When Fences Make Bad Neighbors
I’m a night owl, so setting my alarm for 0545 is serious business. And, as it always happens when I set an early alarm, I wake up long before (0430) and finally give up soon after.
The inspiration: We’re heading to Quitobaquito Springs and want to be there in time for the golden hour that starts somewhere around 0700 and is over whenever you notice the birds are no longer singing.
It’s a straight shot from our place near Why, AZ down State Road 85 for 28 miles until the right turn at South Puerto Blanco Road. Going the speed limit on the highway is a lot like standing still because everyone else is driving so much faster.
South Puerto Blanco Road is nothing but gravel and often washboard, so those 13 miles take just as long, but we arrive just in time for the gathering flight of swallows: Northern Rough-Winged mostly, with at least one tree and violet-green each. They zoom overhead and skim the surface of the small pond.
Which, at first glance, it must be said, is pretty unremarkable as ponds go.
That is, until you learn that this pond is fed by a spring that originates from a fault in the granite-gneiss cliffs of the adjacent hills. And that it is the only perennial water source for hundreds of miles for wildlife, including ocelot, black bear, javelina, and jaguar, as well as migratory and ground-hugging birds. Or that it is home to not one, but three, endangered species: the Quitobaquito Pupfish, Sonoyta Mud Turtle, and Quitobaquito Tryonia (a springsnail), all of which have adapted to the warmer (and thus poorly oxygenated) water. What’s more, it is on the ancestral lands of the Hia C-ed O'odham and the Tohono O'odham who lived and subsisted here for thousands of years.
Quitobaquito Oasis and its environs are also where I see my very first Lucy’s warbler (and heard the sweetest song), Ladder-backed woodpecker (with that handsome red head), and Harris’s hawk (circling overhead, prey clutched in its talons). Definitely worth getting up early for.
What I have avoided mentioning for as long as possible is that Quitobaquito Springs is also just 200 feet from the border wall. For fourteen miles, we drive alongside it and then park facing it.
The visual impact of the wall is the least of the assaults. In addition to the obvious and tragic human costs, its construction has had a disastrous effect on wildlife movement patterns and the water supply.
In the aftermath of September 11th, Congress gave the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) permission to waive 84 different laws and statutes to facilitate border wall construction, including the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and Endangered Species Act. The Real ID Act of 2005 literally paved the way for DHS to dynamite existing barriers to migration (i.e., steep, mountainous terrain) in order to create 20-foot wide canyons and install 30-foot high fences through areas with virtually no crossings.
The suspension of environmental and public health laws also enabled DHS to extract 1.85 million gallons of groundwater per mile of new fencing. This precious resource was used to keep down dust from all the truck traffic, soften the rock-hard ground so that steel bollards or posts could be driven to a depth of seven feet, and to mix cement that would be poured into the bollards for reinforcement.
David Millis, who was convicted for leaving gallon water jugs for migrants near Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, west of Nogales, tells it like it is: "They're taking water from thirsty people and feeding it to the wall."
The lasting impact of this lethal trade-off on human, animal, and plant life is vividly illustrated in the must-watch New Yorker documentary “American Scar/Cicatriz Americana.” After repeatedly and ruthlessly showing the extent of the environmental devastation, the film closes with these words of warning:
The border wall threatens the survival of 70 plant and animal species.
If left in place, the border wall will alter the evolutionary history of North America.
It’s up to us to speak for the Pupfish and the Palo Verde and the precious water.