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Theme: Borders
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What is a border? The common definition might be stated as follows: a border is an arbitrary line or boundary with variable permeability between two distinct bodies. The most distinct usage of the term is to signify national boundaries. In the US and many other nations, this geopolitical usage of the term “border” has been impressed deeply into the psyche of the general public. The border, particularly the Southern border, is the imaginal cornerstone of national identity, security, wealth/resource distribution, and governance. In this model, a border invokes an image like the white lines on a sports field denoting what is in bounds and what is out of bounds. This border is also the scaffold for an impossible fantasy: the fantasy of absolute or determined exclusion of the Other.
This fantasy, though, is truly a delusion—a complex delusion that can be clarified by ecological relations. In the late 1800s, ecologist Alfred Russel Wallace coined the term ecotone to clarify the relationship between adjacent ecologies (other adjacent concepts are ecoline, cline, or ecological gradient). Tonos (τόνος for all the language nerds) is the Greek word that signifies tension. By coining the word “ecotone,” Wallace sought to describe a zone of transition and tension between two distinct ecologies. An ecotone, thus, is a zone where two distinct ecosystems engage in a kind of evolutionary call and response. Casting seeds and critters back and forth, and shifting as a result of various disturbances—ecotones are areas of vibrant biodiversity, competition, and exchange.
While conceptualizing borders is practical for organizational purposes, the effectiveness of a border is severely limited in geopolitics and ecology. In the nationalist psyche, a border is projected as the first line of defense against invaders—memorialized by the many border walls constructed throughout the ages. However, the border walls of tyrants do not actually deter the exchange of culture, goods, people, seeds, roots, or even genetics. Their inadequacy has been proven time and again throughout history. Do the tyrants who build these walls even believe in their efficacy, or do they simply construct them to solidify the fantasy of national security in the minds of common people? In this dynamic, the same tyrant who oppresses me is also the beloved leader who protects me from the inevitable harm of so-called criminals who are “flooding” and “invading” the nation’s border—Stockholm syndrome.
In the opening to her salient 1987 book Borderlands, La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua clarifies the actuality of a borderland against the impossibility of a border:
“The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta [it is an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture.
Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.”
In this passage, Anzaldua reveals how the implementation of a border is no hardline at all, despite the vile attempts of nations. Rather, Anzaldua characterizes the borderland as a wound, an interstice, or an opening where two societies press against each other in tension. The conceptual site-intensity of a geopolitical border, along with the performative actions associated with national security, seek to erase the lived realities of those who exist in the borderlands.
Anzaldua relates her own Mestiza identity to the borderland, highlighting how racial and cultural borders are also used to assert dominance. White supremacist society and racialized capitalism maintain these arbitrary racial borders to assert dominance and perpetuate war. This form of domination requires a hardline racial ideology that is unable to account for the nuanced complexities of biology and identity often associated with race. When the arbitrary boundary of skin color is insufficient, racists turn to religious and cultural differences, blood quantum, and socioeconomic status as justification for their exclusionary practices. Each of these social technologies exists as a way to otherize minority populations to uphold the dominant class.
In opposition to the nationalist concept of a border as a line of deterrence, phenomenal concepts like “ecotone,” “borderland,” and “Mestiza” shine a light on the reality that what we call borders are actually zones of tension, negotiation, and exchange. In the national context, this exchange happens despite the implementation of deterrence strategies and at the cost of innumerable lives in service of so-called national security.
In its better forms, the Appalachian identity itself has become a kind of ecotone between precolonial and postcolonial societies. This is not to suggest that Appalachia does not experience the violent impacts of colonization, extractive capitalism, and white supremacy. Rather, it is to say that in our best moments, Appalachians understand that to be a “neighbor” is to hold space for a kinship that undermines the grotesque tropes and expectations of racialized capitalism.
Beyond these conceptual matters, geopolitical and property borders also have broad implications in the practice of conservation. Variations between regulations, private and public property rights, zoning strategies, and economic interests have caused massive amounts of strife for conservation organizations. For instance, if a species’s range extends across three state lines, one state may lack protections for the conservation of that species while others support it. This has resulted in many situations where conservationists observe a population flourish and diminish in relation to their practice along an arbitrary boundary. For this reason, best practices are often impossible at a systemic level, requiring practitioners to negotiate their decisions within the framework of arbitrary borders and the legislation that dictates them, the geographies they delineate, and the social and natural resources they contain.
When it comes to the management of invasive species, borders require practitioners to adopt a similar “deterrence” mentality that resembles the mentality of national borders. When management strategies cannot be imposed systematically, defense regimes are necessarily deployed along pre-established boundaries to diminish the infiltration of noxious flora and fauna. For now, this is an unavoidable challenge. What, though, would a world look like where practitioners had the freedom to manage invasive species at scale on a systemic level, without concern for the wide range of challenges borders present for our conservation practices?
In the Borders edition, we seek to explore the complex ontology, politics, and implementation of borders in Appalachia and beyond, with a focus on how they influence conservation practices, identity formation, and social ecologies.
Questions: