Issue 6 — On Borderlands, a dispatch from the future frontline of the climate crisis
Plant bones litter the desert — mottled, desiccated, permeable. Under the weight of the sun, they are stripped of the skin that renders them cacti and smoothed by the heat like rocks tossed through the waves. They are plant and they are person, christened by words such as arm, bone, rib. The Tohono O’odham people — whose land spans the vast Sonoran desert across present-day Arizona and the northern Mexican state of Sonora — believe that the columnar saguaro cactus was once a lost and lonely child who, in search of their mother, sunk into the dirt and was reborn as Ha:sañ.
In the winter of 2016 — when the election of Donald Trump was the most anticipated event on the calendar — I was a visitor of the Tohono O’odham nation, hiking the northernmost range of the Sonoran Desert, which stretches from northern Mexico into southwest Arizona. This particular swathe of desert that abuts the Mexican frontier is preserved as Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument — a rusted, barbed, rugged landscape, where the cacti bloom by moonlight and the musk of the creosote bush mimics the rain.
The park’s namesake cactus, the organ pipe, clings to the rocky slopes on both sides of the border while the Mexican wolf, the Sonoran pronghorn, and the mule deer roam in search of food, water, and one another. For thousands of years, the O’odham also walked the once invisible line that divided their ancestral land, paying little heed to demarcations real or imagined. Even upon the park’s creation in 1939, the landscape was so seamless that the first superintendent accidentally drove straight through the monument and into Mexico.
The flesh of a fallen Saguaro cactus (forefront) begins to shed, revealing the woody ribs that form the plant's interior. Photo by Alessandra Bergamin
But the designation of Organ Pipe as a national monument intertwined the protection of the land with the hardening of the U.S. Southern boundary, the fragmentation of a desert ecosystem, and the attempted erasure of the O’odham’s transnational culture. The National Park Service spent the first 20 years at the park promoting the idea of unencumbered wilderness, while at the same time embedding the apparatus of border enforcement across a fenced desert. More than 80 years later, in a racist effort to quell immigration, the construction of Trump’s wall — most of which replaced what was already in existence — has destroyed sacred mountains, slaughtered ancient cacti, and caged wide-ranging species. It has sliced an ugly, raw gash through the park, one imprinted with not just the past four years of harrowing policy, but the world’s love affair with a failed “solution.”
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, there were around 15 global border walls. In the three decades since, that figure has risen to 77. Imbued with meaning through politics and politicians and birthed into materiality by fences, checkpoints, surveillance, and force, border walls are an attempt to both shut ourselves in and keep those who we deem unwelcome, out. As Harsha Walia, author of Undoing Border Imperialism writes, “border controls are most severely deployed by those Western regimes that create mass displacement and most severely deployed against those whose very recourse to migration results from the ravages of capital and military occupation.”
In 2021, it is within these contested spaces, the world’s borderlands, that we see our many and overlapping Sisyphean crises not only converge, but magnify. From the Thailand-Myanmar border to the Turkey-Syrian border, climate change meets conflict, conflict meets racism, racism meets refugees, and refugees meet fences, prisons, deportations. It is at once both a cycle and a collapse, revealing the ongoing failure of policies near and far. The epicenter of the climate crisis will soon be the world’s borderlands, and across this unequal battleground we are already watching a version of the future unfold.
A "warning" sign posted along a trail at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Photo by Alessandra Bergamin
When I visited Organ Pipe during the disquieting lull between election and inauguration day, the border wall, as a harbinger of the horrors to come, felt palpable. Signs dotting the trails warned of “illegal” immigrants while blue, flapping flags — installed by volunteers — marked much-needed water stations throughout the desert. Rather than the howl of the coyote or the raspy call of the cactus wren, the wailing sirens of Border Patrol cars broke the quiet. Empty plastic bottles, well-worn belts, and ragged sweaters were strewn across the landscape, most likely abandoned by desperate migrants walking for refuge rather than recreation.
