S3E8: Border Wall: A Barrier to Wildlife and Humanity

[UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT]

0:00:00 - (Chris): It this podcast is made possible by financial support from our listeners. If you're not supporting us yet, check out nine 0 mile from needles.com slash. Donate or text the word needles to 53555.

0:00:16 - (Chris): Starting out on south Puerto Blanco Road along the border in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument dirt Road two way traffic. There is an advisory posted in the organ Pipe visitor center that says they advise against travel on this road. And then I asked what that meant and they said, you're probably fine, just a lot of people seeking asylum. Just don't hit anybody. Sign that says travel caution, smuggling and illegal immigration may be encountered in this area. Do not travel alone.

0:00:57 - (Chris): Avoid encounters with suspicious groups. Do not travel at night. Call 911 to report any suspicious activity. I'm traveling alone and I am a suspicious group, so I better watch out for myself.

0:01:21 - (Joe G.): You think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again. It's time for 90 miles from needles, the Desert Protection podcast. 

0:01:43 - (Chris) Thank you, Joe, and welcome to 90 miles from needles, the Desert Protection podcast. I'm your host, Chris Clarke, and if you've been listening to the podcast for a little while, you'll know that I spent some time earlier this year on and around the US Mexico border, January and February 1 off. I don't live too far from the border, so it's not that big of a stretch for me to get there. But the first couple of months of the year I spent time on the border, not just near it.

0:02:12 - (Chris): And my travels on the border pretty much ranged from organ pipe cactus National Monument, some of which you heard just now. Little bit of my experience there, and you'll hear more of that in this episode. But I also got to some other places right on the border that I hadn't spent a lot of time checking out beforehand. There was Nogalis, Arizona, and Sonora south of Tucson. There was El Paso, where I spent several days looking at the border and experiencing it there in an urban setting.

0:02:44 - (Chris): I spent some time literally right on the border in Big Bend National park and nearby Terlingua and Lajitas, heading up towards Presidio, Big Bend Ranch State park. That's a really different aspect of the border that we'll definitely be talking about in an upcoming episode for this episode, because the border is extremely newsworthy at the moment. I wanted to share with you a really good conversation that I had in Tucson during this trip with someone who's been paying attention to border issues, both political and ecological, for quite some time.

0:03:20 - (Chris): And, well, let me just let him introduce himself.

0:03:23 - (Myles): My name is Myles Traphagen. I work for Wildlands Network NGO that deals with connectivity and corridors rewilding with a focus on top apex predators, carnivores such as grizzly bears, wolves, jaguars, because they tend to be umbrella species. And if you have those species present then you've probably got everything else underneath it tagging along. I also am the science coordinator for the Malpais Borderlands group, which is a consortium of ranchers that have been putting conservation easements since about the mid ninety S. And I advise on that and help them with their gis and mapping and organize science conferences for them.

0:04:04 - (Myles): I have been here in Tucson for about twelve years now, but I've been working in the borderlands of the US Mexico since 1996. And I was at UC Santa Cruz and got my first job out of college working for the US Fish and Wildlife Service and sitting there waiting at mom and dad's house in January in the winter just hoping you get some sort of job offer. I finally get called by the service, the Fish and wildlife and saying, we have a job open for you at San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge if you'd like to go.

0:04:36 - (Myles): I had never heard of San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, but being a Californian I knew where San Bernardino was and I was just like, no, I'd like to go somewhere wilder. No. This is San Bernardino Valley of Arizona. As serendipity would have it, right before that time period I was in the science library of UC Santa Cruz and I was perusing the stacks of books. And back in those days it was fantastic. All the stuff that you would come across like the bycatch that would pique your interest.

0:05:06 - (Myles): And because of the catalog format and organization of books in libraries, you're going to find that range of similar topics on that same shelf. So sticking outside of this one bookshelf was this odd looking book that stuck out probably a foot from the others. And I pulled it out and it was this big rectangular thing about 2ft long and 1ft high and it had a map of the north american continent with mylar overlays for things like bird diversity, lizard diversity, plant diversity, basically a book form of gis.

