Sierra Club members are not happy about a Russell Pearce-backed plan to seek donations to build more fencing along the border. According to the organization, new walls would cause flooding and put native species at risk.

Per a press release:

With 307 of 375 border miles already occupied by barriers and walls, Arizona is subjected to more border walls than any other state. Walls have caused massive flooding at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and block wildlife at important refuges such as the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area and the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge.

A recent study of amphibian, reptile, and some mammal species along the border found that new barriers would increase the number of already threatened species whose survival would be put further at risk.

On a non-environmental vein, Sierra Club higher-ups said the planned fencing would be expensive and ineffective, adding that there are more important issues for the legislature to focus on.

This article appears in Jul 14-20, 2011.

4 replies on “Sierra Club Speaks Out Against Border Fence Plan”

  1. I have to believe that most citizens of the United States hate the idea of a border fence; however, I think that we would find the posting of guards across the border with orders to shoot to kill even more undesirable.

  2. I live in Arizona and the illegal immigrants trash the enviroment more than the fences will cause. There are lots of little places for the smaller critters to cross. Unfortunently if they are caught on the Mexico side they are sometimes eaten and made into soveniers that are illegal in the USA. The Mexicans dont care!! They want the American Greenbacks to send home. Money from the US is thier second highest income to the nation of Mexico.

  3. I fear that people contributing money to erect a border fence are retrenching into a world that existed before globalization. They do not realize that nation-state boundaries are eroded by capital flows–and concomitantly–corresponding labor flows. We are entering a new world order and should think in terms of that new order. For example, why not envision a common union between Mexico, the United States, and Canada, similar to that of the European Union? When the European Union was first contemplated there were objections that citizens of Italy, then a low-wage country, would flood into all of the other countries and take jobs away. Instead, what happened was that the wage levels in Italy rose to the levels in other European countries, and people chose to stay at home. There are numerous reasons, as explored by Damian Cave in a New York Times article, that Mexican immigration to the United States is falling off in any case. We must start to think in terms of a new world order, shaped by processes of globalization, that eschews the building of walls between neighboring countries. Much needed are environmental protections that span nation-state boundaries.

Comments are closed.