Just go to this page and follow directions: Email alert sign-up.An Ecotone is a transition zone between two ecosystems. Neither is good for the fox or the human.Įditor's note: Want more stories from Eco Catholic? We can send you an email alert once a week with the latest. Why do I keep hearing God singing that Cole Porter song, "Don't Fence Me In"? Fencing in is also fencing out. Creation was never only one thing but always many things, blending. A large part of me thinks of God as the one residing always in an ecotone, a place of tension and possibility. As is thought in the theory of permaculture, the hedgerow is a place of great excitement, with sassafras growing alongside a wild mushroom. In an essay on ecotones and environmental ethics in the 1993 book In the Nature of Things, scholar Romand Coles wrote that "Ecotones are the edges where different ecosystems meet: where forest meets field, sea meets land, salt water meets fresh water." He noted the word's etymology: oikos, meaning "dwelling," and tonus, meaning "tension."Ĭoles pointed to natural ecologists who have highlighted the enormous "evolutionary potential" that lie in these places of blend and intermingling. It is like a hedgerow more than anything else. Homogeneity is actually naturally dangerous to our survival.Įcotone may be a new word to you. Hybridity is a good thing, naturally and for the human. There we do not dominate, except at our own peril. Likewise, we are putting human interest, albeit the interest of the most powerful humans on the planet, above animal interest, forgetting what an Eden or ecotone really is.Īn ecotone is like a permaculture, where humans are part of a much larger natural ecosystem. Oddly, in dominion over our borders we are once again making the same mistake, putting some humans over others in an attempt to protect our humanity. Oddly, this whole debate about mixing and crossing shines a new light on Lynn White's famous 1967 essay, "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis." White was rightly concerned that a theology of dominion, of man or woman or human dominating nature, was the source of our dangerous behavior toward out own nests. We assume that the walls will prohibit this kind of mixing up of the genomes, as if mixing up was not the clear destination of creation and evolution. The couple broke up, even though the parents' dismay made the Mexican wall's absurdity less comical. Her parents flipped out, and I do mean flipped out, at the idea of cross-racial breeding, even though such a possibility was way down the road and as it proved, never quite happened. I remember when my daughter's roommate, who is a white Texan, fell in love with a Mexican student at their college. The birds will probably be okay but any animal, including the human that can't fly will be in trouble. The "ecotone" - the point where two different ecosystems meet and integrate - will be lost and a phony national environment will come into being. Animals will be cut off from their habitats. Ranchers on the border are making some of the most interesting arguments about "border control." They don't think the wall is ecologically wise. Foxes would no longer have holes, as Jesus might put it. What is even more perplexing, though, is what the built border wall would do to biodiversity. On human terms, it is beyond ridicule, if not unprecedented as a Trojan sham. And some Mexicans already have a slogan: If they build it 20 feet, we will jump 40. It is a long, long border on our southern edge - 1,989 miles, to be precise. The possibility that a wall might be built separating the United States and Mexico is preposterous enough all on its own terms.
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