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Paradise Lost
The Rio Grande Valley in south Texas is one of this nation’s most biologically rich areas—home to our largest remaining stand of sabal palms, rare ocelots, and bird species found nowhere else. So why would the United States be planning to build a wall that would do little to stop illegal immigration, do a lot to harm wildlife, and effectively cede much of this land to Mexico?
Audubon June 2008
Despite its heroic work and strong advocacy for wildlife, the Texas Border Coalition doesn’t quite get it when it comes to habitat, and the group is vulnerable to federal seduction, occasionally advocating alternatives to the fence that are even more deadly to wildlife. The coalition, for example, describes the 22-mile cement wall approved for Hidalgo County as a “win-win” because the DHS will toss levee repair into the deal. (At least a fence can be taken down.) And Ahumada touts the plan for a section of “virtual fence” by which a new dam on the Rio Grande will (in addition to providing more irrigation for his constituents) widen the river by 300 feet, back it up for 42 miles, and drown thousands of acres of wetlands and riparian forest.
What’s more, now that Chertoff has waived the National Environmental Policy Act, his agency won’t release any of the comments on the draft environmental-impact statement (EIS).
“Surveyors,” reads the draft EIS, “walked the entire length of the proposed project corridor for each tactical infrastructure section, and examined in more detail areas containing unique species compositions of habitat that might be conducive to sensitive species.” Either this is an untruth or they violated government regulations, because Ken Merritt had denied them access. The draft EIS goes on and on about how the fence will “reduce the flow of . . . terrorists, and terrorist weapons into the United States.” But because no terrorists or terrorist weapons have ever entered from Mexico, such reduction is impossible.
Even the powerful, arch-conservative property-rights community is lining up against the fence, and for once it’s not on the wrong side of an environmental issue. When property owners and communities, following the lead of the Fish and Wildlife Service, have declined to allow surveyors on their land, the DHS has hauled them into court.
The fence, claims the DHS, needs to go through refuges, sanctuaries, farms, college campuses, city parks, and front yards. But, reports the Texas Observer, it will end abruptly at the 6,000-acre Mission, Texas, gated golf community of Dallas billionaire Ray L. Hunt, a close friend of George W. Bush who just donated $35 million to help build his presidential library.
All blame, however, cannot be assigned to the administration. It was, after all, Congress that gave us this ruinously expensive non-solution purely to cover its butt. Voting in The Secure Fence Act were 283 representatives and 80 senators (including John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama).
Our legislators and the White House would have done well to heed these other lines from Frost’s poem: “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out / And to whom I was like to give offence.” But they evinced not the slightest curiosity, and instead of solving a serious problem, they have given us another.
WHAT YOU CAN DO
You can send the Bush administration a strong message by joining thousands of other wildlife advocates in signing our online petition to save the unique ecosystems of south Texas. Click here for details. Urge your representative to support Representative Raúl Grijalva’s Borderlands Conservation and Security Act (H.R. 2593). For current information on the fence, visit No Border Wall and The Rio Grande Guardian.
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