Ecology: Beyond the Wall
Originally published in BESIDE. Purchase the issue here.
We Think of State Borders as Conflict Zones. They Can Be Something Else Entirely
The Madrean Sky Islands are an archipelago of mountaintops amid a sea of clouds, spanning the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico. The terrain is extreme, thanks to sudden, thousand-metre shifts in altitude, and the ecology is impossibly varied: forests of Douglas fir give way to desert, bright-coloured parrots coexist alongside bald eagles and beavers. In 2016, biologists discovered that a jaguar in the range had been preying on black bears. Jaguars hail from the tropics, while black bears are Rocky Mountain creatures, but in the Sky Islands, distinctions blur. “Different species come together in a way that is remarkable,” says Dan Millis, an activist with the Sierra Club.
The Madrean isn’t a single ecology but rather a patchwork—a distinctive whole made up of parts. In that sense, it is a fitting symbol for the larger US-Mexican borderlands, a meeting point where the subtropical south merges with the temperate north. The border defies the human impulse to categorize and label. It connects not just nations but oceans, spanning 3,100 kilometres from the Gulf of Mexico—a marginal sea of the Atlantic—to the Pacific coast. On that journey, it runs along the Rio Grande River, bisects the metropolis of Juárez–El Paso, traverses the Sonoran Desert, and terminates near the Colorado River Delta. The border is Texan, Chihuahuan, Californian, and Sonoran; it is urban but rural, arid but lush.
Hybridity, on the border, isn’t just an ecological phenomenon; it’s cultural, too. People have a fierce sense of local identity, neither wholly American nor Mexican. Residents speak a hybrid Spanglish. Mexican cities have grid-like arrangements reminiscent of northern metropolises. And on the US side, one finds symbols of Pancho Villa, the Mexican revolutionary who launched raids on American soil. (There’s a Pancho Villa state park in New Mexico and a statue in Tucson, Arizona.) For Juan Carlos Bravo, a conservationist in Sonora, the social mixture of the borderlands complements their ecological hybridity. “In this landscape, which is complex and somehow permeable,” he says, “cultural diversity feels like another part of our ecosystem.”
A diverse environment is, by definition, a valuable one. The borderlands, thanks to their fertile river valleys, account for billions in agricultural production, and tourists thrill to them for the landscapes and fauna. The region is home to some of the world’s most charismatic endangered species, from the ocelot, a wild cat with a striped-and-ridged pelt, to the prehistoric bighorn sheep. So what’s the US government doing to keep the borderlands vibrant? It’s seeking $18 billion for a wall.
If the borderlands symbolize hybridity, the wall represents its opposite. It is at odds not only with its surroundings but also with nature itself, which predates the advent of national boundaries by at least 4 billion years. As a piece of security infrastructure, the wall is questionable: people will find ways over or around it. But it threatens real damage to the ecologies—environmental, economic, and cultural—that make the region unique.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Borderlands are shared resources, and because nature doesn’t obey state boundaries, interventions on one side of a border affect what happens on the other. Nations that seek to conserve their border regions, therefore, have no choice but to cooperate. And sometimes they do, prioritizing compromise over militarization. A border is a wound; it can also be a suture.
This is an excerpt. To read the full text, purchase issue four of BESIDE here.