More stories

  • in

    Idaho is going to kill 90% of the state’s wolves. That’s a tragedy – and bad policy | Kim Heacox

    Nothing embodies wildness like wolves, our four-legged shadow, the dogs that long ago refused our campfire and today prefer freedom and risk over the soft sofa and short leash. The dogs that howl more than bark, add music to the land, and – if left alone to work their magic – make entire ecosystems healthy and whole.Witness Yellowstone, a national park reborn in the 1990s when wolves, absent for 70 years, were reintroduced. Everything changed for the better. Elk stopped standing around like feedlot cattle. They learned to run like the wind again. Streamside willows and other riparian vegetation, previously trampled by the elk, returned as well, and with it, a chorus of birds. All because of wolves.Yet in the state of Idaho, new legislation signed days ago by Governor Brad Little will allow professional hunters and trappers to use helicopters, snowmobiles, ATVs, night vision equipment, snares and other means to kill roughly 90% of the state’s wolves, knocking them down from an estimated 1,500 to 150. A group of retired state, federal and tribal wildlife managers wrote to Little asking him to veto the wolf kill bill, saying statewide livestock losses to wolves have been under 1% for cattle and 3% for sheep. The group further noted that the overall elk population has actually increased since wolves were reintroduced into Idaho more than two decades ago. It made no difference.Why exterminate the wolves? To make the country safe for cattle and sheep; more productive for deer, elk, caribou and moose. To better fill hunters’ freezers with winter meat. To sell the pelts.But there’s something more. Something nobody talks about.“The wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination,” wrote the nature writer Barry Lopez in Of Wolves and Men. “It takes your stare and turns it back on you.”Maybe the wolf, freer than you or I will ever be, reminds us too much of our own self-domestication. That in a rush to create a stable environment, we’ve put ourselves in stables, and that paradox haunts people who see wolves as something to be feared, hated, destroyed.America’s demonization and slaughter of wolves has been going on for centuries – fed by myths, fairytales, Disney films and more – and continues today, full throttle from Wisconsin to Idaho to Alaska. This is our true forever war – the war on Nature, specifically on wildness and its sinister poster child. The wolf could be out there right now, sneaking under the barbed wire, stalking our profits.In November 2020, the Trump administration, as part of its rollback of environmental regulations, ordered the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to remove the gray wolf from the endangered species list. Western ranchers and farmers were pleased; wildlife advocates called the decision “willful ignorance”. EcoWatch reported that the de-listing occurred “despite the enduring precarity of wolf populations throughout much of the country. According to the most recent USFWS data, there are only 108 wolves in Washington state, 158 in Oregon, and 15 in California, while wolves are ‘functionally extinct’ in Nevada, Utah, and Colorado.”“Wisconsin’s brutal wolf hunt in late February generated outrage – and for good reason,” Jodi Habush Sinykin, an environmental attorney, and Donald Waller, an ecologist and conservation biologist, wrote in the Washington Post. “Throngs of unlicensed hunters joined those with licenses with packs of dogs, snowmobiles and GPS technology. The wolves stood no chance. This unprecedented hunt took place during the breeding season, killing pregnant females and disrupting family packs at a time critical to pup survival. A full accounting of the hunt’s biological toll is impossible, as the state declined to inspect carcasses.”Who are we, as a species? Are we global gardeners, or might we be good guardians as well?As for Alaska: if you want to see a wolf this summer, skip Denali national park, where the Toklat pack – Alaska’s most famous wolf pack, studied since the late 1930s – has been decimated by hunters and trappers who bait the animals just outside park boundaries. The legendary wildlife biologist Adolph Murie, who studied the Toklat pack for three years and teased apart more than 1,700 scat samples, came to a stunning conclusion: wolves that prey on caribou and Dall sheep primarily take the old or infirm. In effect, they create strong prey populations. Wolves are nature’s chisel and lathe.And wolf attacks on humans are so rare as to be statistically non-existent.Over the past half-century, wildlife around the world has dropped 68%. The human race, together with our livestock, now accounts for more than 95% of all mammal biomass on Earth. Everything else – from whales to wolves to lions, tigers and bears – adds up to only 4.2%. And that percentage continues to fall.Knowing that, who are we, as a species? Are we global gardeners who manage everything – plant and animal – as crops on a sustained yield basis, where wildlife is game and wolves are pests? Or might we be good guardians as well, caretakers who regard others beyond ourselves as capable of love; of celebrating their young and mourning their dead?While writing Of Wolves and Men in the late 1970s, Barry Lopez raised two hybrid red wolves, Prairie and River, an experience that he said gave him “a fundamental joy”. He concluded: “I learned from River that I was a human being and that he was a wolf and that we were different. I valued him as a creature, but he did not have to be what I imagined he was. It is with this freedom from dogma, I think, that the meaning of the words ‘the celebration of life’ becomes clear.”
    Kim Heacox is the author of many books, including The Only Kayak, a memoir, and Jimmy Bluefeather, a novel, both winners of the National Outdoor Book Award. He lives in Alaska More

