Border wall madness

Photos courtesy my friend Janay Brun

First, let me reveal a personal conviction, from what might seem like a cold-hearted biologist’s viewpoint: The earth is overburdened with humans. As Jacques Cousteau once observed, every environmental problem we face can be traced to a single cause: overpopulation. It’s basic arithmetic: Fewer humans would mean less garbage and more fish in the oceans, fewer endangered species, less CO2 pumped into the atmosphere, less land needing to be cleared for agriculture or mines, more forests and other wild areas. It’s no speculation to say that if as a species we’d had the sense to limit our numbers to sustainable levels (say, a mere two or three billion), we could all use as much water as we wanted to, eat as many hamburgers as we wanted to, burn as much fuel as we wanted to.

Everyone knows about population pressure in China and India, but I also think there are too many people in the U.S., and certainly too damn many in Arizona. Growing up in Tucson, I watched as thousands and thousands of acres of desert were swallowed up by the metastasizing city. We continue to fall prey to the scam that claims the only way for an economy to be healthy is for it to grow—a concept that is nothing more than a global Ponzi scheme, period.

With that said, and even though it might sound contradictory, I remain a humanist, deeply concerned by the plight of refugees the world over. I know that simply walling them out and ignoring the roots of their problems will never, ever solve the issue. And walling them out under the auspices of blatant racism will only create envious enemies. Not until we, the wealthy nations of the world, help the poorer ones solve their internal problems will the crush of global migration be stemmed—whatever those problems may be, from rampant corruption to the effects of global warming, which will be felt most severely in those tropical countries already prone to drought and other environmental pressures. Isolationists who believe we can let those countries stew in their own troubles and not be affected by the results are choosing to be morons.

As someone who hopes to see the curve of human population growth flatten, I’m aware of a well-documented worldwide statistic: Women with more education usually elect to have fewer children. Therefore, our foreign policy should be heavily weighted toward getting girls into school in countries where they traditionally have not had that opportunity.

Humanitarian concerns aside, the wall that was blasted and hammered into the Arizona/Mexico border destroyed directly hundreds and hundreds of acres of desert and mountain habitat, with easy-to-predict effects on large mammal movement. In fact, that movement has been brutally halted. For certain, where the wall was completed it will stop any further hopes of jaguars or Mexican wolves recolonizing the U.S. And even if sections of it are removed, the damage to the habitat, and the hideous scars its rushed construction created, will remain, a lasting legacy to the xenophobic whims of a single administration.