My first year in graduate school, I read a paper in which the authors laid out the state of 21st-century nature. There was a great map of the world’s remaining High Biodiversity Wilderness Areas. There were only five: the Amazon and Congo rainforests (aka the Usual Suspects), Papua New Guinea, a patchy swath of southern Africa . . . and the arid region around the U. S.-Mexico border, covering most of the American Southwest and north-central Mexico. The area near the border is dry, but it’s mountainous, with many microclimates and hardly any people. I once spent a week in the desert where California meets Nevada, and an ecologist out there told me that it’s not unusual for a dedicated naturalist to find plants, even trees, that haven’t yet been described by science. The border fence cuts right through these kinds of places. … [Read more...] about Border Walls Aren’t Just Political Objects—They’re Ecological Barriers, Too