  • in

    Political animal: California governor hopeful greets voters with 1,000lb bear

    The businessman John Cox lost California’s last governor’s race to Gavin Newsom by 24 points. Now he’s back, and this time, he’s got a bear.As Newsom faces a recall election, the Republican has launched a new campaign against him, attempting to portray the well-groomed governor as a “beauty” and himself as a “beast”. To drive home this message, he has employed some nonhuman staff, including an enormous bear – an apparent homage to the California flag.The bear appeared at a press event on Tuesday in Sacramento. The campaign had hyped the moment by promising the 1,000lb creature as a “special guest”. As part of his Meet the Beast Bus Tour, Cox appeared at a podium in front of a vehicle emblazoned with his face next to that of a ferocious-looking bear. In reality, however, the animal appeared fairly uninterested in politics, lumbering around a few feet behind Cox before flopping on to the ground, panting heavily. It did not offer an endorsement, unless not eating the candidate counts as support.A handler occasionally fed the bear while Cox – who uses Twitter as @BeastJohnCox – took questions from reporters, decrying Newsom as a “pretty boy politician”. He said the bear was there to help him get his message out, and also addressed the animal’s welfare: “We made sure that everything about this bear is taken care of in the utmost.”Cox is gunning for a recall election expected to take place in the autumn after Newsom opponents gathered enough signatures to force a vote. The beast is one of an unusual collectionof contenders, who also include Caitlyn Jenner, a former Facebook executive, and a billboard model.The bear is not the only animal Cox has pressed into service. In a campaign ad titled “Meet the BEAST”, a macaw repeatedly mocks Newsom as a “pretty boy” as it wolf-whistles. “We chose pretty over accomplished,” a voiceover warns Californians of Newsom, who grew up with dyslexia, launched a wine business, became the mayor of San Francisco, rose to lieutenant governor and won the 2018 governor’s race with nearly 62% of the vote – though he does have slicked-back hair. Images of the bird are interspersed with shots of a bear thundering through the forest, suggesting Cox would do the same in the halls of the capitol.At the press conference, however, the docile bear appeared far less likely to bring about significant legislative change. Cox noted that it had been raised in captivity, meaning its “mother didn’t have an opportunity to teach it how to fish”.“If it were out in the wild, it would die very quickly,” he said. More

  • in

    Can red wolves come back from the brink of extinction again?

    There are perhaps no more than 10 red wolves left in the wild, and they are all in just one place: North Carolina.
    It is an astonishing statistic for a species once hailed as undergoing the most successful reintroduction programme in the US, providing the blueprint for Yellowstone national park’s much-lauded grey wolf rewilding project.
    “The [red wolf] programme has almost entirely crumbled since I’ve been working here,” says Heather Clarkson, who works with the environmental charity Defenders of Wildlife. “It took about 20 years to get the programme to a strong place, that’s the really sad part. Because now it’s crashed. Disappointed barely scratches the surface.”
    In January, following legal action by conservation groups including Defenders of Wildlife, the district court for the eastern district of North Carolina ruled that the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), which had cancelled the red wolf reintroduction programme, must resume the release of wolves into the wild. This month the USFWS presented a new plan to the judge and he has given the groups that launched the lawsuit two weeks to lodge any objections.
    Start of the rewilding scheme
    The plan to boost the number of red wolves in the wild began in 1973, when the USFWS set out to capture as many of the remaining wolves as possible to establish a captive-breeding programme.
    In 1980, the red wolf was declared extinct in the wild. Seven years later the first reintroduction was made at the 60,000-hectare (152,000-acre) Alligator River national wildlife refuge in North Carolina. A breeding pair was released, and captive-bred pups were later fostered by the pack.
    At its peak, in 2011, there were as many as 130 red wolves back roaming the marshes, swamps and coastal prairies. Their recovery was the first time in the US that a large carnivore had been declared extinct in the wild and then successfully reintroduced. More