0:05:43 - (Myles): And it really intrigued me because all these isoklines were converging on the New Mexico Arizona state line and the Sonora Chihuahua area. And turns out that San Bernardino refuge was only 8 miles from the New Mexico border in the exact same place that I was really interested in. I packed up my Volkswagen fox and headed down here. And as luck would have it, two weeks prior to that, Warner Glenn had photographed the first live jaguar in the United States, just a few miles east of the refuge, in fact, two jaguars were photographed within just a few months of each other. Jack Childs over in the Atascosa Pajarito area had photographed a jaguar, and he was a long term houndsman, meaning mountain lion hunter.

0:06:30 - (Myles): And that always fascinated me, that here, two multi generation mountain lion hunters, ranching natives of the area, both photographed their first jaguar within a few months of each other. And you could say that's a coincidence. But the fact that Warner's father, Marvin, he was a mountain lion hunter his whole life, and so was Jack Child's father. None of their family had ever encountered one before, despite roaming the same territory using the same exact techniques.

0:07:00 - (Myles): That just alludes to the fact that jaguars are undergoing a dispersal event from Mexico to the US. And if you look at the human component of this, we've been seeing a pretty large dispersal event of humans coming out of Central America and southern Mexico. And humans are fleeing Central America for three reasons. It's resource depletion, drought, disturbance, and also violence and persecution. Jaguars are essentially suffering from the same effects where they're being trapped, killed and poisoned by ranchers in Mexico and Central America.

0:07:42 - (Myles): And the prey base for jaguar has really depleted due to improper game management in Mexico. So they're on this parallel track, and it's one of these things that you can't prove this. It's a very difficult thing to study, but sometimes you have to follow your intuition and then begin to gather more data points in order to support your hypothesis. All of these things are happening, and they're happening in a very short amount of time. It was 27 years ago when Warner photographed that first jaguar, and now we're at jaguar number eight and potentially a 9th coming down the pipe here real soon.

0:08:26 - (Chris): It can see the outskirts of the town of Senoida through the wall here. Chain Chollas, ironwoods and Chain Chollas. It looks like a redtail or a Harris's hawk following the path of the wall, maybe hoping to pick up some small animals that get up to the wall and don't know what to do. Oh, boy. The road's getting very close to the wall. This is not aesthetically appealing.

0:09:14 - (Myles): There was 458 miles of border wall built under Trump. And I would urge people to really think critically when they hear the statement that Trump built no new border wall. And this largely comes out of left leaning media. I remember hearing this from Lawrence Hill, Donald Rachel Maddow, the classic people on the left saying, turns out Trump has only built five new miles of border wall. It's replacement fencing. Let's go over what the fencing is. It started out with, in the late 18 hundreds between 1890 and 1894, with marking the border from the Rio Grande to the Pacific Ocean at Tijuana, San Diego.

0:09:55 - (Myles): Using obelisks made of either concrete or metal, they range in size from about 5ft tall up to seven or 8ft tall. Monument one begins at Sunland park at the Rio Grande in Texas New Mexico border, and it ends with monument number 258 at the Pacific. And these are all spaced in line of sight from each other, so that in the days before fencing, if you were standing at one obelisk, you should theoretically, with your set of field glasses, see a monument in either direction to know which side of the border you're on.

0:10:30 - (Myles): So that was the first demarcation of the border. And then as ranching became more prevalent and the west was settled, specifically Arizona, New Mexico, by a lot of ranchers moving west. Barbed wire fence went in, and most of the border was covered by a six strand barbed wire fence in places that have relatively low relief that they could actually put fencing on. So that was our first fencing of the border. Keeps cattle in and out.

0:11:01 - (Myles): Deer, bears, javelina, pumas. Most animals can traverse through that type of infrastructure. Then after 1996, with, I believe it was operation gatekeepers and the first immigration reform acts, they began to put up more stout border barriers. And these were largely in the urban areas, such as Tijuana, San Diego, San Luis Rio, Colorado, Yuma, some parts of El Paso. And they basically repurposed a lot of Vietnam War era materials, specifically landing mats. And landing mats. Are these corrugated metal panels that they would lay down on terrain that was either rough or wet so that they could have aircraft landing in places where there was no infrastructure that made up the first real border walls.

