US
Bordering on Extinction Protecting the biodiversity of our border regions by Hannah Severyns ’23.5, an intended English concentrator and Senior Managing Editor of the BPR magazine illustration by Brenda Rodriguez ’21
In California, just miles from the United States-Mexico border, a Quino checkerspot butterfly rests on the stem of a low-growing shrub. The butterfly opens itself to the sun, tilting the red, black, and cream checkers decorating its wings skyward. Once, millions of these well-adorned insects could be found dotting California’s southern border. Nowadays, even within 50 miles of the US-Mexico border—an area that contains 64.6 percent of the species’ critical habitat—the Quino checkerspot butterfly is hard to find. While the butterfly once paid no mind to the geopolitical boundaries between the US and Mexico, today much of the border is composed of bulky infrastructure that the Quino checkerspot, with an aversion to flying over objects taller than six to eight feet, cannot cross. Due to factors like habitat fragmentation and destruction that have decimated the population of
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Quino checkerspots, the federal government has listed this butterfly as an endangered species since 1997. As biodiversity decreases at accelerating rates, “transboundary frontiers”—areas surrounding a geopolitical border—have been deemed an “emerging priority” for conservationists as they often overlap with biodiversity hotspots that contain the habitats of thousands of species. The Quino checkerspots are, unfortunately, not the only inhabitants of a transboundary frontier whose population has been threatened in recent years. Yet, in politicians’ talk of border security, environmental concerns are consistently put on the back burner. The US-Mexico border is a prime example of this. During Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, he mentioned a border wall over 200 times and upon taking office, he issued an executive order calling for the immediate construction of such a wall. In doing so, Trump actively ignored experts’ warnings that a border wall could threaten the wellbeing of about 10,000 species, including plants, fish, and invertebrates. Trump’s
administration is not the first—and, without change, is unlikely to be the last—to sacrifice biodiversity in the name of border security. The 2005 Real ID Act, which US officials have been exploiting for nearly 15 years to bypass environmental laws, is largely to blame for the unregulated destruction of biodiversity at the US-Mexico border. Thus, to preserve already weakened biodiversity at this essential transboundary frontier, the historical exploitation of the 2005 Real ID Act must be declared an unchecked abuse of executive power and its use in circumventing environmental regulations must be permanently put to rest. The most serious environmental threat posed by the Real ID Act stems from a provision that grants unprecedented power to the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to waive any local, state, or federal law that might inhibit the construction of infrastructure at the US’s southern border. With the War on Terror in full swing, bipartisan support for an act prioritizing “national security” was not hard to come by, and border construction quickly followed the
“In politicians’ talk of border security, environmental concerns are consistently put on the back burner.”
