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biodiversity
In an Era of Hardening Borders, Wildlife Corridors Bridge Peoples and Species
From Costa Rica to Colorado, wildlife corridors have been about the connections people make when they care about animal mobility.
Jun 14, 2026
Driving on the Interamerican Highway from Monteverde Biological Reserve to Rincón de la Vieja National Park, I couldn’t help but notice a series of rope bridges that crossed the six lanes of traffic. Each crossing structure featured traffic warning signs with silhouette images of monkeys or sloths as nonstop flows of diesel semitrucks and electric cars zoomed by.
Costa Rica is known for its protected areas, which cover one-third of the country and function as core zones for conservation, but the “green republic” should also be recognized for its corridors. What started as an NGO effort in the 2000s when organizations like Kids Saving The Rainforest started installing aerial bridges to improve habitat connectivity later became national policy with a 2024 presidential decree requiring electrical companies to build crossing structures so that animals like howler monkeys and kinkajous avoided electrocution from using power lines. These monkey bridges also keep tropical rainforest more intact for mobile creatures.
Beyond Central America, wildlife corridors are popular in the western United States. According to recent surveys from the Environment America Research and Policy Center and the Pew Charitable Trust, respondents approve creating more wildlife crossings at rates of 85-90%. And that support spans the political spectrum. In March 2026, the Idaho State Legislature passed Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 124, officially supporting the development of wildlife crossing infrastructure, such as highway overpasses and underpasses, to reduce animal-vehicle collisions. In December 2026, California’s Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing is set to be completed across 10 lanes of Los Angeles freeway, making it the largest structure in the world.
Wildlife corridors could receive a financial boost by the bipartisan BUILD America 250 bill, considered by US House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee this week. If passed, it would increase funding for the Federal Highway Administration’s very popular Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program (WCPP) to $80 million annually ($400 million total). The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act allocated $350 million to 35 projects across 30 states, but demand far exceeded with $500 million in requests.
Today, the benefits of conserving wildlife corridors might be just as much about the social as the biological.
If we’re living in a worldwide golden age for wildlife corridors, where did this idea come from? I trace the origins of this dominant conservation strategy in my new book, Borders of Biodiversity: How Gray Wolves, Monarch Butterflies, and Giant Sequoia Transformed Large Landscape Conservation, published by University of North Carolina Press.
In the 1970s and 1980s, new technologies provided windows into animal mobility. For wolves, radio- and satellite- telemetry allowed US biologist Diane Boyd and Canadian biologist Paul Paquet to track the interchange of dispersing juveniles along the Rockies. For example, Boyd collared wolf #8551, named Kay, west of Glacier National Park; the wolf turned up six months later dead after it was legally shot near Pouce Coupe, British Columbia. The 600-mile movement northward was interesting scientifically because it was two-thirds of the way to the Yukon Territory, but Kay’s movement also had major conservation implications. Wildlife corridors facilitated wolf dispersals; transborder dispersals could facilitate wolf recovery under the Endangered Species Act.
In the 1990s, wildlife corridors were thought of as proactive tools against habitat fragmentation. Responding to Boyd and Paquet’s work, conservationists in Alberta, British Columbia, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming created the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative in 1993 to keep core areas—like Yellowstone National Park or Banff National Park—connected. Projects included lobbying the Canadian government to build wildlife overpasses and underpasses along the Trans-Canada Highway, which Y2Y founder Harvey Locke called the “Berlin Wall of Biodiversity” for its high rate of wolf and elk fatalities. Or investing in predator-deterrence tools like range riding and electrified fladry fencing for ranching communities so wolves and grizzlies could use rural spaces as biological passageways.
By the 2000s, however, wildlife corridors were also understood to help with climate adaptation in a warming world. A scientific meta-analysis documented that of 4,000 animals recently tracked, almost three-quarters of them shifted their ranges to cooler lands or waters. Terrestrial species, on average, were moving 12 miles (or 20 kilometers) every decade toward the poles. Animals relocate to adapt.
Today, the benefits of conserving wildlife corridors might be just as much about the social as the biological. In 2012, Ben Bobowski of Rocky Mountain National Park and Yaxine María Arias Núñez of Santa Elena Biological Reserve created a series of personnel exchanges between the two protected areas called the Naturalmente Juntos-Naturally Together Project. Their connection was based on bird banding studies that revealed 150 bird species, like yellow warblers, migrated along the Continental Divide between Colorado and Costa Rica. In 2015, Rocky and Santa Elena entered a formal sistering agreement.