0:11:54 - (Myles): But then in 2007, following the Real ID act of 2005, the Bush administration began putting up what they called pedestrian fence. And pedestrian fence means to impede pedestrian traffic, not facilitate it. And I remember when I first heard the term pedestrian fence, I thought, oh, that's an awful term because I had a girlfriend once in Juarez when I lived in New Mexico, and I would walk over the pedestrian bridge. So to me, in my mind, that meant, oh, this facilitates pedestrian crossing. In fact, I know it's meant to impede that.

0:12:25 - (Myles): And so the design that they used starting then in 2007, 2008, was called a Bollard style fencing. And Bollard style fencing is using cold steel tubes. And these have very specific engineering specifications. ASTM 503, eight inches thick, made for structural engineering and the first generation were 18 foot tall ballers with four inches gaps between them. And the reason for that design was so that border patrol agents could see across the line into Mexico.

0:13:02 - (Myles): But that would impede humans, and it would also impede vehicle traffic, obviously. But in addition to the steel bollards, which were mostly employed in the urban areas, they built some in Douglas, Naco, Nogales, and some other places, there was an extensive vehicle barrier network that was in more rural areas of the border thinking Oregon pipe National Monument, Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, and the vehicle barriers, which are also sometimes referred to as Normandy barriers because they had a similar design as the barriers on Omaha beach at D Day to impede landing craft from coming on shore.

0:13:38 - (Myles): Those were put in place because there was a lot of drive through traffic. And at the time, it seemed just utterly horrible that they were doing this and that they were really grading the Roosevelt reservation easement along the border to where it became a much higher speed road, where in many cases it was a two track or even overgrown and impassable. But now highways were basically being constructed along the border.

0:14:02 - (Myles): But if you look at aerial imagery of vehicle tracks across Cabeza Prieta and Oregon pipe, there was a pretty bad resource issue going on there with just vehicles driving across the desert, pristine desert. So in hindsight, I look back at the vehicle barriers and I say, okay, there's a degree of protection there.

0:14:22 - (Chris): A quick explanatory note here. In 2006, I wrote a story for Earth Island Journal where I was editor on recent developments along the border in Oregon pipe Cactus National Monument. And I have to agree that the vehicle barriers that were in place at that point, which I took a very close look at, seemed to make a lot of sense. There was a big problem with people driving illegally across the border, and you can do a certain amount of damage on foot, but if you're driving across the desert trying to find routes that won't expose you to attention from law enforcement, you're going to do a lot of damage.

0:15:02 - (Chris): And that was why the agencies put up a fairly effective vehicle barrier through the entire border of organ pipe cactus national monument. Now, Myles mentioned Operation Gatekeeper. This is a really important piece of context for you that is often left out of discussions of the border. This is from the piece that I wrote for Earth Island Journal after that visit from the cornfields to the desert. On January 1 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect.

0:15:36 - (Chris): NAFTA removed most of the legal barriers to trade among Canada, Mexico, and the United States, and Mexico's agricultural infrastructure began to collapse almost immediately before the agreement was signed, then President Carlos Salinas de Gortari had amended the mexican constitution to gut the ejido system of communally owned farms, allowing farmers to divide ejidos among themselves and sell their shares outright.

0:16:04 - (Chris): It also made it possible for bankrupt farmers to lose their ejidos. Until 1993, the Mexican government was legally obligated to guarantee a minimum price for corn by buying it under the CONASUPO program. President Salinas ended CONASUPO price supports just before NAFTA passed, and with those trade barriers relaxed, US firms began to dump US government subsidized corn into Mexico. The price Mexican farmers earned for a bushel of corn fell by nearly half between 1993 and 1999.

0:16:37 - (Chris): In the meantime, the retail price of corn actually increased in Mexico. The same companies who were dumping us corn were also buying up the corn companies and raising prices. By 2001, agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland owned a controlling interest in the Mexican company Gruma, the world's largest producer of cornmeal and tortillas and part of two other corn milling companies. In 1998, in response to US pressure, Mexico dropped its law capping prices on tortillas, increasing US companies’ profitability and causing the price of tortillas in Mexico City to jump by 50%.