Much like the diminutive Rufous hummingbird which travels over desert lands to pass the winter in Central America and the summer in Alaska, these people had sought the resources they needed to survive in a world that assumes those resources are equally distributed. If the great migrations of the animal world are said to be natural, then the movements of humanity can only be considered innate. But just as climate change is altering the journey of the wildebeest, the Monarch butterfly, and even the Rufous hummingbird, so too is it shaping our own migrations.
The World Bank estimates that by 2050 more than 140 million people across Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia will be displaced by climate change. While the reasons people migrate are complex and many, the economic and political realities of the world’s most vulnerable — and those who have contributed the least to climate change — are often entangled with environmental crises. Because of rising tides, the population of Papua New Guinea’s Carteret Islands are among the first to require relocation. Near the border of Kenya and Ethiopia, drought and diminishing water supplies have led to conflict between two of the world’s oldest tribes, the Turkana and the Dassanach. And in Guatemala, back-to-back hurricanes and failed crop seasons are pushing more people northward, away from the country’s rural highlands, where an already perilous route has only worsened.
The remains of missing migrants in south Texas are zipped into body bags with the hope they will be returned to family members. Photo by Alessandra Bergamin
In early 2018, while reporting a story for Harper’s Magazine, I watched as forensic anthropologists unearthed the bodies of missing migrants along the borderlands of southwest Texas. In an effort to circumvent checkpoints and an already emboldened Border Patrol, people had walked further into the desert, perishing in the arid, unsparing environment. That day, body bag after body bag was heaved from the earth, marked with either “John Doe” or “Jane Doe”, and each containing the “personal effects” — the prayer cards, photographs, rosary beads, and clothing — of the individual who had passed. Most of those unmarked graves predated the Trump Administration. After all, brutality at the U.S.-Mexico border — or, really, any global border— is neither unprecedented nor new. But the increase in policing, in surveillance, in punishment across this region — once termed a “Constitution-free zone” by the American Civil Liberties Union — has met an unlikely accomplice in our world’s changing climate.
Across the Sonoran desert, where climate change has already altered the phenology of native plants and impacted species such as the Desert Tortoise and Ferruginous Pygmy-Owl, scorching days, scarce water supplies, and cold nights are being exacerbated by the same climatic changes driving people from their homelands. So far this year, the remains of 43 immigrants have been found across Arizona’s borderlands while in the first five months of 2021, Texas has reported more border deaths than the entire year prior. The desert, of course, does not seek to harm, to cage, or to kill. The conditions that lead to deaths across our borderlands are, as always, human-borne. Like the walls that we once believed would keep out the rising seas, the border fence is no more than an illusion peddled by a warmonger in an effort to quash the exodus of those escaping a reality that will come for most of us.
Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Photo by Alessandra Bergamin
Looking south from the top of a small rise in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, the Sonoran Desert feels infinite, sprawling, possible. The warmth of daylight has waned and the desert sky has faded to a wispy gray. From where I stand to the blinking lights of Sonoyta — a Mexican border town — it is all arm and rib and spine silhouetted against the heavens. It is a beauty irreconcilable with the failures that have been cast across it. But the land is not a blank canvas upon which a nativist mentality can continually rein in the world. It has memory, it has life.
The sun yawns its last rays, turning the sky pink, then peach. You can no longer see the desert bones — organ pipe, cholla, saguaro — scattered across the dry earth. From a crooked rib we are born and by the darkness, the borders seem to disappear.
Read: “Undoing Border Imperialism” by Harsha Walia via Bookshop or Book Depository
Follow: Laiken Jordahl, borderland campaigner for the Center for Biodiversity, for updates on the U.S.-Mexico border wall.
Support: No More Deaths and Border Angels, humanitarian organizations providing aid (including desert water stations), search and rescue services, and legal support to migrants, refugees, and residents in Arizona and California borderlands. For each person who opens this month's newsletter, Defender will donate $1 to No More Deaths.
One of several water stations installed by humanitarian aid organizations across Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. The octopus-like cactus to the left is the park's namesake species. Photo by Alessandra Bergamin
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