We're going to build the walls★
Build that wall! Build that wall! Build that wall!
Build that wall!
Build that wall! builds Gangplank
Build that wall! x3
Welcome to The Vegan Report.
My name is Ryan and today we are talking about border walls, and more specifically the southern
border wall separating the United States from Mexico.
As the US election are approaching, it feels like the question of the southern border has
become front and center of the political debate.
We hear a lot of talks about immigrants and immigration policies, but what we never hear
about are the animals.
And does it affect their lives when, you know, you build a fence stretching hundreds of kilometers
or miles across their habitats?
To discuss this topic, I have with me Miles Trafigen.
He is the Borderlands Program Coordinator for Wide Lens Network.
He's a researcher, a conservationist, and overall someone who has taught a lot about
the border from an environmental perspective.
So Miles, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for being here.
Yeah, thank you for having me.
I'm glad that you're taking interest in such an important topic that I think is under the
radar for a lot of people.
So my first question for you is about, you know, how can we locate the border wall?
So can you first describe the border wall in terms of where it is located?
Are we talking about also, you know, a wall or more of a fence?
How long is it with kind of, you know, environments and habitats and territories?
Is it crossing?
So I'll let you answer the question.
Well, those are very good questions you're asking.
The border wall is kind of a generic term that has been used to describe border barriers
and infrastructure along the US-Mexico border, most of it being built in the last 15 years.
I'll start with very basics.
When they first started marking the border, it was just using concrete or steel obelisks,
just markers that they would place along the border going from the Rio Grande River to
the Pacific Ocean in California.
And these were all in line of sight of each other.
So there's 268 of these monuments.
And theoretically, if you're standing at one, you should be able to look left or right and
see if you're on the borderline.
So that was sort of the first method of marking the borders, you know, a kinder, gentler way
of doing things.
And then we had barbed wire fence that came along when cattle arrived.
And that was the main barrier in most places.
But then beginning around the mid-2000s, they started building more stout barriers.
And these range from vehicle barriers, which look like what they call Norman defencing,
like the landing craft deterrent structure, as you saw on the beaches at Omaha Beach in
France during World War II.
And those are very recognizable.
And these were repurposed from old railroad tracks.
But then we entered the era of border walls.
And this is where they built steel structures that range from 18 feet tall to 30 feet tall.
So we're looking between, you know, five and nine meters.
And the gaps between the beams, the steel beams that they are constructed of are only
about 10 centimeters.
And so that's not very much room for something to get through.
During the Trump administration, they built over 600 kilometers, actually about 700 kilometers
of border wall in the states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and to a lesser extent
in Texas.
There's some subtle differences between the states, specifically Texas, on how and where
they can build border walls, depending on how the land is owned.
But Arizona, New Mexico, and California, we really took a bad hit here when the Trump
administration was around.
And there were border walls built prior to that under the Bush administration and to
a small number for the Obama administration.
Now these border walls, like I said, they're the ones that they built after 2017, are 30
feet tall.
That's, you know, almost 10 meters tall.
And this is a lethal distance for somebody to fall.
And so, you know, border barriers have an effect upon humans and wildlife, a huge health
effect.
In the hospitals in San Diego, they're seeing more people injured by falling off the border
wall than they do gunshot wounds.
And in America, that is saying something because we get a lot of gunshot wounds here.
And not to joke about such a grave topic, but it's very significant.
But the impact that the border wall is having on wildlife is profound.
And it's a difficult thing to measure because we don't really have good baseline data to
go off.
That's kind of a different scientific topic I can expand upon.
But in essence, here you have this border barrier that is crossing the continent and
in places where there happens to be very high biodiversity and a lot of natural migration
corridors that have existed for thousands of years.
So the way that the topography is laid out in the Western states, North America is the
basin and range topography, where basically you have north-south trending mountain ranges
interspersed with valleys between them.
And so these narrow pinch points between the US and Mexico, what happens is it enables
animals to migrate north or south according to changing conditions.
And of course, these changing conditions have been going on for thousands of years, but
they happen seasonally and more recently in the context of climate change, we're seeing
a lot more animal dispersal in order to follow things like rainfall and if you're a predator,
prey availability.
So there's really no worse place that you could place a border wall and no worse design
than to put one running east and west across this part of the continent because you are
essentially fragmenting and altering the evolutionary history of North America.
Can you bring us to that place?
You talked about New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas.
If I go there and I've never been to the southern border, what does it feel like?
What's the weather like?
What's the topography like?
Because I imagine like a desert, like a barren lands, and you're talking about migration.
So can you bring us to that place and talk about what you see when you travel there?
Well, that's an excellent question, Ryan.
I'm really glad that you asked that because I think the impression is that we live in
a desert wasteland here and nothing could be further from the truth.
And borderlands are an incredibly diverse place.
They have elevations ranging from sea level up to 3,000 meters.
And so you could be anywhere along this point of the 2,000 mile long border and you could
find yourself in a variety of different habitats.
This ranges from pine trees, conifer trees, junipers, and pinions, and grasslands, just
like you would find up in Manitoba, Ontario.
