Do good fences really make good neighbours?

Last week, my son Majdi and I attended a meeting of the small but feisty local chapter of Alternatiba, a citizen climate change movement. Among the eclectic range of topics discussed, from film screenings to climate marches, was walls. 

Walls? One of the members, Thierry Arnaud, explained that in his village of Montbazin, 25 years ago, the dividing walls between neighbours lands were traditionally shin high. Then the convention became to build them waist height — and now people are putting up 2-metres walls, above head height. It might not seem like a big deal, he said, but walls are now mostly made of concrete, which is extremely energy intensive to produce, with significant environmental impact. In addition to the 400-500 kg of CO2 emitted with every tonne of cement produced, its production requires increasingly scarce sand, and its transportation emits even more climate-killing CO2. 

The impacts are local too, Thierry explained to me later. “These walls create heat islands in the summer as the cement absorbs heat and releases it at night. They become tunnels that accelerate the effect of this already windy region, and they’re barriers to connecting with neighbours and seeing our landscapes”. (One of the loveliest parts of our phone conversation was when he said, “Just a minute, I need to stop talking an instant to notice this sunset — the blackbirds are just flying in front of the sun!”). “Some neighbours tell me that walls are needed for protection against thieves,”  he continued, “but actually, walls protect the thieves from neighbours’ eyes, once they’ve climbed over. I tried to raise the issue with the municipal government but they told me there was nothing they could do”.

What fascinates me is the entwined social and environmental dimensions of walls and fences. I’m addicted to Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast, and I recently came across one called General Chapman’s last stand: why good fences make good neighbours — or maybe not, a story that centres around the US/Mexico border. For decades, Mexican migration was predominantly circular, with relatively porous borders allowing Mexican workers to return regularly to their families, cultures and traditions, while providing a much-needed workforce in southern US states. Between 1965 and 1985, 85% of Mexicans coming to the US without legal status eventually went home. 

That all changed, Gladwell says, thanks to the rigorous and relentless work of General  Leonard Chapman in the mid seventies, completely overhauling the Immigration and Naturalization Service, lobbying Capitol Hill, doing hundreds of speeches and media interviews in a few short years. Americans became convinced that they had a problem with illegal Mexican immigration, where they didn’t think they had one before. It escalated in the years since Chapman’s departure with militarized and reinforced borders and a border control budget that was multiplied by ten. To get across the border, Mexicans without visas must now cross the most brutal parts of southern Arizona, avoid armoured patrols and surveillance towers, and risk death from heat, cold or lack of food and water during the crossing.

The most amazing thing about this story is that all this effort to reinforce the border has actually led to a net increase in the number of illegal Mexican migrants. Because the cost of migration lept from virtually nothing to something considerable, Mexican workers stayed in the US once they made it, rather than risking border crossings back and forth.  When they could, many eventually brought over wives and younger children, who became today’s Dreamers. In 1980, the likelihood of Mexican workers returning home after their first trip was fifty percent. In 2010, it was zero. Instead of the border keeping people out, it kept them in!

In my view, the policy of building viciously strong border walls is generally questionable in a country whose citizens are nearly all immigrants or descendents of immigrants. It’s questionable on the grounds of the human rights of border crossers, as the Trump administration’s recent practice of separately detaining parents and their children highlighted. And as Gladwell points out, it’s questionable because it doesn’t even do what it purports to, which is to reduce illegal immigration. General Chapman, it turns out, was a brilliant and devoted implementer — of a bad policy. But when Mexican migration researchers like Douglass Massey and Jorge Durand of the Princeton-based Mexican Migration Project shared their data and conclusions about the migration patterns before and after these policies with US legislators in multiple settings, the findings been consistently shut down or ignored. 

It is a wonderful, and terrible, example of systems failure. The paradigms of ‘fixes that fail’ and ‘policy resistance’, for systems geeks, come to mind: 

• Fixes that fail – policies that have some impact in the short term (people stop crossing at the traditional border) but in the long run, do the opposite of what they set out to (people cross in the desert – and never go home).
• Policy resistance – a refusal to accept what research is showing about the impact of reinforced borders, in order to hold onto to beliefs about what the solution is (ie we need stronger walls). Donella Meadows taught that in the face of policy resistance, the way out is often to redefine larger, more important goals that everyone can pull together on (Thinking in Systems, 2008).

As for the ever-taller walls around homes in my current perch in southern France, it strikes me as a worrying paradigm shift. Where we were once content to know where the boundary between us and our neighbours was so we could decide where to plant a bush for some privacy and shade, now we want to (supposedly) make our property secure and block any whiffs of neighbours. In the half-dozen ground-floor apartments and houses I’ve lived in, I’ve had high fences, low fences and no fences. While there are clearly times and places where privacy barriers are important, in other situations the absence of a fence has allowed for joy and community in the form of shared gardening and summer potlucks. Thierry Arnaud’s municipal government could, in fact, put in place measures to limit the height of concrete or stone walls instead of bushes, trees or low walls  — but such policies would only survive if his neighbours see the benefit of that open space.

Robert Frost’s poem Mending Walls is the origin of the much-used axiom ‘good fences make good neighbours’ — but actually Frost is questioning whether walls and fences are necessarily good for neighbours; he says: Something there is that doesn’t love a wall / That wants it down. 

Gladwell ends his podcast by asking ‘do good fences make good neighbours, or do they just disrupt normal behaviour?’  I’d go further and ask whether walls and fences make good neighbours, or just as often build social divisions and create ecological harm?