The nonprofit environmental news site Grist examines a topic that should be familiar to our readers: The green community’s avoidance of the border fence.
As we reported last May, most major environmental organizations have steered clear of involvement in the border fence debate.
The fence is a complicated subject for environmentalists. Building barriers can reduce foot traffic and litter. But they also threaten to sever wildlife corridors as old as the land itself.
As the debate about fencing the border has shifted east from San Diego to Arizona and Texas, it has once again reemerged in the environmental community — on a limited basis, the Grist column says.
Writer Glenn Hurowitz says:
Neither the Sierra Club nor other groups have gone so far as to launch the kind of national campaign necessary to convince members of Congress outside of the border region to oppose the wall — leaving members of Congress free to push the project without scrutiny.
“We just really don’t want to do anything on the wall,” confirmed a senior Sierra Club volunteer who has helped formulate the Club’s population and immigration policy, “because the immigration debate is just a hornet’s nest.”