From Costa Rica to Colorado, wildlife corridors have been about the connections people make when they care about animal mobility. In an era of border-hardening nationalism, corridors can help people of different nationalities facilitate solidarities among shared species.
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Thousands March in Albania After PM Says Pristine Land 'Belongs' to Kushner-Backed Group
"One week later, we are still here, stronger than yesterday," said one group opposing a proposed luxury resort project supported by Jared Kushner.
Jun 08, 2026
Albanians took to the streets in droves for the eighth consecutive day on Sunday to protest a proposed $1.6 billion luxury resort complex backed by US President Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, one of several investors in the project, which opponents say is both corrupt and disastrous for wetlands and wildlife.
"One week later, we are still here, stronger than yesterday," said the Albanian Ornithological Society, a leading critic of the proposed development. "Millions around the world are united in one voice for nature, for justice, and for the protection of what belongs to everyone, standing for every protected area in Albania."
Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama has vocally defended the project amid mounting public backlash, saying in a recent interview that the land marked for development "belongs to the investors," not the Albanian people.
Rama also criticized the thousands of people who have turned out to protest the luxury hotel project as well as international media coverage of the demonstrations, saying that "there is no chance" that "the projects in Albania will be defined by street protests."
Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama admits Jared Kushner’s new private island will be exclusively for the elite.
He says the land no longer belongs to the Albanian people and is now under the control of Jared Kushner and his investors.
"The aim is to build the most exclusive."… pic.twitter.com/95IM0YX6xI
— Shadow of Ezra (@ShadowofEzra) June 7, 2026
Demonstrators, many raising pink flamingo cutouts to decry the project's expected impacts on the vulnerable bird and other wildlife, have demanded cancellation of the resort project and Rama's resignation, accusing him of steamrolling environmental concerns to bolster the country's tourism industry and curry favor with the Trump administration. Kushner currently works for the administration as a "special peace envoy."
"We are stronger than your bulldozers," chanted demonstrators over the weekend.
Thousands of Albanians took to the streets of Tirana in the largest protest this week against a plan by a company linked to Trump's son-in-law to build a luxury resort in an environmentally sensitive area pic.twitter.com/aJaKz3ju0A
— Reuters (@Reuters) June 7, 2026
As The New York Times reported last year, Rama heads the government committee that gave "Kushner and his business partners the right to move ahead with accelerated negotiations to build the luxury resort on a 111-acre section of the 2.2-square-mile island of Sazan that will be connected by ferry to the mainland."
"Mr. Kushner’s Affinity Partners, a private equity company backed with about $4.6 billion in money mostly from Saudi Arabia and other Middle East sovereign wealth funds, is pursuing the Albania project along with Asher Abehsera, a real estate executive that Mr. Kushner has previously teamed up with to build projects in Brooklyn, New York," the Times added.
Lea Ypi, an Albanian academic, wrote in an op-ed for The Guardian on Monday that "Albanians know that real-estate speculation without state support means ordinary citizens will struggle to buy a flat or pay the rent."
"They know that luxury tourism means holidays in your own country become a privilege for the few," Ypi added. "With no unions to speak of and a labor movement that only appears in communist-era footage of May Day parades, work conditions are so exploitative that only those from countries even more desperate are willing to take the jobs that arise."
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Trump's Border Wall Is a Destructive Monument to Greed and Fear
As it devastates borderland communities and wildlife, the wall stands for shutting out complex things, possibly complexity itself. It represents Trump’s promise to his base that their worldview will be fulfilled.
May 03, 2026
A leading preoccupation of the first Trump administration has all but slipped from view. Except when ostensible conservatives speak out against it, the major media have scarcely breathed a word on the subject. But it’s still there, 30 feet tall, aspirationally 1,952 miles long, obliterating habitats, dividing families, and sucking down public funds faster than a carrier-based air squadron.
The media’s lack of attention is understandable. All-too-real wars of choice and metaphorical wars against science, universities, and the environment have dominated our airtime and the headlines. The rise of a new medievalism in medicine and the abrogation of international trade and security agreements have also won attention. Add to all of that a federal paramilitary kidnapping people, even from what still passes for the halls of justice, while murdering the occasional protester, and one’s journalistic cup runneth over.
