Don't Fence Them In!

As George Monbiot opines, the creation of 'hard' borders to exclude 'immigrants', doesn't just cause untold human suffering. These fences also trigger ecological disasters (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/15/border-walls-triggering-ecological-disaster-humanity-wildlife-habitats-extinction). Monbiot points out that animals don't recognise borders. In fact,many species have evolved to roam widely. Without this capacity, some organisms a) can't move to areas for parts of their life-cycle; b) are stopped from migrating in response to environmental challenges (such as climate change) and c) show reduced genetic diversity, limiting e.g. their ability to counter disease. Monbiot reckons that the world now has 47,000 km of hard borders. His points are especially well illustrated by the creation of the fence, bisecting the Bialowieza forest. The forest is the largest ancient woodland in lowland Europe. The steel wall will eventually be 5.5 m high and 180 km long. It is being created on the Poland-Belarus border, to stop immigrants being encouraged to cross from Belarus into Poland. There is obvious mischief-making here and people are suffering and dying in this forest. Less newsworthy, is the fact that populations of bears, bison, deer, lynx, moose and wolves are also imperiled by the barrier. The creation of the fence is in direct contravention of current EU environmental regulations. Unfortunately, it seems that regulations can be safely ignored, when it is politically expedient to do so. Human immigration will, of course, also be turbo-charged by climate change. The probably means more hard borders and further destruction of the very limited natural world.