  • in

    California has environmental allies once again with Biden in the White House

    California has led the resistance to Donald Trump’s efforts to roll back environmental regulations in the past four years, with the state’s attorney general, Xavier Becerra, filing a whopping 122 lawsuits challenging Trump administration rules, most of them focused on climate and public health.Now, following Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s swearing in on Wednesday, the Golden state once again has allies in the White House when it comes to environmental protections.Faced with a host of challenges caused by the climate crisis, including growing water scarcity, intensifying heat waves and an ever more dire wildfire risk, environmental regulations are high on California’s policy priority list. The Biden administration shares many of the state’s concerns, and isn’t wasting any time in addressing the deregulation efforts of the previous administration.On his first day in office, Biden released a long, non-exclusive list of Trump policies that will be up for review as part of his new initiative to prioritize public health and climate change. The list is intended as a roadmap for US officials, especially those at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Interior where Trump made significant headway in gutting regulations, and shows how the president plans to use his ambitious environmental goals to bring the country back in line.Many of his outlined priorities neatly align with California’s goals and will ring familiar in the state. “The really ambitious goals that [Biden] has in his plan, a lot of them are modeled on California,” said Jared Blumenfeld, the state’s top environmental regulator, told Politico. “We really want to work with the administration to show what is possible. Whether it’s his goal of getting 2035 carbon-free energy or how we think about zero-emission vehicles or building standards or all the things we’ve done over the last 30 years, what we want to do is work with him to scale that.”Here’s a look at some of the key environmental issues for California in Biden’s plan.Vehicle standardsCalifornia has long set its own pace for climate policy, but the Trump administration sought to stomp out the state’s attempts, particularly when it comes to fuel-efficiency regulations. The EPA revoked the state’s Clean Air Act waiver, barring California from setting its own greenhouse gas standards on vehicles.Biden is expected to reverse that decision and his presidency will pave the way for California to have more control on car manufacturers, a crucial part of the state’s carbon-cutting plan. The California governor, Gavin Newsom, has proposed a plan to stop the sale of gasoline-powered passenger cars and trucks in the next 15 years, a move that, if approved, will push the industry to move faster toward electric.Oil and gas drillingUnder Trump, the Bureau of Land Management changed its evaluation process for leasing to the oil and gas industry to fast-track and expand development on public lands. At the end of 2019, the agency, which is housed under the US Department of the Interior, moved forward with a plan to open up roughly 1.2m acres across California’s central valley for oil and gas drilling. Environmentalists are hopeful the Biden administration will reset the rules and revoke leases that are already underway.California also challenged Trump’s repeal of regulations governing hydraulic fracturing – the process more commonly known as “fracking” that uses high-pressure injections of water, chemicals, and other substances, to extract natural gas housed in underground rock formations. The process has been tied to increases in seismic activity and can cause dangerous substances to leach into the water supply. Trump overturned regulations that required companies to detail plans to prevent leakage and data on chemicals used, and those repeals are now under review.Water warsTrump waded deep into California’s complex water wars with a plan to divert more of the scarce and valuable water resource from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to farmers in the central valley, who are among his strongest supporters in the state. Trump openly ridiculed California’s conservation policies, including protections for a fish called the delta smelt, which is nearing extinction from long periods of drought. California officials bristled at the intervention, arguing that it would harm delicate ecosystems and the endangered fish, and fishermen also filed a suit to challenge the rules. Biden’s review list includes the changed determination for the smelt, and California officials may have the final word.Protecting animalsThe Trump administration in 2019 revised the Endangered Species Act of 1973, adding new criteria for listing and removing animals that may be at risk. The changes increase the opportunity to remove some animals from protection or weigh commercial and corporate needs when considering how to designate critical habitat. Biden has put the rule change up for review, as well as some specific cases where changes in designation have already been made. The northern spotted owl, an inhabitant of the forests in the Pacific north-west, had 3.5m acres – more than a third of its habitat – slashed to give the timber industry more access. The monarch butterfly, which migrates across the US to Mexico each year, didn’t make the list last year even though less than 2,000 were counted in an annual tally taken along California’s coast this year. That marks a 99.9% drop since the 1980s. Protections for the sage-grouse, an imperiled bird known for their unique mating dances that lives in a geographically isolated area along the California-Nevada border, were eased by the Trump administration to pave the way to open up mining and drilling in the area. More