These are short grass prairie grasslands.
So you get that element, but you also get some of the deserts.
But contrary to popular belief, deserts are very high in biodiversity.
And where we are here in the southwest is one of the most biodiverse places on the continent,
especially when it comes to reptiles and amphibians and pollinators and native bees.
There's a great degree of inhabitants.
And what also makes it unique is that since this is the meeting ground of the temperate
zones and the tropic zones, where you've got the temperate zones coming down from the north,
the Rocky Mountains essentially reaching their southern terminus where they meet the Sierra
Madre, which is the big mountain range on the spine of Mexico, that has the tropical
element.
And so it creates this melting pot, this meeting ground of great diversity of plants and animals.
The most iconic representatives would be the black bear, which people associate with northern
temperate zones.
But then we also have the jaguar in the borderlands.
We've had nine jaguars occur over the last 25 years here in Arizona and New Mexico.
And this is the iconic apex predator of the tropics, ranging all the way down to Argentina.
And so it reaches its northern extent up here.
So I like to say that this is the land where the jaguar and the black bear share the same
trail.
Oh my gosh, that's incredible.
This is the first time I'm hearing this.
Is it because the fact that it is the first time I'm hearing this?
Is it because, you know, are there a lot of documentaries out there about this zone?
Lots of reports.
You know, I don't remember, you know, watching anything about this zone, this part of the
world.
It's just my personal bias, but tell me.
I don't think it's your personal bias.
I think it's the media bias.
There's always a recurring story that happens along the border and it comes along in the
election seasons.
And much like when you hear about it's hurricane season.
And so in the southeastern US, places like Florida, they start talking about hurricanes
in June and we can expect this to happen.
This is essentially what happens before every big election.
It becomes immigrant abuse season and it becomes, you know, basically a very, it's a very racist
approach towards the border.
You know, when you hear terms like invasion, when we're clearly not being invaded, there's
people just simply walking across trying to find a better way of life.
Yeah, this is, so the way the media portrays the border is very much as a desert space,
as a place of desperation, of chaos.
When the reality is that 99% of the borderlands, if you were just plopped down there like a
transporter beam from Star Trek, you would probably be alone in the wilderness, in, you
know, standing beneath an oak tree or maybe a pine tree if you're lucky to be enough higher
or in grasslands or you might be in the saguaro cactus deserts, like you think of, people
think of the Arizona desert.
And so what happens is in some of these places that happen to be big population centers like
Yuma, El Paso, these are in some of the desert places, it's an easy place for the media to
access and to get their photo ops.
And this happens frequently.
Every few weeks there's a delegation of mostly Republicans from Republican Party here in
the US from the border states of Nebraska, Illinois, Oklahoma, and I joke about that
being border states because those are not border states, but everybody from around the
country seems to have an interest in what's going on down here.
And they come down to get their photo ops, you know, say that we're being invaded, that
you know, whatever administration's in power is not doing enough about this.
And so it's really become a political football.
And the reality of the border is so misunderstood.
You know, along with the diversity of habitats, vegetation communities, wildlife and plants,
it's also an incredibly diverse place for human culture.
It's an area of extreme mixing and blending where you find a lot of dynamic energy.
And there's been a great food tradition that's come out of the borderlands.
And you know, I would say a good majority of Americans take part in some sort of, you
know, Mexican food at some point, probably almost weekly.
It's become, you know, almost daily ingrained with, you know, burritos and tacos and enchiladas
and you know, all these things, avocados, you know, all these things that North Americans
have grown to love in recent years.
And that's a result of, you know, humans occupying this space, this very dynamic space where,
you know, you've got the American Anglo influence from the North with the Latin American influence
from the South.
And then the mixing ground of all these great food traditions, you know, from an ethnobotanical
perspective, it's fascinating because, you know, Mexico is the land where chili peppers
come from and tomatoes and avocados and some of the tastiest foods in the planet happen
to come from this part of the world in Mesoamerica, the Aztec and Mayan traditions.
So that's an element of the borderlands that is something that's very positive, you know,
it's a place where, you know, a lot of people like to be and it's spurred a lot of innovation
and experimentation with food and culture and just about every facet of our life here
in the borderlands.
And I just wish that that aspect of the border was cherished more and really viewed in a
more positive light.
LR I'm glad you brought up the topic of food.
And yeah, we owe a lot of our legumes and recipes to Southern American culture, including,
I think, potatoes, watermelons, even tomatoes are native from, you know, South America,
if I'm not mistaken.
But you said that, you know, the real border, the kind of border we're talking about right
now, you know, it's started during the 2000 era.
And before that, you know, there was a more gentle approach to, I guess, marking the border.
What I want to know is the people who decided to build that wall, have they, you know, taught
about wildlife?
Was it even a footnote in the way, you know, they, they thought about, oh, now we're going
to build the wall.
It's going to impact this and that.
Was there even a study around that before they built that wall?
LR No, there wasn't.
And there's a very specific reason for this.
There was a law that was enacted in 2005 called the Real ID Act of 2005.
And that sounds fairly benign.
Okay, well, we're all supposed to carry identification.