The meta story of the US government’s comprehensive abandonment of its Enlightenment heritage needs telling, too. Goodbye to empiricism and the troublesome scientific discourse it produces. Goodbye as well to empiricism’s political collaterals, including the “created equal” credo of the Declaration of Independence, which the current regime finds distinctly irritating. There is simply too much to report on as the new monarchy, as if in a sped-up nature film, blossoms flowerlike, its palace under renovation, the king’s signature being prepared to grace the currency, and myriad kickback mechanisms whirring like gold-plated turbines to enrich an aristocracy of tech bros and oil emirs.
So, dear reader, it’s not just logical but inevitable that Donald Trump’s border wall, a major story during his first administration, has essentially fallen out of the news. Rest assured, though, that the world’s least pragmatic and most performative construction project continues to prosper.
Spend Now, Think Later
Modern border management relies on three tools: human patrols, remote detection backed by quick response teams, and the construction of physical obstacles. Smart gatekeepers coordinate those tools to maximize effectiveness and minimize cost. But there’s no need for thrift in Trumpworld. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or OBBBA, which Trump signed into law last July 4, negated all need for fiscal restraint. Among other things, it appropriated $46.55 billion for border wall construction, $7.8 billion for US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents and their vehicles, $6.2 billion for high-tech border surveillance, and a hefty $10 billion for anything else border-related. The total: $70.55 billion. Those funds will be available through Fiscal Year 2029. By comparison, the government will spend about $10 billion less over that same period to fund the entire Department of the Interior, which manages half a billion acres of surface land as well as the continental shelf and vast subsurface mineral deposits.
Such border largesse means that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can go all out on all three tactical approaches at the US-Mexico border—patrol, surveillance, and a wall—simultaneously, without troubling to eliminate redundancies, tailor tactics to the environment, or streamline coordination. Daddy has proudly given DHS his credit card.
In addition to bifurcating the wildlife habitat and scarring a gemlike landscape, the wall builders will extract large amounts of groundwater to make concrete for the wall’s foundation, almost certainly desiccating wetlands that are hotspots of biodiversity.
In a victory-lap cabinet meeting four days after enacting the OBBBA, Trump told Kristi Noem, then still his DHS secretary, “You’re loaded up on the border.” He essentially admitted that the bill’s munificence demonstrated power, not budgetary acumen, simultaneously adding, “We had zero [migrants] come in last month, so I am not sure how much of it we want to spend. You may actually think about saving a lot of money because the wall is largely built.” The president then continued with fact-free claims that the migrant population abounded with murderers and mental defectives.
Notwithstanding Trump’s comments, DHS administrators and the contractors who are their most immediate constituents show no sign of leaving money on the table. At the border, their blank-check funding meets a matching regulatory void—the most extensive waiver of laws and regulations in American history. In addition to suspending laws intended to protect the environment, wildlife, national parks, national wildlife refuges, lands sacred to Native Americans, and historic and cultural sites, the Trump administration has also waived more than 60 contracting and procurement regulations. In the name of a national emergency, which is no emergency at all—illegal border crossings (as measured by apprehensions) have indeed plunged—the president has stripped the playing field of all boundaries and opened the door to cronyism and corruption.
Under showers of money and in the absence of restraint, a single border wall is no longer viewed as adequate. Double-walling has become the norm and certain select areas now boast triple walls. With no cap on costs, whole mountaintops, rugged and unvisited, have been sheared apart to make way for the standard 30-foot-tall, steel-bollard wall, even at costs exceeding $41 million per mile, or almost $8,000 per foot. Meanwhile, the Border Patrol’s terminally bored agents (giving new meaning to bored-er) sit behind the wall in white trucks, looking at their phones and incubating their hemorrhoids.
The Non-Monetary Costs Are No Less Astronomical
It’s easy to think of the mostly arid US-Mexico border zone as empty, but biologically it’s a busy place. The grasslands of the San Rafael Valley in Arizona, for instance, are home to 17 threatened and endangered species. For years, existing vehicle barriers, bolstered by remote detection technology, have allowed jaguars, ocelots, mountain lions, mule deer, and other wildlife to move back and forth across the valley’s 30 miles of border and disperse according to their ancient ways. A network of 60 remote cameras along that stretch, monitored by the Sky Island Alliance, recorded just one possible migrant per camera every 20 months. Besides being easily patrolled, the valley is also heart-stoppingly beautiful. Nonetheless, DHS intends to double wall all of it. In addition to bifurcating the wildlife habitat and scarring a gemlike landscape, the wall builders will extract large amounts of groundwater to make concrete for the wall’s foundation, almost certainly desiccating wetlands that are hotspots of biodiversity. And for nothing, save symbolism, bragging rights, and contractor profits.
