The Wall Trumps All

For nearly three decades the Malpai Borderlands Group, a coalition of ranchers along the southern border of Arizona and New Mexico, has worked to protect and preserve 800,000 acres of range land.  They have worked with environmental groups and various government agencies to preserve the open land and protect the environment.

Ranchers have worked to restore the watershed through a series of small rock structures that slow water runoff during heavy rains, recharging groundwater. A cattle-pond enhancement project aided the threatened Chiricahua leopard frog. The group has received money from the Natural Resources Conservation Service, a federal agency, to enhance water sources for both the ranchers’ cattle and the wildlife that cross through their land, and their work has helped inform regional fire-management decisions. Approximately 86,000 acres of land have been protected through conservation easements, maintaining ecological connectivity in a region that both ranchers and environmentalists feared would be fragmented by subdivisions.

Since some of this vast acreage runs along the US-Mexico border, the group has worked successfully with the Border Patrol to support border security while maintaining environmental responsibility. 

The group takes border security seriously; in the early 2000s, some of its ranches were situated along drug-trafficking routes. The ranchers helped the Border Patrol place surveillance towers on their property, and over the years, border crossings fell significantly in their sector.

That was before Trump and his border wall.  Now the Trump Administration is building the wall directly through some of the most environmentally sensitive areas of the borderlands.

In January... the 30-foot bollard wall was being erected...  carving up wildlife habitat, cutting off water sources for animals like jaguars, javelina and mountain lions, and cordoning off open space between the United States and Mexico...

Despite its history of close cooperation with the Border Patrol and what the group believed was an understanding with the government, the border wall is going up.

...Bill McDonald, the former executive director and founding member of the Malpai Borderlands Group...A fifth-generation cattle rancher, he won the prestigious MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 1998 for his work in land conservation.

When asked about his thoughts on the border wall, he told me he feels betrayed by the government. The group approached Border Patrol much the same way it pursued relationships with diverse regional stakeholders — through building trust. Until last March, McDonald thought they were all on the same page.

There is no "same page" with Trump, the environment will always suffer and people of goodwill will always be betrayed. 



For more background on the Malpai Borderlands Group.