Trump is concealing border wall’s true cost — to our environment

You will pay for President Donald Trump’s border wall with something more precious than dollars. Not that dollars don’t matter. But an administration that won’t sweat the details hasn’t got a good cost estimate. You can bet on tens of billions — plus cost overruns, of course. But, as I said, it’s only money. The long-term cost will be to your children’s legacy.

At least, that’s the case if you see America’s wide-open spaces and great outdoors as part of an irreplaceable national heritage.

I see it that way. Teddy Roosevelt and many other presidents did, too.

So did many members of Congress who set aside special lands for protection and wrote environmental laws decades ago to conserve the biodiversity that makes this land so alive, so soul-enriching, so uniquely American.

Our land is our heritage. Our vast territories have defined our spirit.

That’s why we have strong laws that say if you are going to do something to the land, you have to do a study first to find out what the impact will be on the environment.

Those who loved our land and our natural heritage wrote laws to assure that Americans would know the environmental cost of actions on federal land or done with federal money. You can weigh the cost against the need to change the landscape. But you have to know. The public has to know.

But the public won’t know how much damage the border industrial complex will do to the environment with the expensive border-wall prototypes being planned. Trump doesn’t want you to know. The Department of Homeland Security is exercising its option to exempt itself from environmental and related laws in order to expedite a barrier being planned at a time when illegal immigration along the southern border is decreasing. So, who needs the wall? Those who want to keep Trump’s diehard base energized see it as essential. Blundering ahead with border-wall prototypes will also enrich that border industrial complex.

But the full cost of this wall fetish is unknown — and thanks to the waiver of environmental laws, it will be unknowable.

Wildlife doesn’t understand international boundaries.

Wildlife corridors and migration patterns — as well as plant distribution — will be impacted as big-time contractors bulldoze their way to roads, barriers, lights, sensors and other expensive whizbang stuff that doesn’t have to be cost effective because, hey, it’s somebody else’s dollar.

Your dollar. Unless, of course, you believe that fairy tale about how Mexico is saving up to repay us. But let’s return to the real world. In the real world, ecosystems are fragile and facing increasing pressure from population growth and climate change. Nature struggles to maintain her balance. Inflicting unnecessary damage is just plain stupid.

“Trump wants to scare people into letting him ignore the law and endanger wildlife and people,” according to a statement by Brian Segee, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity.

The center and Democratic Rep. Raúl Grijalva are suing to stop the wall.

In the real world, smugglers have tunnels, ladders and catapults. Terrorists have access to the best counterfeit documents. The wall is baloney.

The financial cost of this wall represents a waste of resources that could be used to create jobs repairing some of this country’s aging infrastructure, to provide college assistance to middleclass kids or to help the parents of those kids get job retraining. Squandering it makes no sense. But the more enduring tragedy is the cost to the environmental legacy you leave your children and grandchildren.