  • in

    'My neighbourhood is being destroyed to pacify his supporters': the race to complete Trump's wall

    At Sierra Vista Ranch in Arizona near the Mexican border, Troy McDaniel is warming up his helicopter. McDaniel, tall and slim in a tan jumpsuit, began taking flying lessons in the 80s, and has since logged 2,000 miles in the air. The helicopter, a cosy, two-seater Robinson R22 Alpha is considered a work vehicle and used to monitor the 640-acre ranch, but it’s clear he relishes any opportunity to fly. “We will have no fun at all,” he deadpans.McDaniel and his wife, Melissa Owen, bought their ranch and the 100-year-old adobe house that came with it in 2003. Years before, Owen began volunteering at the nearby Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, and fell in love with the beauty and natural diversity of the area, as well as the quiet of their tiny town. That all changed last July when construction vehicles and large machinery started “barrelling down the two-lane state road”, says Owen.Once work on President Donald Trump’s border wall began, construction was rapid. Sasabe, a sleepy border town, located over an hour from the nearest city of Tucson, was transformed into a construction site. “I don’t think you could find a single person in Sasabe who is in favour of this wall,” Owen says.The purpose of our helicopter trip today is to see the rushed construction work occurring just south of the couple’s house, as contractors race to finish sections of the border wall before Trump leaves office. Viewed from high above the Arizona desert, in the windless bubble of the cockpit, this new section of wall stretches across the landscape like a rust-coloured scar. McDaniel guides us smoothly over hills and drops into canyons, surveying the beauty of the landscape. Here, as on much of the border, the 30ft barrier does not go around; it goes over – stubbornly ploughing through cliffs, up steep mountainsides, and between once-connected communities.“That was already a pretty good barrier,” McDaniel says of the steep, unscalable cliff in front of us. The bulldozed path of Trump’s wall creeps up over the mountain’s west side, but on the other side of the cliff there is no wall, just a large gap. As with many areas on the border, the wall here is being built in a piecemeal fashion. According to the US Army Corps of Engineers, there are 37 ongoing projects, of which only three are set to be completed this month; others have completion dates as far away as June 2022.In August, at a virtual press conference with the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, Joe Biden told reporters that “there will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration”. The 37 existing construction sites, in various stages of completion, are likely to be shut down.Yet he will have to formulate a more complex policy than simple suspension. Many of the private contractors building the wall have clauses in their contracts that will trigger large payouts if the government simply stops construction. There are also ongoing legal cases brought by private landowners from whom the government seized land. The exact nature of these obligations may only be clear to Biden once he takes office.In the meantime, Trump has accelerated building in the wake of the election, with crews working flat out, late into the night. Throughout December and into January, mountainsides were exploded with dynamite and large portions of desert bulldozed, to make way for a wall that may not be finished in time.For the past four years, I have been living in New Mexico, travelling in the borderlands and documenting the ongoing impact of the wall on communities and the environment.“They started working nights six weeks ago,” says photographer John Kurc, who has been documenting construction in the remote Guadalupe Canyon in Arizona since October last year. “It’s been nonstop ever since.”This is not about protecting America. It’s about protecting President Trump’s own interestsVerlon Jose, former vice-chair of the Native American Tohono O’odham Nation, tells me he has seen the wall plough through his ancestral homeland. “We are caretakers of this land. We are responsible for these things. Has anyone ever asked for permission from the local folks to do the construction? This is about President Donald Trump. It’s not about protecting America. It’s about protecting his own interests.”When construction stops, there will be large gaps in the new wall. In some places it will join up with older barriers that the Trump administration deemed inadequate; in others it will finish abruptly. “They work as fast as they can to build walls that will just end,” says McDaniel, as his helicopter circles back toward their property over saguaro-studded hillsides just north of the Mexican border. We drop altitude and approach the landing strip – a patch of dirt just off the road – whipping up a small dust storm as we touch the ground.