Continental Divide: Wildlife, People, and the Border Wall

Introduction

introduction In early spring 2008, two young bison bulls jumped a sagging threestring barbed wire fence separating Chihuahua, Mexico, from New Mexico in the United States. On both sides of the international line lay an unbroken grassland valley scoured almost bare by a prolonged drought, which announced itself meanly on the dusty hides stretched taught over bison bones. D.H. Lawrence once wrote, he “never saw a wild thing sorry for itself,” and this ragtag band of bison was no exception. They had been eking out an existence in an unforgiving land for almost a century , weathering the seasons of famine and plenty, pursuing one allconsuming preoccupation that prompted their every move: survival. Bison are creatures of simple needs, requiring only some grass, reliable water, and space to roam; a hardiness that enabled them to migrate by the millions as lords of the vast prairies of North America for millennia before European settlers arrived. But needs are needs and survival is serious business in a landscape now scored by roads, fences, and other obstacles foreign to the natural contours of the prairie. The haggard bison barely paused in their crossing that day. It was a simple leap over a fence their herd had broken down a hundred times, a known inconvenience encountered during frequent travels between the pond where they had drunk that morning, and a reliable patch of pasture for grazing. The bulls’ herd had found this location dozens of years earlier , and since then had relied on it for the two main staples of its survival . The fact that there was an international boundary between pond and pasture meant nothing to them. They made the jump, and headed off toward dinner. Meanwhile, a few thousand miles away, a roomful of politicians sat tossing a political rotten tomato called immigration, everyone tak- i n t r o d u C t i o n | 3 ing care not to soil their hands, while engineers sketched out rough plans, and construction companies procured concrete and steel, and the United States began to raise its great wall—a wall that if it comes to fruition along the entire 2000-mile border, will divide not only two nations and their people, but an entire continent of creatures like the bison, already taxed to the breaking point by the business of survival. History is filled with admonitions for the folly of walls, and the earth is littered with crumbling reminders of our endeavors to divide the landscape. Structures made of brick, steel, and concrete do not ultimately solve problems of political and economic origin, and often they create a whole suite of unintended consequences. But chronic economic disparities, historical amnesia, and other habitual maladies of humanity persist, and absent the will to make substantive changes, we turn to walls. This book tells the story of a region at the crossroads of this age-old equation, a largely unknown place at the knees of North America where the United States meets Mexico. Here the presence of both political and natural boundaries creates a unique blend of north and south where the melodies of northern cardinals and tropical green jays float upon the warm South Texas breeze; where the perfume of creosote speaks of the passing of desert rain while high in the mountains, the boughs of Douglas firs cradle winter’s first snow. Here is a landscape that has seen the birth of jaguars, the death of Spanish missionaries, the budding of saguaro cactus, the persecution and dogged endurance of native peoples , and the footsteps of a million migrants recorded in the smoldering sands of the Devil’s Road. Here is a place where Spanish kings abdicated sovereignty to drug lords, one cruel century to the next. In the borderlands, theories of smart international policy collide with rock hard reality, and the laws of supply and demand tumble violently with forces of poverty and despair. Within this turbid mix, the complex vibrant character and rich history of the borderlands is obscured by a news media preoccupied with violence and criminality, and a politics of sound bites and insincerity carving wedges from the 4 fears of a nation. And, consequently, the scales are tipping toward walling person from person, nation from nation, and a landscape from itself. This is a book about the US-Mexico border wall and immigration policy, but more importantly it is about the land, wildlife, and people that have...