‘This is a human tragedy and an ecological tragedy’ — High Country News
At Organ Pipe, the landscape’s ecology confronts its militarization: A migratory corridor collides with a wall, a natural spring could lose water to pumping for concrete, and both migrants and locals who cross the Borderlands are monitored and tracked. Here amid a sea of saguaros, standing tall like giant green tridents, and organ pipe cactus rising in clusters like their namesake church organ pipes, the voice of local dissent grows louder.
Some members of the Tohono O'odham Nation, whose land spans both sides of the border, see the wall construction as the latest abuse from the federal government. “To the Anglo people, to the people of color, I want you to think back in terms of your own communities,” said David Garcia, a former tribal leader. “What may be going on in your communities has just started recently, but this has been going on for many centuries.”
Nellie Jo David, who is Hia-Ced O’odham and a Tohono O’odham citizen and activist, said that Tohono groups like Indivisible Tohono and the O’odham Anti-Border Collective have been standing up for border issues for years. “We’ve all grown out of the constant militarization and surveillance our land has experienced,” David told me.
I followed the protesters down a winding dirt road to see firsthand where new panels of wall are rising at a dizzying pace. Vehicle barriers have been ripped from the ground, replaced by steel bollards. The difference is dramatic. Where the old barriers blend into the landscape — simple rusted metal columns a few feet high with big gaps in between — their successors resemble the bars of a giant never-ending jail cell. This nuance is lost when national outlets like the Washington Post report that President Donald Trump’s wall is simply replacing old fencing. “I think a lot of the media would rather make it look like Trump isn’t delivering,” Laiken Jordahl, Borderlands campaigner for the Center for Biological Diversity, told me. “The sad truth is that right now, border walls are being built in all four states; they are destroying some of the most beautiful places in our Borderlands.”
The ongoing construction is already having ecological impacts and threatens to destroy or fragment habitat for 93 threatened, endangered and candidate species, according to a 2017 report by the Center for the Biological Diversity. Already environmentalists fear that border construction, which involves mixing concrete with hundreds of thousands of gallons of water from nearby aquifers, could drain Quitobaquito Springs — the only place in the United States where endemic species like the Quitobaquito spring snail, Sonoyta mud turtle, Quitobaquito pupfish and desert caper plant are found. This desert oasis is located within a few hundred feet of the U.S. Mexico border.
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