Unintentional Juxtaposition
I'm sure that the Washington Post didn't do this intentionally, but they still managed to pull off a rather amusing juxtaposition of stories this morning. The irony should make you chuckle - or cry. First headline: Border Fence May Impede Wildlife.
TUCSON — The debate over the fence the United States is building along its southern border has focused largely on the project's costs, feasibility and how well it will curb illegal immigration. But one of its most lasting impacts may well be on the animals and vegetation that make this politically fraught landscape their home.
Some wildlife researchers have grown so concerned about the consequences of bisecting hundreds of miles of rugged habitat that they have talked of engaging in civil disobedience to block the fence's construction.
"This wall is so asinine, and so wrong, I am one of a dozen scientists ready to lay our bodies down in front of tractors," Healy Hamilton, who directs the Center for Biodiversity Research and Information at the California Academy of Sciences, told colleagues at a recent scientific retreat here. "This is one thing we might be able to stop."
"Make it 13!" said Allison Jones, a conservation biologist at the Wild Utah Project, an advocacy group.
Hamilton and Jones have yet to throw themselves before bulldozers, but their call to arms reflects the researchers' growing fears that the wall will imperil species that, in Hamilton's words, "walk, fly or crawl across that border."
Ah, the concern is touching, of course. The irony, however is in the second article, detailing some wildlife that is coming across the porous southern border. Mexico's Drug Violence Spills Into U.S.
PUERTO PALOMAS, Mexico — Javier Emilio Pérez Ortega, a workaholic Mexican police chief, showed up at the sleepy, two-lane border crossing here last month and asked U.S. authorities for political asylum.
Behind him, law and order was vanishing fast. In the four months he had served as Puerto Palomas police chief, drug traffickers had threatened to kill him and his officers if they tried to block the flow of cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamines into the United States, his former colleagues said on condition of anonymity.
After a particularly menacing telephone call, his 10-man force resigned en masse. His bodyguards quit, too. Abandoned by his men and unable to trust the notoriously corrupt Mexican authorities, Pérez Ortega turned to the only place he believed he could find refuge — the United States, the former colleagues said.
As President Bush meets this week with Mexican President Felipe Calderón in New Orleans, the repercussions of Mexico's battle with drug cartels are increasingly gushing into the United States, giving rise to thorny new problems for Mexican and U.S. officials, as well as the millions of people who live along the border.
There is wildlife and there is wildlife. Mexican drug gangs are killing American Border Patrol agents and bullets are flying across the border in ever-increasing amounts. It would be nice if some of this particular wildlife could be diverted away from the border by a fence.
Crime, Environment, World news | Gaius Sunday, 20 April , 2008
By MikeM, Sunday, 20 April , 2008 @ 6:19 am
So, it seems Dr. Hamilton believes animal lives are more important than human lives. But what can you expect from someone who seems to think birds and bats are incapable of flying over a fence.
By syn, Sunday, 20 April , 2008 @ 6:19 am
Then there is the third wildlife, the Darwinists screaming how America is in a Hurbert Hoover Depression without jobs to feed their families all the while demanding the border remain open for millions of illegal workers to do the jobs unemployed legal Americans are prevented from doing.
By martian, Sunday, 20 April , 2008 @ 12:28 pm
I’m confused, what does Darwin have to do with any of this?
By Gary Gulrud, Sunday, 20 April , 2008 @ 4:49 pm
I believe a few people in border states are going to be able to see Israel’s POV a bit better.