Finally, a good piece on fences

After reading Mark and Delia Owens (post here) work the veterinarian fences in East Africa caught my attention and I followed up everywhere I could to find a NGO working to remove / improve fencing. Null … just nothing.

Finally this last week, a great piece with good stories and details about fences’ evil and good. In and of themselves they are neither … but are / have they created issues. Reading this is an important step in understanding the complexity of fences – their politics, economics and outcomes

A key point is contained here:

Although fence ecology is nascent—the paper that coined the discipline was published in 2018—its practitioners have already generated a profound insight: Among all the forms of infrastructure with which humans have fettered the planet, few have changed our landscapes more, with less fanfare, than the humble fence. Fences truncate and direct animal movements, shape the distribution of native and invasive species, and dictate interactions between predators and prey. They control the spread of disease and the flow of genes; they alter soil and vegetation and water. Yet for all that, scientists know little about precisely how many are out there, or where they’re located—though their construction is booming around the world. You might even say we’re living in the Wirocene, the age of the fence. 

Entangled – Ben Goldfarb

From this piece, my earlier research was at least prima-facia proven – small, scrappy local non-profits are leading the effort globally, and even this piece used only N. American examples of ‘success’ or such efforts.

So much more is needed to be done … figure out how you can help.

all images from referenced article