No detail illuminates the mentality behind border enforcement better than this: In cooperation with US Customs and Border Protection, military elements at Fort Huachuca, Arizona are now engaged in “the largest Concertina wire (C-wire) emplacement in US territorial history.” “C-wire,” or “razor wire,” is designed to lacerate any flesh, human or animal, that comes in contact with it. Fort Huachuca soldiers are deploying 43,000 rolls of it, the largest single purchase ever.
Usually C-wire is used atop a wall or fence to prevent people from climbing over. Ominously, it’s now being spread on the ground, sometimes in areas where there is no wall, but also in front of the wall and between double walls—a policy of pure viciousness, not necessity. Someone should explain this deployment to the bighorn sheep of California’s Jacumba Mountains, which are now separated from their key Mexican waterhole by thickets of the nasty stuff, which will become ever more camouflaged and treacherous as grass and brush grow through it.
Buoy, Oh, Buoy, What a Wall!
For treachery, however, it’s hard to top CBP’s plans to “secure” 536 miles of the border in Texas by mooring a chain of cylindrical buoys, linked end to end, down the middle of the Rio Grande. Once in place, the array will look like an orange sausage, five feet in diameter, floating on the river. The anchors and mooring lines, of course, will be invisible. What could possibly go wrong?
This ill-conceived plan offers a retro-snapshot of American life before the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) became law in 1970, back when strip mines and other land-wrecking ventures could be launched with no evaluation of their impact, no public involvement, and no second opinions as to their necessity. The waiver of NEPA and every other environmental constraint means that no modeling of the “Buoy Wall’s” hydrodynamics (that is, its reaction to flooding), if any exists, has been made public.
The Rio Grande International Study Center in Laredo, Texas, however, commissioned its own study. The results are unequivocal. The Buoy Wall will be a debris trap during floods, as when a hurricane lodges over the region. It will redirect flows of water and raise water levels, especially in places where it’s paired with river-crowding segments of the wall. And if a section of buoys should break loose from the sandy, unstable riverbed, the likelihood of disaster will soar.
Geomorphologist Mark Tompkins, who authored the report, concludes, “Failures will cause catastrophic flooding, damage, and destruction to property, and risks to the health and safety of people near the river corridor.” Thousands of people living adjacent to the river in Laredo and other communities in both Mexico and the US will be put at risk.
Conflicts Brewed and Brewing
Walls have their place. They can be effective in urban areas. But DHS startled more than a few onlookers with plans to build a wall among the cliffs and arid wildlands of Big Bend National Park. Even the sheriffs of West Texas, one of the reddest regions in the country, got riled up. Although DHS may yet fall back to a more sensible “detection technology” alternative for the national park, it has failed to communicate a clear decision, while nearby private lands and Big Bend Ranch State Park remain at risk.
Even worse uncertainty may be brewing in Arizona, where the lands of the Tohono O’odham people, whose presence predates the border by many centuries, are spread on either side of the line. The tribe’s exemplary cooperation with border authorities includes tribal enforcement teams that have helped keep illegal crossings at a historic low. But the rigid minds and hungry contractors of the “CBP industrial complex” remain unsatisfied. The agency’s “smart wall map” indicates that it aims to build a double wall across the Tohono O’odham reservation, splitting apart families, clans, and longstanding webs of relationship.
And then there’s the unhappy Roman Catholic Diocese of Las Cruces, which serves Sunland Park, New Mexico. Walls have long separated El Paso and Sunland Park from the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez. However, there is an unwalled gap at Monte Cristo Rey, a steep-sided peak long considered impractical for barrier construction. Not now, though. Blasting for the Border Wall began on Cristo Rey in March, in time to appall the thousands of Holy Week pilgrims who visit the statue of Christ the King on the mountain’s summit.
The land available to CBP, however, is not sufficient to finish the job on Cristo Rey, and the adjacent landowner, the Catholic Church, refuses to sell. CBP claims it may assert the right of eminent domain, while the church has said it will fight, although its best tool for resistance, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, has predictably been among the many laws waived by DHS.
Orgasms for Birders
On a recent trip to the border, I visited one of the most exquisite places in the entire Southwest. To get to it, I drove 40 miles on dirt roads across broken, arroyo-carved desert. The Border Wall was almost always in sight.
