We fear George Monbiot is missing something important here

George Monbiot wants us all to know that building fences along borders slices up wildlife populations to the detriment of the future health of those populations. He may well be right in that. Not wholly right, absolutely, as those fencings and blocking offs have, at times, had the opposite effect. That Australian rabbit fence is rather useful for example. Or, given the area of the world Monbiot is talking about:

For decades, the border that cut through Europe was a brutal symbol of the hostility between East and West, between the socialist and capitalist power blocs. Until the fall of the Berlin Wall 28 years ago, it divided Germany into the Federal Republic of Germany in the West, and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the East. Many lost their lives trying to cross over to the West, killed by snipers or landmines, in the no-go zone between the two nations. This heavily guarded corridor became known as the "death strip".

But in this region where no humans could tread, plants and animals thrived.

No, we don’t think the abomination of the Iron Curtain was worth some wildlife but it is an interesting example of how everything does have costs and also benefits, everything.

But that’s not the important thing that we fear Monbiot has missed:

When the Berlin Wall fell, we were promised that this marked the beginning of a new era of freedom. Instead, far more walls have risen than fallen. Since 1990, Europe has built border walls six times longer than the barrier in Berlin. Worldwide, the number of fenced borders has risen from 15 to 70 since the end of the cold war: there are now 47,000 kilometres of hard frontier.

For those trapped at these borders, the cruelties of capitalism are scarcely distinguishable from the cruelties of communism.

The distinction should be simple enough. For there is a difference between a wall meant to keep people in and a wall meant to keep people out.

Yes, we grasp the moral point that the people should be free, that migration is one of the great exercises of that human freedom. We would also insist that observing the flow of people across such lines on the map tells us a great deal about the systems either side of it. People are moving from less desirable to more and one useful manner of working out what it is that people actually desire in this life - migration as revealed preferences - is which socioeconomic system loses people, which gains?

But we do still insist that there’s a simple manner of distinguishing between those different cruelties, of capitalism and communism. Which way are the guns pointing? Out to keep people out, or in to keep people in?