But there was a clause in that law that said that the Secretary of Homeland Security has
the authority and power to waive all laws for the construction of border barriers.
And this includes the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the
Rivers and Protection Act, the Wilderness Act, Bald Eagle, Golden Eagle Protection.
And the list goes on to about 70 different laws that they have the authority to waive.
And so because of this, we were not able to do environmental studies to try to assess
the impact of the border wall on wildlife, on water, on the ecosystem.
So they essentially can just do what they want to do.
And that's exactly what they did is they don't really have to notify anybody except to put
it in the US Federal Register saying, we're going to build a border wall here and we are
waiving all of these laws.
And that is a very scary thing and it set a horrible precedent around the world because
this is the erosion of democracy.
How can an unelected politically appointed official, which is who the Secretary of Homeland
Security is, how do they have the authority to waive laws that both houses of Congress
have passed and whatever sitting president signed them into law and then it withstood
decades of judicial review and challenges at the Supreme Court?
How does that person have the power to do that?
Unchecked power.
This is something that people should be scared of because it's starting to proliferate around
the world.
There are now nearly 70 countries in the world that have border walls and they are following
the same playbook where in Poland and Belarus, they built a border wall two years ago, a
200 kilometer long border wall between Poland and Belarus right through the Białowice Unesco
Biosphere Reserve.
So there's bison there, there's wolves, brown bears, and they waived all the laws to construct
that.
In Slovenia, they're putting up border barriers and once again, they did the same thing saying
that, oh, in order to put these up, we need to bypass all the laws.
And unfortunately, that's something that I believe that the United States exported to
a lot of places who are taking advantage of this autocratic power that really should not
exist in a true functioning democracy.
But why are we building those walls?
Because when I think about a wall, I think about the Great China wall.
It's something from the medieval era.
It's something from the time of our ancestors and times of conflict and lords waging wars
between themselves and things like that.
So what's the function of that wall?
What is it contributing to our society, to our countries?
I think it's really taken a step backwards in our evolution.
And this makes me think of the rock band Devo.
It stands for devolution.
And the members of the band thought that at some point in the late 60s, early 70s, we
had reached a pinnacle of human evolution.
But after the Kent State shootings, and I believe it was 71, they saw us devolving.
And that's what I believe is happening with these border walls, is that we are trying
to approach 21st century problems, socioeconomic and climate problems with a very medieval
base solution.
I mean, we are past the days of where there's a group down there with torches that say,
now we storm the castle, and they're trying to clamor up the walls and they're pouring
oil on them and everything.
It's just, I don't think we're living in those days right now, at least right here.
People are coming to this continent for a variety of reasons, but I'll tell you the
common three that I have seen over the years as I've worked there and talked to people
and helped transport them to airports and buses if they're seeking asylum.
It's that one, they are fleeing climate change.
And two, a lot of people in the Northern hemispheres, we are not seeing the climate change effects
as acutely as they are in some parts of the world that are more prone to drought or disturbance
or weather phenomenons.
We're slightly more buffered here, except when you go further North and getting up into
Alaska in the Northern latitudes, they're seeing that as well.
But people are fleeing climate change because they have been in places where they've seen
multiple hurricanes, they've seen droughts and wildfires.
And then the second reason they're also fleeing is because of violence and persecution.
And there's a lot of instability out there, global instability, but also inter-country
instability in terms of a lot of gang violence and narco-cartel violence.
A lot of these communities in the small villages, the mountain areas of Central America are being
terrorized by very organized gangs, organized crimes.
And then the other reason that they're also escaping is resource depletion to where it's
becoming more difficult to grow your crops and make a good living with an unstable climate,
with an unpredictable climate.
But on top of that, they are also a victim of global macroeconomics.
And coffee is a perfect example of this.
There was a period where a lot of farmers in the coffee growing regions were doing pretty
well.
Well, now there's been a huge explosion of coffee over the last three decades, and it's
essentially overplanted and also very subject to climatic fluctuations in its production.
So here these people have to compete with a global commodity, just like oil, and they
are essentially powerless.
They take the price that they're getting.
And so these people are victims of global trade agreements such as NAFTA, such as GATT.
They've all been affected by this because these global trade agreements, they benefited
the big corporations quite well, and especially agri-industry, meaning agricultural, industrial
agriculture, with large companies such as Cargill, Archer, Daniels, Midland, these very
Cone Agri.
They own a significant portion of the agricultural market, and it's based upon a lot of commodities
such as corn and wheat, beans, that now are traded on the global scale.
But these people need these on a daily basis, and they have no power of controlling their
own pricing.
And so they get squeezed.
And so what's happening as a result of this?
It's thermodynamics, is we have energy that's moving from one place to another.
And if you could call money energy, then essentially they don't have very much.
They don't have very many resources there, and so they're moving this direction.
So when you look at this, and we're putting up border walls, this is just the most absurd
thing you can do.
And it causes a very cynical reaction in me because I would like to think that people
in our governments are at least semi-intelligent and are thinking about problems and want to
be problem solvers.
And we are simply not solving any problems.