0:17:17 - (Chris): The price jump was even greater in rural areas. Farmers lost their land, whether on ejidos or in long held family plots sold to cover mounting debts. The disruption was mind bendingly massive. Some observers estimate that one Mexican in six lost his or her home as a direct result of the US corporate invasion of Mexico's core economy. Many poor people in Mexico get half their daily calories in the form of tortillas.

0:17:47 - (Chris): Mexico's Instituto Nacional de la Nutrición estimates that one Mexican child in five suffers malnutrition as a direct result of the corn crisis. Between 1993 and 2002, Archer Daniels Midland's annual profits tripled. My article continues. People have migrated from Mexico into the US since the two countries first shared a border, drawn by the greater income available in the US for even menial labor in the 1980s, us investment in the so called maquiladora zone, prompted by the drastic devaluation of the peso in 1983, brought hundreds of thousands of workers to the northern tier of mexican states.

0:18:28 - (Chris): When those same US companies relocated their factories to other cheaper countries, those workers were left without jobs, homes, or social services. Immigration into the US, legal and otherwise, increased as a result. But it was the destruction of the corn economy that truly swelled the ranks of the migrants. The Immigration and Naturalization Service estimated in 2000 that the number of Mexican nationals in the US illegally more than doubled over the 1990s, from a bit more than 2 million in 1990 to 4.8 million in 2000. The Arizona desert is by no means a sensible place to cross the border. Migrants have succumbed to its deadly arid heat for more than a century.

0:19:08 - (Chris): But in 1993, the Border Patrol began a deliberate campaign of funneling migrants toward the border's most dangerous sections as a way of dissuading border crossers. In 1994, the Border Patrol launched Operation hold the line and Operation gatekeeper campaigns of massive law enforcement presence along the San Diego and El Paso borders with a stated purpose of driving migrants into the desert, where the Border patrol enjoyed what the Justice Department called a, quote, strategic advantage over would be crossers. Thus, the federal government funneled thousands of migrants into one of the most dangerous landscapes in the US as deliberate law enforcement policy.

0:19:51 - (Chris): Excerpt ended okay, so I wrote that in 2006. That was 18 years ago. Obviously, a lot has happened since. The migration crisis worldwide has grown as a result of a number of factors, including endless wars, late stage capitalism making life miserable in most places, as well as climate change reducing the livability of some places that people had called home. And of course, there is the construction of the border wall and the doubling down on racist and exclusionary rhetoric by the Republican Party and the seeming acceptance of all but the worst parts of that rhetoric by the opposition party, such as it is in the US. But it's all built on the foundation of keeping people out of the country after we destroy their lives. And that's really important context.

0:20:47 - (Chris): We'll be right back. And we're back.

0:20:52 - (Myles): I think I went to Organ Pipe for the first time in 92, went there for spring break and there was a lot of helicopter traffic and it felt you could feel the border. And I grew up in the border in Imperial beach in San Diego. So I was familiar with that sort of thing. But yeah, I remember going to Quitobaquito and it's just right there. Certainly thereafter when I lived in Douglas, I could ride my mountain bike from Douglas to Awa Prieta and go buy papayas and things like that. A real different scene. Now we can roll back border security a long ways.

0:21:25 - (Myles): This is not the first round of there being issues of trade and commerce, whether it be legal or illegal. That has happened between the US and Mexico. The Roosevelt reservation. This is a 60 foot wide strip that goes from Texas to California and that is reserved for the federal government so that there is an unobstructed place to control illegal activity, and that was during the time of prohibition. So that was a concern then.

0:21:57 - (Myles): If you look at a lot of the place names along the border, I'm thinking of Mount range in the bootheel, called the smuggler hills. They didn't name those for nothing. So this has been going on for quite a while. The Roosevelt reservation was established. And the irony is that the destruction that we saw along the border, especially during the Trump years, where they were blasting through mountains and waiving all laws to do that, what facilitated the ease of this to happen so rapidly was from arguably the father of conservation. In terms of presidents here, Theodore Roosevelt is known for that.

