Putting critters and plants ahead of national security

Washington Post:

The debate over the fence the United States is building along its southern border has focused largely on the project's costs, feasibility and how well it will curb illegal immigration. But one of its most lasting impacts may well be on the animals and vegetation that make this politically fraught landscape their home.

Some wildlife researchers have grown so concerned about the consequences of bisecting hundreds of miles of rugged habitat that they have talked of engaging in civil disobedience to block the fence's construction.

"This wall is so asinine, and so wrong, I am one of a dozen scientists ready to lay our bodies down in front of tractors," Healy Hamilton, who directs the Center for Biodiversity Research and Information at the California Academy of Sciences, told colleagues at a recent scientific retreat here. "This is one thing we might be able to stop."

"Make it 13!" said Allison Jones, a conservation biologist at the Wild Utah Project, an advocacy group.

Hamilton and Jones have yet to throw themselves before bulldozers, but their call to arms reflects the researchers' growing fears that the wall will imperil species that, in Hamilton's words, "walk, fly or crawl across that border."

...

Are these guys actually trying to say the fence is going to keep birds from flying over it? To even suggest that threatens what credibility they have on the issue. Having grown up on the border, I am confident that the Mesquite trees will survive any fence too. We should not be putting critters ahead of our ability to control our border. This is just another excuse to fail.

It starts with the false premise that the environment is fragile. In Texas, nothing could be further from the truth. The environment down here can overtake anything man can build, if it is not restrained by pruning and clipping.