There seems to be no effort to really provide solutions to these issues that are only going
to be increasing every year.
So we are starting to see climate change in action that's arriving at our southern doorstep.
And the United States always frames it as we have a problem with the southern border.
It's our problem.
It's like, no, don't put that on yourself.
Claim this responsibility for it.
This is a global crisis is what we're seeing.
It is manifesting at the border because of borders being places where just things get
compressed, where we're seeing people from dozens of countries all around the world.
I've counted 17 countries so far and people I've encountered over the last probably two
or three years.
So these people are not just coming to America for the healthcare.
Definitely not.
But they're coming for very good reasons.
And that common thread of why they're coming, it's across the same for people I've met
from Syria, from people I've met from Ukraine, from Ethiopia, Sudan, Mali, Burkina Faso.
I mean, it's just incredible that the people I encounter and the places that they come
from and that's never appreciated in the media.
And the media and the government is not doing a good job of being analytical and introspective
on why are the people coming here.
Why is never a question that you'll hear in any stories about the border.
I think you, I never heard such a good explanation of why is it a problem right now?
Why are we hearing so much noise about it in the media?
I want to get back to the wildlife aspect of it because I feel like, first of all, I
feel like it's such a great story to tell.
The impact of the border wall on wildlife.
Why are we not having more conversations around that?
Why aren't reporters and journalists interested in the fate of wildlife species around the
border?
It's not that there are none that are not covering this.
There was a documentary that was produced about three years ago called American Scar.
And so I was part of that production.
And in fact, we were just in Mexico City for a screening a couple of weeks ago for that.
So it's still having an impact.
That discusses wildlife.
But there's a couple other documentaries that I just finished shooting recently that will
be coming out this summer.
And these will specifically be focused on wildlife and such as nature divided or border
wildlife effects.
Back in 2021, we did a story map and story maps of these GIS products that it's basically
like kind of a scrolling story with multimedia in it.
And I actually see this a lot of websites now for news as they're starting to use the
story format.
I think it's a pretty good medium.
But we did one on where the border wall was built and it has interactive maps in it.
And I'll send you a link to that so that people can find that in the comment section.
But that lays out the structure of the border and what it's affecting.
And what it's really affecting are the large mammals.
And I had mentioned the jaguar, which is a very charismatic species from the tropics.
It's the third largest cat in the world, spotted cats.
But the ones that I'm really concerned about are the common everyday animals that you see.
Like if you and I did a trip down to the border today, we would definitely see deer, probably
two species, white-tailed deer, mule deer.
And then there's also the javelina, which is like a wild pig native to this area.
That's like a new world pig.
They're very common.
There's an animal called coadamundi, which is kind of like a ring-tailed cat raccoon.
That's another tropical species.
And there's a pronghorn antelope, which range all the way up into your area, into Canada.
And there's black bear, mountain lion, bobcats, and desert bighorn sheep.
All of these animals are very affected by the border wall because in a place that's
dry and even though it may not be desert in a lot of the borderlands, it's still a very
arid place where rainfall is very infrequent in space and time, meaning that you may have
a year where not much rain falls or you may have all of it falling in one day or in one
place and not another.
So these animals have adapted over thousands of years to find these water sources, find
these food sources, find the places for shelter when different seasons come around.
Now they have this barrier that's running hundreds of miles across the land.
And what do they do when they encounter this if they needed to get to their water source
that's maybe one kilometer north or south of where they are?
Now they have to walk potentially 100 kilometers to the end of this wall or find a gap in it
and get through.
So I think that the border wall is probably killing a lot of animals that we're not even
seeing that we're not even aware of because animals are out of sight, out of mind.
They don't call up on a cell phone and say, hey, I'm lost out here.
I'm hungry.
Can you help?
Which is the case with humans.
We know that in the Arizona area just over the last 10, 15 years, there's been documented
five, 6,000 people who've died in the desert here.
Organizations such as No More Deaths documents these and finds these locations and has created
maps for those and has put little memorials out there and also tried to identify the remains
using forensics and DNA.
So if this is happening for humans, if we're seeing five, 6,000 humans that we know of
perishing dry horrible deaths of starvation and suffering, I'm sure that the same is true
for animals.
But we just don't see that because an animal may walk off into the bushes and pass away
and then its remains are scavenged by something.
And so we don't see that.
And so I'm very concerned about all the common everyday animals that we have not had the
opportunity to monitor because of the nature of the way border barriers are built.
And this goes back to what I mentioned earlier with the Real ID Act of 2005, where since
they were able to waive all these laws, they just build the barriers.
Now any other giant public works project like a dam or a freeway, it would go through environmental
reviews.
There would be biological opinions.
There would be public comment periods.
There would be alternatives presented to minimize impacts and expense.
But that's not the case with border walls.
And so we were not able to put in any baseline studies to see like, okay, we know how many
animals, how many deer are in this area.
We know how many mountain lions are here.
Now what's going to happen if we build a border barrier?
What happens to their home ranges, their distributions, their habitats?
There's just so much that we don't know.
And that's what makes it really difficult is when you know in some places that wildlife
are having a hard time.
And we have trail cameras and videos.