0:22:35 - (Myles): But yet his establishment of the Roosevelt reservation really helped to fast track a lot of the border wall destruction that we saw. Over the last few years. These barriers have gotten progressively worse. They went from 18 ft high to 30ft in the Trump years, and 30ft was deemed a lethal to serious injury, elevation to fall from. And they're seeing this in San Diego. The trauma centers had more injuries and deaths from the border wall than they did from gunshot wounds in San Diego county.

0:23:11 - (Myles): And for America, that's saying a lot. So there's just a lot of cruelty there. And also part of the strategy or unintended consequences, depending on which side of the conspiracy theory spectrum you reside on. The border walls have driven traffic out to more dangerous terrain. It's hotter areas in the western deserts of Arizona or into the more remote borderlands, places in southeastern Arizona, southwestern New Mexico, where migrants coming from all around the world literally have no idea where they are.

0:23:45 - (Myles): A guy recently asked me, he says, I'm going to New Hampshire. Is that close? So we've had this progression of border militarization and also infrastructure, and it's really harmed our border communities. The wall has not only fragmented the land, but it's also fragmented our social communities. It's been very polarizing for rural areas along the border, where some are pro wall, others are against it.

0:24:12 - (Myles): But one thing that seems to be a common feature is that the farther you get from the border, the stronger your feelings are and the less informed you are. The majority of residents living really on the line are not in favor of a border wall. They don't want to see that it's escalated the level of force, and now we're seeing wildlife suffering. So with a gap of only four inches in the border wall, you're going to preclude pretty much all mammals, other than squirrels, jacked rabbits, skunks, but deer are not going to cross through that mountain lion, are not going to cross through black bears, sonoran pronghorn bighorn sheep, and most notably, the jaguar and the mexican gray wolf.

0:24:57 - (Myles): So there's a very heavy handed approach to dealing with the border. And in fact, it's a very base, primitive way to deal with this when the things that people are really afraid of, they're afraid of the border invasion, which there's no invasion. They're afraid of fentanyl. Any border patrol agent will tell you, “I've never caught anybody with fentanyl out in the field. It's all coming through the ports of entry.”

0:25:22 - (Myles): It's really sad that a nation that was really founded and advanced its technology and economy through the scientific process that we've resorted to millennia old technology when we simply have ladders and reciprocating saws that can cut through this. And in the naivety that if you build this 30 foot wall and then you enact a law like in the Senate bill today, oh, as soon as it hits 5000 migrants a day, then Biden can shut down the border.

0:25:55 - (Myles): I didn't know there was a border switch. Hey, Kamala, can you grab that and hit shut down the border, please? That's absurd. I've encountered people from 30 different countries along the border over the last couple of years, and I don't believe that if you've come here from Ethiopia, Mali, Iraq, that you're going to encounter a border wall and say, hey, everybody, I know we came all this way. We're not going to be able to get over this thing. I just can't do it.

0:26:24 - (Myles): So that's really the logic is beyond me, as is that prior to the Trump administration, immigration rates were at their lowest in the last 25 years. Here they add 458 miles of border wall. And now we have record levels of immigration, and people want to apply cause and effect to certain things regarding immigration and our laws, and that we've got catch and release through the Biden administration. But they never put it out there that it's simply been ineffective, utterly ineffective, because people are not coming through trying to evade capture.

0:27:00 - (Myles): If you go right down the road here, about 60 miles to Sasabe, you'll find 300 people today, guarantee you, that are asking, where is the border patrol? Where's the port of entry? We want to turn ourselves in. You talk to a border patrol agent, and I've talked to many at public presentations, and I asked the question, what percentage of people are you capturing in the field that are trying to evade capture versus people who are turning themselves in?

0:27:29 - (Myles): And before I even get the question mark on that question, they respond, oh, 99.5% turn ins. They are claiming asylum at the border. That seems like a pretty easy thing to deal with. If we set up the infrastructure to do that, versus an $18 billion border wall that is incredibly destructive, resource intensive, and ineffective. Why are people coming? One, they're escaping violence, persecution, economic problems, but they also would like to find stable livelihood.

0:28:06 - (Myles): And the last statistics I saw is that there was about 5.6 million agricultural and labor jobs that were needed in the US. And you could even go to the Hampton Inn now and see a help wanted sign for wanting people to clean places and stuff like that. How many people are claiming asylum now? About 5.4 million. So you just do the math. I'm not a mathematician, but I can say, hey, we've got a workforce here.