***After four years of daily scandals, and the shocking scenes in Washington DC last week, it’s easy to forget that Donald Trump was elected in 2016 with one signature policy: to build a wall. That was the call echoed at his rallies, the embodiment of Trump’s hardline approach to immigration and his purported “America First” ideology. Trump claimed the wall would address an invasion of undesirable migrants, “bad hombres”, a nationalist rhetoric that resonated with his base. During his first week in office, Trump signed an executive order that included a policy for “the immediate construction of a physical wall on the southern border”.Construction began in 2019, mostly replacing existing fences, vehicle barriers, and other border structures, as well as unwalled sections of the border. The bollard wall, Trump’s barrier of choice, consists of a series of vertical steel posts set in concrete, with small gaps in between. While in some places it reaches a height of 30ft, it is less of a wall and more of an imposing metal fence.According to Kenneth Madsen, an associate professor in the department of geography at Ohio State University, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has waived 84 laws and statutes – many enacted specifically to protect the nation’s most treasured cultural and ecological sites – in order to expedite construction.Dozens of environmental and public health laws were brushed aside to build walls through parks and wildlife areas, including Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge and Coronado National Memorial. “It has brought devastation to the environment and the communities of the borderlands,” says Scott Nicol, author of a 2018 report for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) about the impact of the wall, and a resident of the Rio Grande valley in Texas.Nicol believes the wall’s charted course has been determined by ease rather than efficacy. Construction has been much busier on federally owned land, not because that’s where there are likely to be more border crossings, but because building on private property is a lengthy process. “Texas has the most border but the least wall mileage to date because the Texas borderlands are mostly in private hands,” says Nicol.According to the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency, 452 miles of border wall have been constructed under the Trump administration, at an estimated cost of $15bn, one of the most expensive infrastructure projects in US history. In September 2019, Trump promised to build between 450 and 500 miles of wall, so he has reached this goal – even if the vast majority of it is replacing existing barriers.On Tuesday, days after the violent insurrection at the White House, Trump made a final visit to the border in Texas to celebrate reaching this target. During a short speech, he skirted any responsibility for the capital siege, and instead remarked on his successes in halting illegal immigration and securing the border.“When I took office, we inherited a broken, dysfunctional and open border,” he said. “We reformed our immigration system and achieved the most secure southern border in US history.”Has it had any impact on immigration? According to attorney David Donatti, from the ACLU of Texas, the answer is no. In recent months, according to CBP data, the number of people trying to cross has increased. “The wall as a whole is unlikely to have any discernible impact,” says Donatti. “In a race to construct, the administration is building where it’s easier as opposed to where most people cross.”And while the wall may be an impressive barrier, it is far from impregnable. Just after Christmas, Nicol visited a new section in the Rio Grande valley between Texas and Mexico and found numerous ladders scattered on the ground. “You can always go over,” he says.You can also go through. John Kurc started using drones to photograph and video the construction of the wall. The last time he was in the border town of Sonoyta, Mexico, he saw two young men with “yellow, handheld angle grinders” cutting through the wall while a lookout with a radio watched for Border Patrol. “They would put the section back with a special bonding agent and then use paint that oxidizes the same colour as the bollards,” says Kurc. “Then they just go in and out.”Gil Kerlikowske, the Obama-appointed former commissioner of the CBP, says there is not a one-size-fits-all solution for border security: “There are places where the environment is difficult and so remote you don’t need any barrier at all.” In these areas, surveillance and detection technologies would be more useful and cost-efficient, he argues. “It is such an unbelievably complex problem. When someone proposes a simple solution to a complex problem, you can be sure that’s the wrong solution.”