We're monitoring this in numerous locations along the border with long-term research projects
that we've set up recently.
But that's going to take a long time to get those results.
And I think that even with scientific data, the data are, they turn into numbers at some
point.
And what happens is you lose the fact that there's a real animal with a beating heart
and hopes and desires, I'm sure.
What's happening out there?
And if we see that, oh, wildlife numbers have declined in the context of border walls, what
does that mean, decline?
That means probably big die-offs of animals along the borderlands.
And we simply don't know how that's going to affect the ecosystem at large if that happens.
And like you said, with a horrifying death, having this border and you know there is water
just across it and you just can't reach it and you have to go through the desert and
the hot weather.
So you talked about mammals.
What about reptiles?
What about insects?
Is it also affecting, you know, is it affecting every species out there or is it limited to
certain categories of animals?
I think it's probably having an effect on almost everything.
It's obvious that some things can pass through the border wall.
I've seen several snakes, rattlesnakes and other ones crawling through the border fence.
So they're not having an issue, but desert tortoises can't make it through there because
you know, that's a hard shell.
The border wall is only four inches slash 10 centimeters wide.
And so two years ago I had an encounter where we encountered a pretty large female desert
tortoise and she was right on the border road next to the border wall and happened to be
with the documentary film crew and so that will be in this documentary, The Border Wildlife.
But you see the plight that this animal is in.
It's had this barrier placed across a place where it's lived for decades.
Desert tortoises can live to 60, 80 years old.
And so they form their lives around these known locations of food, shelter, water.
So they are being affected, the desert tortoises are.
And also there's a lot of birds and butterflies that are impacted by this because even though
they fly, many of them don't fly that high.
They may fly three, four meters maximum.
And I've observed this along the border wall.
I've seen butterflies, big giant flocks of butterflies come up to the wall and not pass
through.
And I think it might be something to do with the temperature of the wall during the daytime
it heats up or it could just be that there's a disruption of airflow.
You know, I don't know.
But unfortunately they have installed high intensity lighting in many places along the
border.
This is like stadium lighting.
And so in most places they have not turned this on yet.
And we're very concerned about this because that could have a huge impact upon bird and
bat migration.
You know, these animals they use visual navigation, they use sonar navigation.
So the presence of high intensity lighting could really disrupt that.
It's also could have a huge impact upon native insects and pollinators.
In the San Bernardino Valley of southeastern Arizona, there was a paper published about
three years ago that identified there were 500 species of native bees that occurred in
this one area, the highest of all North America, the highest diversity.
These are a lot of solitary bees.
So there are these ground dwelling bees that just live by themselves.
And a lot of people don't think about this.
When we think about bees, everybody thinks there's one bee, you know, but it turns out
there's thousands of bees, you know.
And the Western North America has a lot.
And so if you turn on high intensity lighting, the effect that's going to have on the insect
fauna, and then the avian fauna and the bats is going to be tremendous.
And so we're putting out all of these structures and technology and border militarization type
of tools without really doing the work to determine what kind of impact are they going
to have.
So things will be impacted all across the border and including plants.
We're seeing a huge influx of non-native invasive plant species occur along the border because
you had this road hundreds of miles long that has been disturbed and all of that heavy equipment,
you know, giant pieces of caterpillar construction gear and trucks and thousands of people from
all around the whole country spreading all these seeds.
And so we're seeing weird plants pop up now, you know, invasives that we have not seen
in other places, you know, range expansions of invasive species we've seen in Arizona,
but we had not seen them in New Mexico yet.
They hadn't made it there, but now they're making their way there.
So anytime you get a change in the plant community, that's going to have a ripple effect because
a lot of plants, all plants have some sort of mutualisms or symbiotic relationships or
something that is going to some species is going to rely upon that plant for its sustenance
and wellbeing and pollination.
So you know, it remains to be seen what's going to be the final outcome here, but there's
out of doubt we are seeing tremendous effects across the ecosystem now due to the border
wall.
LR You mentioned, well, we talked about water sources and you mentioned rivers.
What about aquatic life then?
CB Oh, aquatic life is definitely impacted.
Where I first started my career in the Southwest was at San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge.
And that's near the Arizona New Mexico state line.
And it's right on the international border, the refuge is.
And that refuge was established for native fish.
That is the headwaters of the Rio Yaqui River basin.
And so there's eight species of endemic fish to that small refuge.
We're talking a place of only about 1000 hectares, harbored eight different species of native
fish.
The Yaqui top minnow, the Yaqui chub, the beautiful shiner, or the Mexican stone roller,
and then the only catfish native to the Western North America, the Yaqui catfish.
Those were impacted tremendously by border wall construction.
Because it turns out that some of the portions of the streams where a lot of the population
lived was right on the border, right where it crossed, where the deepest ponds.
There was tremendous amount of material that was discharged into these streams, making
the water quality terrible.
In addition, they pumped billions of gallons of groundwater to mix the concrete to build
the border wall.
And so there are places where they drilled wells and pumped the water and all the surrounding
wells went dry, and including the natural artesian wells that flow naturally at the
San Bernardino refuge, those went dry.