0:28:33 - (Myles): Why not take advantage of that? Nobody's coming to take my job. Nobody's coming to take yours. The last plane flight I took, I don't think that they were going to get the captain's job. Let's get real about this. And when the farmers in Washington are letting apples rot on the tree because they don't have workers, meanwhile, there's thousands a day wanting to come and work here. How come we can't process that?

0:28:58 - (Myles): How come I can go to Costco, get my card, and in about 15 minutes fill out a form, they take a picture of me. I've got this pass. I can go to places. I can go down to Hermosio, and I can shop at Costco. I've shopped at one in Campeche and also north of the Baileys border. Walked into a Costco. Okay, you're, like, in the club. My whole buying record is known, and it's all the same rules apply. Why can't we legalize labor and have a program where people just enter right on the spot they're set up to just say, okay, here, let's get your information here. You need to establish a bank account.

0:29:37 - (Myles): We've got some bankers here. It would be just like the job fair universities. The military is trying to recoup the college students, and the chase credit card is trying to get them to apply for it. Well, just let people get set up there. Okay, I'm from Wells Fargo. I'm from bank of America. Would you like to set up an account? It requires no amount of deposit here. Or they make it $5 or something because they got to put a transaction in there.

0:29:59 - (Myles): And now you've got this work card, you can go to work, and we can manage the problem versus trying to hold back the floodwaters, which has never worked in any part of human history. And this is what really, it almost drives me to tears, because I look at the american dream and the ideals of pious christians and people who have a good moral compass. What is more noble than to go work for your family somewhere and send money home to support them?

0:30:37 - (Myles): And so many are trying to do that, but it's been cloaked in this narrative that Trump started. They send us their worst. They're murderers, they're rapists and stuff like that. I, for one, have never had a threatening encounter with any immigrants on the border. The only threatening encounters I have are with the militias down there who are harassing everybody, who are armed to the teeth, who have very poor intentions.

0:31:04 - (Chris): Black vultures sitting on the top of a saguaro with two vertical stems. Oh, black vultures everywhere. And a Harris's hawk. Four black vultures and a Harris's hawk. All of them sitting on top of their respective saguaros. child's pink jacket. Getting up close to the fence again. Here's a door in the fence. Looks like it's locked, but who knows? Tempted to just walk over there, see if it's open? Leave it open.

0:31:50 - (Chris): Feels like it would be time well spent if I spent the rest of my life working to get this wall torn down. This is just heartbreaking, this whole stupid thing. Welcome to the world's largest gated community. Noon on a day in the very end of January. It's deceptively nice out. 73 degrees. People trying to cross the 60 miles of desert north of here without adequate water, going to be every bit as dead as if it was 113. But I love this national monument. But I got to say, this is one of the worst national park experiences you could have.

0:32:48 - (Chris): Cognitive dissonance should rename this road cognitive dissonance Road. I mean, what better entrance exam for the fucking country? Get somebody that is willing to walk through 60 miles of this in the summer for the chance to pick lettuce for sub minimum wage so that they can send money to their family. Those are the kind of people I want to live near. Those are the kind of people that make this country better. Why are we afraid of working people? Why are we afraid of brown teenagers that we got to put up this stupid, giant, lowest, bitter, flimsy, ugly, already decomposing bullshit wall?

0:33:45 - (CVhris): Oh, boy, this got washed out.

0:33:48 - (Chris): I asked Myles what the border wall really meant for the wildlife that have trouble getting past it.

0:33:55 - (Myles): The situation is more compressed here in the arid southwest than it would be in places that have rivers and streams. A lot of people would be surprised if they came here and saw the Gila river outside of the Gila Mountains in New Mexico and be like, okay, where's the river? It happened to be flowing when I passed over it the other day. But same goes for the San Pedro river, the Santa Cruz river, half a mile from us here in Tucson. There's no water in it now. The Palancio Mountains, where I've done a lot of work, which straddles the New Mexico Arizona border, ranges north, south, about 106 miles long.

