A border wall made of solar panels wouldn’t actually be good for the environment

Is this a bright idea?

Physically imposing… aesthetically pleasing… and solar?

On Wednesday, President Trump added a new descriptor to the wall he’d like to see built along the United States’ southern border. Speaking at a campaign rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the president said, “We’re thinking about building the wall as a solar wall, so it creates energy, and pays for itself. And this way Mexico will have to pay much less money, and that’s good. Is that good?”

While this may be the first time that Trump has stated this vision of the wall publicly, the publication Politico wrote that Mr. Trump first floated the idea in a June 6 meeting with legislative leaders. But how would a solar panel border wall work?

Energy efficient, but not environmentally friendly

“We already have a border wall [in Arizona], actually it’s a border fence. We already have it in places where it’s not needed and where it’s not effective,” says Aaron Flesch, a biologist at the University of Arizona. “And it’s already having negative effects on the environment.”

Flesch has studied wildlife on the borderlands between the United States and Mexico for almost twenty years, and he’s found that the wall hurts animals—especially those whose numbers are already perilously low—by limiting connectivity. He finds the potential environmental risks of building a wall—even a solar wall—across the whole border to be quite troubling.

“It helps to think of habitats as little islands dispersed on the landscape with inhospitable lands around them,” says Flesch. “if animals can’t recolonize those islands because they can’t move through the environment between and among those little islands, then it can have huge destabilizing effects on the population.”

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