And they had to, in an emergency, install solar powered submersible pumps that are still
there to this day to keep the water flow to these ponds where the native fish are.
So ironically, this was all occurring during COVID, most of the construction.
And right at that point, the refuge went on a ventilator when they had to install all
of these solar powered pumps and the water has still not returned to its natural flow.
So the aquatic resources has been tremendously affected.
And other places where rivers cross the border, like the San Pedro River, like the Santa Cruz
River, which are small rivers by Eastern standards, but the major drainage is here, those have
been walled off and they put fences across them.
And these have blown out with floods every year since they built the border wall.
And so it's so naive to think that you can just stop a river.
It just doesn't work that way with nature.
Nature will win.
And every time one of these walls gets knocked over by the latest big flash flood that comes
through this area, it's just sort of a ray of hope that eventually nature will reclaim
what is hers.
But I wish we could do it a little bit quicker.
Let's run some scenarios and tell me how pertinent it is to what we're talking about.
What about if there are storms or changes in the weather in terms of seasons?
How does having this big wall impact wildlife in this context?
A lot of migration routes are learned.
But everything is this magic instinct in wildlife ecology.
It's well known that birds such as whooping cranes, sandhill cranes, they learn their
migration routes from their elders.
And even in Europe, in places between the former Iron Curtain, the Eastern Bloc countries,
the Russians built a fence, the longest fence at that time in the world.
I think it's nearly 2,000 kilometers long, not as high as the one here.
It was more of a fence with a lot of razor wire on it.
But when that was removed, they started removing this in the 90s, 2000s, the 90s in a lot of
these places.
They took the walls down, wrapped up all the barbed wire, got rid of it.
Interesting thing was observed.
Collared animals, meaning ones that had GPS satellite collars for research.
And these were bears and wolves and lynx and other large caribou.
They followed the same routes of the walls.
And they were not migrating across these.
Even though no physical barrier existed anymore, these animals had gone through several generations
of learning this is the route to go.
And they continue to follow these routes even though the border barrier has been removed.
And right there, that tells me something that we've got a data point that demonstrates an
impact, a decades long effect from this border barrier.
This is an effect that we are now able to observe because the wall is gone and we've
got research technology, things that we can measure things very accurately, animal movements.
So there's definitely things that we are not seeing here on the US Mexico border because
we don't have the time, meaning the time to observe these effects.
We don't have a good handle on who's being affected by this.
So migration routes and animal movements will undoubtedly be affected in ways that we have
not been able to predict because of those movement corridors that might be changing
and different at different times of the year.
Maybe in December, an ocelot or a javelina goes this area.
In August, they go this route.
So measuring the complexity of animal movements along any region is complex, but even more
so in places like the Southwest and the borderlands where rainfall is infrequent.
And like I said, it's really patchy in space and time.
And so the movements and migrations of animals are a little bit more sporadic and random
versus a classic case like the Serengeti where the wildebeest make that migration.
They all go through that one space.
The Nile crocodiles are waiting for them.
We don't have that type of migration routes here.
They're more dispersed, they're more invisible.
So this is an uncontrolled experiment is what this is.
We're going to see things happen that we've probably never seen before.
Second scenario, I mentioned storms.
I guess there will be pollutants.
You talked about the concrete in the water, but this wall will get damaged.
What will be the effect of those pollutants?
And then what about the increased human presence?
The people that will be dispatched to again and again repair that wall, repair the holes
in the wall and do maintenance on the wall.
Oh yeah.
As we speak, there are probably hundreds of people working on the wall right now doing
maintenance.
And in some places it has fallen down or at risk of being fallen down.
There's a lot of what they call head cutting, which is a process of erosion or streams cut
back into their banks.
And you see this in places where there's a lot of gullies.
And a gully is just a steep sided eroded piece of land.
The Grand Canyon and those places that people know of in the Southwestern United States,
that's an extreme example of gullying of an erosion.
Basically the Grand Canyon is one big gully that keeps on cutting back into itself.
Well, that's essentially been happening in many places on the border.
And so when you get soil erosion, ultimately that soil goes into streams and that affects
the water quality.
And then when the soil erodes, well, nobody wants to lose soil.
That's the foundation of basically most life on earth combined with water and sunlight.
Yeah, we are seeing a lot of damage to the land and continual maintenance of the border
that's required.
And with that comes, like you said, increased human presence.
There's a lot of traffic, a lot of truck traffic, heavy equipment.
Of course, animals get hit on the road.
I find roadkill constantly.
And then there's the increased border patrol presence.
And now you've got vehicles occupying an area basically 24-7 and driving these roads.
And the effect of them on animals is quite significant.
In fact, for my master's research, I studied the white-sided jackrabbit, which is a rare
species of hare that lives in the southwest corner of the state of New Mexico and in Chihuahua.
And this hare is nocturnal, comes out about 10 o'clock at night, goes back in before the
sun comes up.
I guess it was called the vampire hare.
But at that time of night, they haven't been subject to very much roadkill because of the
rural area that they live in.
