June 8, 2017

"It is not the first time" the article notes "that immigration restrictionists have borrowed environmental arguments to bolster their appeal." Border Walls Gone Green, by John Hultgren published in 2015, is full of examples of the intersections between the environmental conservation and eugenics movements. 

“Some of the earliest American environmental groups had interesting and important connections to the eugenics movement,” Hultgren said.

"The most famous of these is Madison Grant," the article continues, "who worked to conserve huge swaths of American wilderness and helped create the national park system...and was also a eugenicist and white supremacist...Grant’s views on the environment were inseparable from his adoration for eugenics."

Hultgren goes on to explain that, “To Grant, the redwoods were threatened with ‘race suicide’ in the same ways that whites were...these folks really saw national purity and natural purity as being interconnected.”