Inhumanity compounding inhumanity: the monumental price of “homeland security”
Trump’s border wall, an embodiment of cruel immigration policies, is inhumane to people to a degree that is criminal—if not according to written law, then according to moral laws we grasp by intuition. Even many of those whose job it is to enforce draconian immigration policies intuit those laws—it’s just that they don’t obey them.*
There’s another, less visible, less publicized inhumanity, that is not so plainly criminal. But in the long run it may be just as devastating to the living world as to refugees and asylum seekers. That’s the way a continuous wall carves up vital, often fragile habitat, puts up barriers to creatures who have neither understanding of, nor use for, political boundaries, and robs the environment of resiliency. We know how habitat fragmentation has diminished the capability of living things to cope with such additional man-made injuries as climate change. However, some things that fragment and destroy habitat have at least the excuse of some utility: roads, farms, power lines, airports, wind farms, solar energy arrays, etc. But this ugly artifice has little purpose besides division for division’s sake. It is a monument to human vanity, and especially the vanity of one corrupt, depraved individual, U.S. President Donald Trump.
So many wildlife refuges and sanctuaries are already under assault by the Wall or are soon to be, that I gave up trying to list them here. Just do a search on a string such as “threatened wildlife refuge border wall,” or similar keywords, and you’ll find enough of them to make you seethe, or weep. One particular lovely and imminently jeopardized landscape can be seen at Lower Rio Grande Valley Wildlife Refuge
The horrific and potentially irreparable damage resulting from extensions of a continuous border wall would spread well beyond wildlife refuges, as described in a paper in the journal Bioscience and summarized last summer in an article in Cosmos. (I referred to this same piece in a post last year; it’s even more urgent today.) The article had 16 co-authors and was endorsed by 2,500 scientists worldwide.
Sparseness of vegetation in a desert scrub biome,** such as pictured above, dictates that larger animals, especially predators such as jaguars and ocelots, need freedom of movement within a wide range. A continuous wall restricts their range on either side of the wall, limits access to water, disrupts seasonal patterns of movement, and has ripple effects throughout other populations. (For more on ripple effects, see last section below on “The Serengeti Rules.”)
Bending the law towards criminality
Since twisting science and regulation to suit political priorities is a hallmark of the Trump presidency, it comes as no surprise that existing protections of wildlife were subordinated to construction of the border wall. Among other extra-legal tactics to dispense with environmental constraints, the Customs and Border Control has “the authority under anti-terrorism law to suspend dozens of environmental protection laws to quickly build the wall,” according to an article in the Washington Post written by Dino Grandoni and Juliet Eilperin last December.
In the Washington Post article, you will also read of underhanded means to facilitate a speedy wall construction taking place in the Interior Department, such as stripping warnings by career biologists and wildlife managers from a key letter to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
The Interior Department at that time was headed by Ryan Zinke, an official who was so corrupt even by the low standards of the Trump administration that he was forced to resign last December. Note that much of Zinke’s notoriety was earned by his enablement of incursions by the fossil fuel industry into public lands. During his barf-worthy tenure, Zinke came under at least 15 investigations.
It’s telling that Zinke’s office walls were adorned with mounted animals “fitted with ornaments.” This reminds us of the jackets made of brown python and ostrich leather included in Paul Manafort’s wardrobe. Both of these are of piece with an attitude that nature is theirs for the taking— whether it be for sartorial vanity or bragging rights as a trophy hunter.
Plundering nature versus promoting resilience under “The Serengeti Rules”
Plundering the environment, even to the point of collapse, is nothing new for humans. Total extinction of the dodo and the passenger pigeon are well-known historical examples. There’s significant although not 100% solid evidence that humans hunted mammoths and giant sloths to extinction in the Americas, long before the invention of guns. Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is a catalog of ways in which we can destroy not only animal and plant species, but also entire human societies that exploit natural resources to exhaustion.
Nature itself has boom-or-bust cycles, famously exemplified by the wildly fluctuating relationship between lynx and snowshoe hare populations. Lynx prefer snowshoe hare to other prey, and when the hare population is high, they may eat two hares every three days. Eventually, hare populations crash—driven in part by lynx predation—and when lynx turn to other less abundant, smaller, or less catchable prey, starvation or reduced breeding drives down lynx numbers as well. Of course, the hare-and-lynx habitat in the cold and snowy northland is not as rich in resources as are habitats in gentler climes, which makes the cycle more pronounced. But it is analogous to the desert scrub biome: harsh habitat with lesser food supplies is more sensitive to disturbance.
Fortunately, Nature, given half a chance, can rebound from some of the worst insults we can throw at it (the border wall, added to other habitat injuries, halves the half a chance). This is the topic of a fascinating talk by biologist Sean B. Carroll (not to be confused with physicist Sean M. Carroll) entitled “The Serengeti Rules”—by which he means overarching rules governing animal and plant population patterns, that dawned on him when visiting
and researching the Serengeti. Among the “rules” is the critical role of keystone species in ecological health: as examples, he invokes wildebeest in the Serengeti, and wolves in Yellowstone. Eye-opening stuff, especially as regards the wildebeest, whom I have mainly known from documentaries where terrified wildebeest are trying to cross a river infested with crocodiles.*** They generally lead more placid lives, as you will see with huge herds of wildebeest photographed in Carroll’s video (see below).
The presence or absence of keystone species (Rule #1) can have effects that ripple throughout a biome in surprising ways: in the case of Serengeti wildebeest, the ripple effects were wide-ranging and profound. He also speaks of a spectacular recovery in Mozambique late in the talk. Carrol’s video is below.
If the video below does not fully display, even if you go full screen, you can view the speech at this location:
The border wall, if extended continuously across broad swaths of sensitive terrain, will amount to a totally unnecessary calamity. It’s another instance of a crime against nature, as well as against desperate people fleeing from terror in their homeland. If the swarming of refugees at the border was treated as an humanitarian crisis rather than an invasion of enemies, a wholly different solution would present itself.
But the Trump administration has little appetite for humanitarianism. It doesn’t fit the Trump business model.
It may call for future generations to tear down the wall. The land is for everybody.
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* I would not judge those people too harshly. They are under the kind of pressures that cause many of us to sin (such as, I have to keep my job, or lose health insurance), and many of us to try to redeem ourselves in other ways (e.g. caring for an elder). The greater, unforgivable sins are committed by the powerful who see no reason to redeem themselves—considering themselves above all laws, human, natural, and divine.
** For a capsule description of the desert scrub biome, see this in Untamed Science.
*** Crocs are an extremely resilient genus (13 species). They got through the rise and fall of the dinosaurs, and inhabit all continents except Antarctica and Europe (although a crocodile was sighted in the English Channel). But robustness has its price. Who wants to lie for hours in a swamp with only your eyes peeking above the surface?