***That’s not to say Trump’s wall has had no impact. Back on the ranch, cameras set up by Melissa Owen have captured passing wildlife – mountain lions and javelina, pig-like mammals, the skulls of which can also be found around the house. “There were no environmental surveys, no groundwater surveys, none of that,” says Owen. Once contractors arrived in town last summer, they began “pumping enormous amounts of water out of the ground” in order to mix concrete for the border wall’s foundations.Residents in Sasabe began complaining of reduced water pressure. At San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, groundwater pumping for concrete began draining a crucial wetland and endangering four threatened species of fish. Similar concerns were raised when the Quitobaquito Springs at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, home to the endangered desert pupfish began to dry out as contractors pumped water from the ancient aquifer that fed it. “That’s our water – that’s what we depend on,” says Owen, looking out towards arid ranchland that is suffering from a long drought.We had three different jaguars in 2016 – we haven’t seen signs of any since construction beganMyles Traphagen, borderlands coordinator of the Wildlands Network conservation group, has called Trump’s wall the “single most damaging project” to the ecology of the mountainous Sky Islands region and the animals that call it home – especially the jaguar, which has made a remarkable comeback in the US after being hunted to extinction by the late 1960s.“We had three different jaguars in 2015 and 2016, which hadn’t happened since the 1930s,” says Chris Bugbee, a senior researcher at Conservation CATalyst, an organisation dedicated to the world’s 38 wild cat species.“If this border wall hadn’t started, we expected a female to eventually arrive and have breeding jaguars again,” adds Aletris Neils, Conservation CATalyst’s executive director.The jaguar is one of numerous species – such as the endangered ocelot and the Mexican gray wolf – found in a region that extends from south-western New Mexico into western Arizona and far down into Mexico. If current border wall construction is completed, says Traphagen, “93% of jaguar habitat will have been walled off”.Only males have been seen in the US since the 60s. They have huge ranges and some travel north where there is plenty to eat, before returning south to find a mate. There is currently one jaguar (whose location cannot be shared due to poaching concerns) on the US side, cut off from Mexico because of the wall.Bugbee has spent years tracking the famous “El Jefe” jaguar, one of the few sighted recently in the US, with his dog Mayke. “We haven’t seen signs of any jaguars since construction began,” he tells me when we meet at the Coronado National Forest, where he previously tracked the cat. A mile or so away, construction workers have been blasting and bulldozing over the steep Montezuma Pass, where another jaguar, known as Yo’oko, once roamed.Owen and McDaniel are far from open-border liberals. The entrance to their ranch has a sign that reads: “Border Patrol always welcome”. Owen’s two horses, Rocker and Kiowa, are retired Border Patrol horses – “the best”, she says of their temperament. In her early years on the ranch, Owen says, undocumented migrants and smugglers were coming across the border in large numbers. She would frequently encounter migrants on her property. One morning someone broke into her house. “I don’t want it to go back to then,” she says, but adds that the economic downturn of 2008 has slowed immigration considerably. “No one wants a secure border more than I,” she says. “But a 30ft-tall, poorly constructed barrier is not the answer. It’s a campaign gimmick. My neighbourhood is being destroyed because a megalomaniac wants to pacify his supporters.”During his election campaign, Trump claimed that Mexico would pay for the wall. Once he was in office, Congress provided some $1.37bn a year for construction, but each year the president demanded more, ultimately declaring a national emergency in order to divert military funds to pay for the wall. It’s estimated by the US Army Corps of Engineers that Biden will save about $2.6bn if he stops construction on the border wall in his first day in office.Trump, and some within CBP, have maintained that the wall is a crucial means of halting smuggling. “Illegal drug and human smuggling activities have decreased in those areas where barriers are deployed. Illegal cross-border traffic has also shifted to areas with inferior legacy barriers or no barriers at all,” said a DHS spokesperson in a recent email to the Guardian.Kerlikowske, who also served as director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy between 2009 and 2014, admits that drug trafficking is a problem. However, he points out that the vast majority of illicit substances, such as fentanyl, cocaine and heroin, are smuggled through legal ports of entry where elaborate walls and security systems already exist. “During my time as commissioner, I met with hundreds of border patrol agents. No one in the border patrol says we really need a wall,” he says.As you keep building, you keep pushing people into more remote and dangerous areasDonatti from the ACLU of