Apart from the roadway itself, the commonest evidence of a human presence were signs at the approach to each arroyo: DO NOT ENTER WHEN FLOODED, which is good advice in an area where flash floods from local thunderstorms can sweep away a heavy truck. All the arroyos that the road crosses are also crossed by the Border Wall. Floods pile tons of debris against the wall, and sometimes the accumulated weight is enough to push the structure down. CBP continues to experiment with designs for swinging water gates, but a durable solution remains unproven.
Between a pair of “lay-bys”—bulldozed flats where the wall contractor has assembled fleets of eighteen-wheelers, excavators, scrapers, dumpers, pickups, bulldozers, loaders, and cement trucks—I veered down a rough track to a steel gate and let myself in. A little way beyond that, I stopped my car beside a lazy creek at the bottom of a canyon. White-barked sycamores and cottonwoods, just coming into leaf, towered overhead. Amid their shadows, the air smelled of duff and wet sand. The birds were not just singing, they were yelling. When I opened a birding app on my phone, the bird-call IDs scrolled by like movie credits.
From concertina wire to counter-functional buoys, from mountain blasting to free-wheeling billion-dollar contracts, the mindset behind the wall is the same as that which spawned the Iran war. Both are exercises in unchecked power.
The canyon has a perfectly good name, but I’ll call it Paradox Canyon in recognition of the contrast between the vigorous life it contains and the brutalist-walled horizon looming above it. During the first Trump administration, the nearest mountain peak was cleaved open like a watermelon, leaving the landscape not just scarred but grotesquely amputated.
The current contractor, Fisher Industries, is no stranger to disassembling and rearranging mountains. Besides installing the standard bollard wall, Fisher is pouring a concrete patrol road at the foot of the wall, portions of which, rising above Paradox Canyon, are so steep that, absent the paving, no wheeled vehicle can climb it.
The next mountain, however, is too steep even for a patrol road. The previous contractor’s employees dubbed the peak “Widow Maker,” and the zigzag scars of switchbacks and ledges by which they gained access to the path of the wall make it easy to understand why.
Fisher is the largest player in the wall-building business. Based in North Dakota, it was the contractor for “We Build the Wall,” a crowd-funded enterprise that got its promoters, including Steve Bannon, a longtime Trump ally, convicted for fraud. “We Build the Wall” funded Fisher to build 3.5 miles of wall on private land beside the Rio Grande near Mission, Texas. The Department of Justice and the International Boundary Waters Commission subsequently sued Fisher for shoddy work and violation of the boundary treaty with Mexico. The suit has since been settled, with Fisher having agreed to make immediate repairs and carry out future repairs subject to the forfeit of a $3-million bond.
The Paradox Canyon rancher whom I came to visit is philosophical about the wall. The assault on his land began at the end of Trump I and, after a Biden-era pause, has resumed at full strength. The “shock and awe” accompanying Trump’s resumption of office, he says, left no room for negotiating a more sensible path forward. He believes that the symbolism of the wall is its real power, as it channels the fears of the MAGA faithful. The wall, he says, stands for more than shutting out migrants and narcos. It stands for shutting out other complex things, possibly complexity itself. It represents Trump’s promise to his base that their worldview will be fulfilled.
Making War at Home and Abroad
My rancher friend feels that his present task is to weather the storm of wall building and await a time when wiser heads prevail, when the rush to spend and build might yield to thoughtful redesign, when gaps for wildlife might be installed and properly monitored, and when the wall’s proponents and its enemies might find a “third path.”
Meanwhile, the excavators, scrapers, bulldozers, and haulers carry on. From concertina wire to counter-functional buoys, from mountain blasting to free-wheeling billion-dollar contracts, the mindset behind the wall is the same as that which spawned the Iran war. Both are exercises in unchecked power. Both were conceived with disdain for the complexities of the real world. Both serve rhetorical as much as tangible purposes.
The war with Iran has confounded Trump’s expectation of a quick victory. Thousands of gravestones will be its monument. The Border Wall, in its own slow way, will provide another sort of monument. It won’t be the graves of those who died crossing it or flanking it by sea, for they will rarely be marked at all. And it won’t be the local extinctions of plants or animals, for they will simply vanish. It will instead be a tottering, linear, soulless version of Stonehenge—think of it as America’s Steelhenge—built on sand and made of haste, fear, and avarice.
It will memorialize Trump’s success in making America less and less great.
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