Some Ecological Damage From Trump's Rushed Border Wall Could Be Repaired
The jagged granite peaks of Arizona’s Tinajas Altas Mountains, reminiscent of the Iron Throne in the television series Game of Thrones, are almost insurmountable to humans. But bighorn sheep have long climbed through them with ease—until their path was blocked by a 30-foot-high steel fence built atop a blasted-out right-of-way on the U.S.-Mexico border last spring.
Just to the east, federal contractors have built more border fencing through the habitat of the endangered Sonoran pronghorn in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. And in South Texas, sections of wall continued to rise in protected areas of the Lower Rio Grande Valley in recent months, increasing flooding risks and bisecting the subtropical woodland habitat of endangered ocelots and jaguarundis and other imperiled species.
These barriers are the climax of a three-year building spree designed to make good on former president Donald Trump’s promise to keep undocumented immigrants from crossing the southern U.S. border. In early January Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announced it had achieved Trump’s goal of completing a total of 450 miles of fence. Construction continued across parts of the four southern border states in the final week of his administration, however. These stretches, which Trump touted in a visit to southern Texas on January 12, are in addition to the 654 miles of both low and tall barriers built during previous administrations.
Hours after his inauguration last Wednesday, incoming president Joe Biden issued an executive order calling for a “pause” to border wall construction within seven days. But some environmental groups and scientists want the new administration to go a step further and tear down parts of the fence that cut through some of North America’s most biodiverse landscapes—including the Otay Mountain Wilderness Area in California, the Sonoran Desert and the Sky Islands in Arizona, New Mexico’s Chihuahuan Desert and the Lower Rio Grande Valley in Texas—and restore those key habitats. “We have the wall running through wildlife habitat, through refuges and reserves intended to be protected,” says Scott Nicol, a conservationist who has long fought border walls in South Texas.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/some-ecological-damage-from-trumps-rushed-border-wall-could-be-repaired/
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