However, now with the increase of patrol roads on the border and border walls, now you have
border patrol trucks driving around all night long in a habitat space and time that there
didn't used to be that.
And so I documented the decline of the white-sided jackrabbit, about 50%, part of which is due
to habitat change, due to climate variables.
However, there were locations, the signal came out pretty strong that there's a roadkill
effect here.
And very early on in the study, I began documenting what vehicles I was seeing.
Was this border patrol vehicle or non-border patrol?
And it was 99% border patrol vehicle.
So there's a measurable impact that border security and border militarization has had
upon animals.
Last scenario, you talked about that, the turtle.
Oh, the tortoise.
Yeah.
Sorry.
You know, sometimes I just lose my English abilities and my mastery of English.
Anyway, you found that big, beautiful creature and you did nothing.
You know, you helped her.
I guess you documented her presence, which is the right thing to do because now I'm imagining,
you know, all those people who are now present around the border wall area, if they had encountered
like a rare animal or something like that, like the creature you described, I feel like
they would have just picked up the creature and brought it home or something like that.
So last scenario, what is the impact of the border wall on wildlife trafficking?
One thing it does is it brings more people to an area.
And this is the classic case with logging and mining, you know, oil production roads
is that you have roadless areas and now they build a road in order to go in to extract
the materials or whatever they're going to do there.
And for the first time, you have a traffic highway that people can go into and out of
quickly.
They have mobility there.
They have the advantage of fossil fuel vehicles.
And so now you're bringing in a population of humans to a place that they didn't exist
or they were in very small numbers and only on foot.
And so the ironic effect of the border wall is that now there is increased migration in
places that were formerly wilderness areas because the United States government went
and created the infrastructure and mobility to get in and out of those areas.
So now it's become even easier for the drug cartels, which have largely switched to human
trafficking in the last two years because it's more profitable and less risky.
Now they have routes to take people through.
They can take them through the wilderness areas to the south of the border in Mexico.
And then they get to the border wall and they put a 31 foot ladder on top of the 30 foot
border wall and the people go to the other side.
And now they've got a highway that they can utilize.
And so this is the same for drug smuggling, all of this thing, although the majority of
drugs are coming through the port of entry.
So there's a snowball effect that's occurring is that the more you add onto the infrastructure,
the more you actually increase the presence of humans and you create better conditions
and habitat for them to exploit.
And ultimately, the wildlife is going to suffer.
And noise pollution is a big part of that too.
That can't be overlooked.
I would say that in a lot of places where I see a lot of heavy human traffic, I'm not
seeing very many animals.
And that's kind of an obvious effect.
They're kind of scared away.
This was observed all around the planet during COVID is that there was an influx of wildlife
into urban areas.
A lot of urban parks in India saw large increases of leopards and even elephants coming in at
night in spaces because the quarantine had taken effect and the humans went back into
their boxes and all the urban areas that still had trees and landscapes got recolonized quickly
by the animals.
So that's another data point.
If they can be recolonized that quickly, then they can be depopulated that quickly as well.
LR That's crazy, Miles.
I'm astonished.
I did not realize before this conversation how large, how the problem was that complex
and that large scale.
So you're working day and night researching, documenting what's happening.
First of all, is it safe, the work you're doing?
Because I guess you're bothering a lot of people and agendas and you talked about those
gangs trafficking people.
Hopefully you never had to encounter some of those violent criminals.
So this is my first question.
How is it being in the forefront of talking about this issue and doing something about
it?
So during border wall construction when it was active between 2017 and 2021, I was monitoring
the actual activities.
And so I would go to these construction zones and I would fly my drone, I would take photographs.
They had security teams, heavily armed, just like you'd expect in America.
These firms out of Texas and they come around like, what are you doing here?
And this is a place where I've worked for over 20 years.
And my question would be like, what are you doing here?
So I encountered a lot of hostility during that period.
I've had encounters with cartel and those aspects over the years.
Nothing terrible, nothing horribly violent, but there's an element of risk.
I would say that the borderlands are safe, no more dangerous than other places, but you
can't overlook the fact that anytime you are at a border area anywhere, there's going to
be a heightened sense of awareness.
They talk about things like conditions, like condition green, everything's cool.
It's a Sunday afternoon, you're not working, you're in the park, you're having some wine
in a baguette and some brie or something like that, then you have condition yellow and red
and then black and it's that gradient.
And so when I'm working in the borderlands, I would say that I'm definitely on like a
condition yellow, a very relaxed one, but just you have to keep track of your surroundings
and be aware of where you are and know the terrain.
It's funny because people don't often know what is dangerous and what isn't.
And this is kind of a classic case if you travel somewhere in the world and if you just
went into some big city, ignorance is bliss.
Sometimes you might be in a very dangerous place, but you don't know it because you were
never told that it was a dangerous place.
And so I think that there are some places on the border that are more dangerous than
people perceive and other ones that are less dangerous.
But it's like anywhere and it definitely has its degree of risk involved.
And what can we do to support your work to do something about this issue?
I think that learning about border walls and how and why they're being constructed is just
the first step of awareness is to realize that what they can waive these laws.
And this runs so deep.
