“The significance of de- sanctifying the earth, the animals, the plants, the trees, and even human beings is that the world is made a potentially ugly and very exploitable place.” This describes, in part, the mentality that has allowed the two-thousand-mile-long border region to be transformed into a vast “buffer zone,” a geography that has itself been converted into a tool of enforcement that is considered so disposable as to merit being riven by an immense wall—seven hundred miles of which already exists.