0:34:31 - (Myles): It's the only mountain range that connects the Sierra Madre to the Gila Mountains, and hence the Rocky Mountains. There's about five springs total in that mountain range. There are no perennial streams, and so that's largely the norm for the southwestern borderlands. It might be 20 to 50 miles for a sonoran pronghorn or a desert bighorn sheep or a jaguar to find its nearest drink of water. Herbivores rely on the production of annual vegetation. Anybody who's been in the desert knows that it does not rain equally in the desert.

0:35:07 - (Myles): The desert monsoon rains that drive 70% of our moisture for the year are very sporadic. It's a downburst in one area. Very exciting to see and to be in and smell and hear. Because of that dynamic of rainfall being very sporadic in space and time, animals have to move long distances, and so their ranges need to be much larger than something that would be in a well watered area. We'll take the ozarks or the south, for example.

0:35:41 - (Myles): No animal is going to be more than a quarter mile from water, a quarter mile from forest. They're going to be within that. Even if you built a border wall straight across Arkansas, it would fragment those populations of wildlife, but it wouldn't doom them to dehydration and death like it would here. A jaguar moving north has to find water along the way somewhere. And depending on where that border wall was built, that could be the difference between life and death.

0:36:12 - (Myles): So what concerns me is what we don't see. How many animals have been out there dying, suffering, exposing themselves to greater risk that we simply don't know about because it's in very remote country. We don't understand what the border wall is doing. It could be killing a lot more than we know. We know this from the no more deaths work, where there's 5000 data points out there in the desert and more are found every week, the remains of somebody who has died in the desert.

0:36:45 - (Myles): And this is a result of the border wall and border militarization. It pushes them out into more dangerous territory. And the same exact thing is happening with wildlife is that now they've got to go around a wall and everybody's moving that same direction, whether you're a predator or prey. It's well known that sometimes the unintended effect of wildlife crossings, which are ultimately beneficial, when you build a wildlife bridge or a tunnel, predators are known to use those, say, hey, well, I'm smelling this. It looks like the javelina are passing through here and the deer, I'm just going to camp out here.

0:37:20 - (Myles): That's probably happening in border wall situations. And our current camera trapping research from San Bernardino Wildlife Refuge that wildlands network is conducting with Sky Island alliance is we're seeing predator and prey use the small wildlife openings because there's some places that wildlife can pass through that have been put in there specifically for other reasons. But we're seeing that mountain lions are coming through the same spot as the Havalina. And when the javelina get close to there, they're skitterish. They're looking around like, okay, is the mountain lion here waiting for me?

0:37:55 - (Myles): So it's the unseen. And that really concerns me is that there's a lot of death and suffering happening out there that we're not even aware of. And there's been a lot of people, a lot of children, a lot of families, everybody who have died in the desert died in the mountains because they were forced to have to do everything underground, unseen, sneaking around, versus if we're able to facilitate and manage migration in a constructive way that is beneficial and fair for all. Inhumane.

0:38:30 - (Myles): The border wall is an uncontrolled experiment. And usually when you do experiments, if you're a good scientist, you collect baseline data because you need to know where you're starting with and where you're going to end up and be able to measure the results of your experimental treatment. The border wall is the treatment, the experimental disturbance that was applied. If you are going to do a prescribed burn in a forest, once you've burned the forest, that's your treatment.

0:39:04 - (Myles): The treatment took effect with the border wall without any baseline data being collected. And the reason for that is because of the Real ID act of 2005, which allows the secretary of homeland Security, who is an unelected, politically appointed official, to waive upwards of about 70 laws for the construction of border barriers. They can just waive all of those laws. Keep in mind that these laws date back to 1890. The Rivers and Harbors Protection Act.

0:39:34 - (Myles): Native Graves Antiquities Act. Golden Eagle Bald Eagle Protection act. Clean water, Clean Air act. They can do anything they want without any review. So we have this giant ecological experiment where we are putting a wall across the continent and the process of migration between north south central America is largely a north south direction. Our geology dictates that especially in the west, where mountain ranges tend to trend north and south versus east and west. So we're affecting that north south migration. And of course, what's happening now with north and south, it's warm and cold and we're seeing climate change. We're going to see more migration moving towards cooler climbs. And so in a time period where animals, people need as much mobility and migration to survive, we're shutting that down.

