundary and nearly the entirety of Arizona's southern
boundary. This would be an environmental disaster, utterly preventing
wildlife migrations between the two countries, blocking Jaguar, Sonoran
Pronghorn, and Mexican Gray Wolf recovery and fragmenting the habitats of
myriad border species. This bill MANDATES construction of double-layered
fencing no later than May 30, 2008 and trumps efforts like wildlife-friendly
vehicle barriers along public-lands boundaries that have been effective in
mitigating cross-border traffic.
The bill that the Senate will be voting on early next week not only mandates
construction of this multi-layer fence, but also will allow the Department
of Homeland Security exemption from all applicable laws as they build it.
This could mean that the disruption and destruction of cultural and
environmental resources along the border will proceed without any analysis
or public notice, even if the construction project would destroy the habitat
of endangered species, create water pollution or destroy cultural sites.
It is essential that you write and call your Senators and urge them to say
no to HR 6061 and to the Berlin Wall on our boundary with Mexico. This could
go to vote as early as Monday, Sept. 25, so please write and call today!
What's At Stake:
This massive wall on 700 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border is a colossal
environmental disaster. Walls would block wildlife movement corridors and
severely harm natural landscapes and rivers along our fragile southern
border. The only living things the walls won't stop are people.
More border walls and militarization will be highly detrimental to
endangered species and important wild areas, such as the Cactus Pygmy Owl
and Sonoran Pronghorn in Arizona, Flat-Tailed Horned Lizard and Peninsular
Ranges Bighorn Sheep in California, Jaguar and Mexican Gray Wolves in New
Mexico, and the Rio Grande River, Ocelot, and Big Bend National Park in
Texas. Endangered species need to cross their borderland habitat often, and
the new walls will crush their ability to survive and recover.
Instead of building a new 'Berlin Wall' on our Nation's southern boundary, a
key focus of enforcement efforts should be wildlife-friendly vehicle
barriers in strategic and at-risk places on the border, such as the Cabeza
Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, Goldwater Range, Buenos Aries National
Wildlife Refuge and Coronado National Forest. These barriers have proven to
be very successful.
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You are right on about the border fence. At the
Conservation Biology conference this past June, we
held a symposium about conservation along the US
Mexico Border. I've attached two press articles that
came out of our discussion.
Press Coverage:
TerraAmerica, 22 July 2006,
âBiodiversity Has No Use for Walls.â
http://www.tierramerica.net/english/2006/0715/iarticulo.shtml
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A fair number of other people also wrote me, amplifying these comments, and I
very much appreciate all of your thoughts.
In my original posting yesterday, I mentioned US populations of jaguar as an
obvious species that would be put at great risk of extirpation due to faunal
relaxation in a now fragmented habitat, as did almost all of my correspondents.
Thinking about it a little further though, there are other species of mammals
that are at their northern range limits just north of the US-Mexico border,
and these newly isolated species would quite likely be put at substantial risk
of not being able to maintain minimally viable populations indefinitely:
peccaries, coatis, ringtails, ocelot, jaguarundi (if they even now currently
exist
in the US), as well as the subspecies of Mexican gray wolf.
The fence will certainly be the antithesis of the conservation corridors that
have been so forcefully advocated in the past.
Wirt Atmar