I was with a congressman one time down at the border and she said, well, why don't we just
use the Endangered Species Act to stop this?
And I just said, whoa, wait a minute, you were a member of Congress and you weren't
aware of the law that you passed here?
They were part of that voting block and they weren't even aware of it.
So just educating oneself, but keep track of the organizations such as Wildlands Network,
Sky Island Alliance.
We do work along the border here.
No More Deaths, the Samaritans.
There's a lot of groups that do human and animal aid along the border.
And so keep track of what's going on with those projects.
We have a combined study with Sky Island Alliance.
We have a border wildlife study.
We've got hundreds of cameras along the border.
We're trying to track movements of animals.
Donations are always, of course, extremely helpful.
Trail cameras cost around 200 to $250, but that's what I like to say, that's the entry
points there.
Because once you do that, then it's the maintenance of going there to take the SD card out of
it.
And then you got to put the SD card in the computer and look at 5,000 pictures of whatever
and catalog all that.
And so one camera really costs $1,000 a year because of just all the work that goes into
it.
So I often donate to a lot of small organizations, $50 or something, just because I know that
they've got to buy batteries for this camera or something like that.
So that's helpful.
And also the political process.
This is all about politics.
And so for people who say, I don't like to get involved with politics, well, at some
point you better get involved because the levers and machines of bad politics have hit
the borderlands ground zero, like a ton of bricks.
And we've seen so much damage and destruction along the border.
And I don't want to see any more suffering continue.
There's got to be a better way of doing this.
Before we end this recording quickly, I heard about projects of building another wall, but
this time on the northern border with Canada.
Does it have any, is it realistic?
Is it just rumors of something or are people really considering doing that?
I have not heard any real consideration of that.
However, I would like to, and I don't mean this in a mean way.
Let's get down to the root of why the southern border gets picked on.
It's racism.
It's what I call the fear of the little brown people is essentially what's happening in
America.
And the perception, like when we started out this interview, that it's a desert wasteland,
what's there to conserve, there must be no wildlife there.
The northern border is entirely different.
It's demographic makeup.
If you said the secretary of Homeland security has determined that in order to secure the
border, we are building a border wall across Niagara Falls.
So we're going to be dynamite blasting this here to build the border wall.
People in that area would say, no, you can't do that.
It's just like, oh, no, yes, we can.
Really?
Yeah.
The Real ID Act of 2005 does that.
If they wanted to drain the boundary waters of all of its water and divert that and build
a wall through that, they could.
If they wanted to blast through the mountains of Glacier National Park, Waterton Peace Park
that straddles the border in Western Canada and the state of Montana, they can do that.
They can build a border wall through there.
I guarantee you that the constituency of those places of towns like Buffalo, towns like Niagara,
Vermont, and Quebec, if they were going to be blowing up the mountains to build a border
wall through national parks and reserves and provincial parks, I think people would just
go crazy.
Because there's more population there, there's also a better political constituency, meaning
that they're engaged more with their politicians where here in the borderlands, the politicians
have left the people behind.
There's not a lot of people living in these rural places on the border, and the people
that are there are poor, many of them undocumented, so they don't have a voice.
The people in the borderlands are almost like the animals.
They have a very diminished voice.
People on the US-Canadian border have a much larger voice, Vancouver, Seattle, those places.
If they started talking about a border wall there, I would be happy because it would expose
this horrible law that we have in the books.
Maybe people might want to reconsider and say, I didn't know that we could do that,
so let's look at this and maybe tweak this and get rid of that one.
But I'll keep you informed if I hear about anything happening at the border there.
If we do nothing, what happens to the southern region?
If we do nothing.
Well people are coming here, they're going to come to the United States, Canada, no matter
what, whether there's a border wall.
When I encounter these piles of trash that are often blamed on the immigrants, but the
reality is that when the border patrol gets them, they make them empty out all of their
backpacks and pockets.
I see plane tickets from Ethiopia.
I see plane ticket stubs from Sudan, and then buses all along the way through South America
and Mexico.
Do you really think that a family that's coming from halfway around the world is going to
arrive and then they get to this nine meter border wall, which is very significant and
imposing and just go, oh man, I didn't realize there was a wall here.
I guess we're going back.
It's just stupid to think that it's going to be that way.
So let's solve one of the problems of our time and facilitate and manage migration because
migration has been occurring since the first bowl of primordial soup was served.
It's happened everywhere with every species from bacteria to bats, and it's going to happen
forever.
It's just the nature of life is to migrate.
So unless we start learning how to deal with that, we're only going to be throwing these
destructive measures up on our borders and dividing everyone as opposed to, let's invite
everyone to the table and solve the problem together.
Miles, this has been such a pleasant and educated conversation.
People will find links to how to donate and also to the map you talked about in the description
below.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for your work.
Thank you for everything you're doing.
And thank you for having taken the time to answer my questions.
Merci beaucoup.
I appreciate it.
Thank you everyone for listening.
I kindly invite you to share this podcast with the vegans you know.
Let's encourage more people to take action.
Again, thank you so much for caring, and I will see you next Tuesday for a new episode.