0:40:39 - (Myles): And so we are effectively altering the evolutionary history of the North American continent. And we don't even know what we're doing because we're doing it in such a haphazard, knee jerk reaction way. We're having to use every fancy statistic we can to figure out what effect is this border wall having. No adult deer are making it through the wall. No black bears are doing that. Everybody can see that.

0:41:05 - (Myles): But we're seeing smaller things squeeze through and it's surprised us with our small wildlife openings, what we're seeing. But that's only the best case scenario in some very small places, like the wildlife refuge of 2000 acres with a dozen small little wildlife openings, eight by eleven inches in size scattered across that. But we're looking at a 2000 miles border. And so what happens when they want to wall off that entire border?

0:41:36 - (Myles): You could see a lot of mass extirpation in the borderlands. A couple of years ago I did a story map called the Border Wall in Arizona and New Mexico. And it starts out with the history of border barriers, beginning with the Roosevelt reservation and some of the things that we were just talking about, the marking of the border and then progresses through where we are at now with 750 miles of border wall along the US Mexico border.

0:42:05 - (Myles): And it's got a lot of videos, pictures, but also embedded within that is a map that's like a field guide to border walls and where they occur. This was an educational tool and if listeners would like to go and see that, I think it's a good way to start with the technical aspects of what borders are specifically to our country and Mexico. And of course there's a wildlife focus, so you can find that on the wildlands network website.

0:42:33 - (Myles): Just if you Google search Wildlands Network, the border wall in Arizona, New Mexico you'll find it, 

0:42:38 - (Chris): and we'll put links to all those in our show notes.

0:42:41 - (Myles): Yeah, that'd be fantastic.

0:42:43 - (Chris): Myles Traphaen, thanks for spending time with us at 90 Miles from Needles.

0:42:46 - (Myles): Thank you. It's been great meeting you and talking about this, Chris

0:42:49 - (Chris):. Well, that about wraps up another episode of 90 miles from needles, the Desert Protection podcast. Thanks to Myles Traphagen of the Wildlands network for sitting down with me in Tucson a couple weeks ago and chatting about the border wall. It gets more and more important now that the Democratic Party has pretty much borrowed all of the Republican Party's talking points on the border. We're going to return to this topic pretty frequently.

0:43:16 - (Chris): And if you want to deep dive into border issues, I cannot recommend one resource highly enough. The Border Chronicle, a podcast and email newsletter by Melissa del Bosque and Todd Miller out of Tucson. Longtime veteran border reporters who just do an excellent job deconstructing and debunking all of the various mischaracterizations, untruths, and occasional fabrications that are flying around in the border world.

0:43:48 - (Chris): Definitely recommend you check them out at theborderchronicle.com. Among other people I'd like to thank are Daniel Southard, who bumped up his monthly contribution from five to $10. We definitely appreciate that, Daniel. Despite Daniel's generosity, we are seeing some dwindling in our supporter base. We haven't had any complaints, so I suspect it's just through life happening and people needing to put their money somewhere else. Totally understand that. But it does mean that we need others to step in. So if you have not yet supported us financially, or if you want to like Daniel, boost the amount that you give us. You can do that by going to 90milesfromneedles.com.

0:44:38 - (Chris): Donate or texting the word needles to 53555. Among others I want to thank are Joe Geoffrey, our voiceover announcer, and Martín Mancha, our wonderful artist who put together our rather striking podcast artwork. Our podcast theme song, Moody Western, is by Brightside Studio. Want to thank the members of our board who just welcomed a new board member to our ranks, Audrey Scheere of Tucson, Arizona. Wonderful creative person and we're really glad to have her on board. You can check out her very entertaining insta at oldPueblocuriosities. Have some more great episodes coming up in the weeks to come.

0:45:20 - (Chris): Going to try and keep this weekly. Sometimes life intervenes as it did this past time around. Almost weekly is a fine production schedule, I think. Keep yourselves healthy. The desert needs you, and we will see you at the next watering hole. Bye now.

0:47:47 - (Joe): 90 Miles from needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy media network.