Texas says there is little evidence that walls deter either drugs or undocumented immigration, which is being driven primarily by so-called push factors (war, poverty, desperation) in other countries. “The US federal government has tried to study this several times and has never found support that a border wall stops the flow of undocumented immigration,” he says.One thing border walls are effective at is increasing the number of migrant deaths. As the US has walled off more of its border, the risk to migrants crossing illegally has increased. Since 1998, around 7,000 people have died along the US-Mexico border, the majority in Arizona’s rural deserts and, in recent years, the Rio Grande valley. “As you keep building, you keep pushing people into more remote and dangerous areas,” says Donatti.“It’s a humanitarian disaster,” agrees Eddie Canales, of the South Texas Human Rights Center, who has spent the past decade operating hundreds of water stations in the Rio Grande valley in Texas to save migrants. “We do what we can,” Canales told the Guardian in early 2020. “But people keep dying.” The wall funnels people into more dangerous crossing points, where physical barriers do not yet exist. Summer temperatures in the Arizona desert are brutal; 2020 became the deadliest year since 2010 for those who crossed the border there.***“It’s hard for people to understand what this means to us, as O’odham and Native Americans. What it means to us as the original indigenous peoples of this land,” says Verlon Jose.When I visit Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a pristine tract of Sonoran desert, earlier this year, contractors are busy dynamiting Monument Hill, a sacred mountain and burial site for the Tohono O’odham people. Uprooted saguaros, the huge, tree-like cacti sacred to the tribe, dot the path of the wall. “It was like, ‘Tell me where your grandparents live, and I’ll put a wall through there,’” says Jose.“In certain areas, we won’t be able to continue our traditional practices,” says Jose, whose tribal members span both sides of the border. “We spent billions of dollars on the wall. Why don’t we invest it in our border cities and towns?”According to Norma Herrera, a border resident from McAllen, Texas, the wall’s $15bn price tag is an insult to one of the county’s most impoverished regions, where critical infrastructure is often lacking. This issue was laid bare during the pandemic, when places such as the Rio Grande valley in Texas, a centre of border wall construction, was devastated by Covid. Hospitals reached capacity, deaths mounted, and all the while, the wall continued to rise.“We had more deaths in the region than the entire state,” says Herrera, community organiser at the Rio Grande Valley Equal Voice Network, which advocates for marginalised groups in the area. “To see the wall going up, to see resources used on useless steel and concrete, it’s senseless.”According to Donatti, whose parents originally emigrated from Argentina to the US, the wall should be seen in the context of broader exclusion policies – such as the Remain in Mexico programme enacted by Trump, under which asylum seekers arriving at ports of entry are returned to Mexico to wait for their US immigration proceedings. “It’s this idea that there is a fundamental Americanness, and either you’re inside, or you’re out,” he says.That idea was evident in late 2019, when I visited a shelter in Tijuana. The two-storey building in the neighbourhood of Benito Juárez was packed with families, with mattresses sprawled over every inch of open floor. At that time in Tijuana, nearly 10,000 asylum seekers were waiting for their immigration hearings after being turned back at the border and sent to one of the most dangerous cities in Mexico.Many are hopeful that under the Biden administration the approach to migrants and the borderlands will change; that policies such as Remain in Mexico will be undone; and even that sections of the border wall will be removed. A week after inauguration day, a coalition of groups across the borderlands will begin a monitoring project in order to assess the damage, and to see what needs to be done. Some hope certain sections can be removed in order to reconnect critical habitats and communities.Verlon Jose of the Tohono O’odham has a “sliver of hope” that some of the walls will come down. “I believe Biden will not build another inch,” he adds.Others are not so sure. “Optimism? No,” says Donatti of the prospect of the wall coming down. “He hasn’t committed to as much. But there is a strong coalition along the border that will be fighting for it.”John Kurc, who has spent thousands of hours watching the destruction of Guadalupe Canyon, sees the scale of the challenge. “The Trump administration has caused so much damage to these environments,” he says, peering through a set of binoculars as a crane hoists up an isolated section of wall, with huge gaps on each side. “We have a lot of work to do.” More

  • in

    The animal species imperiled by Trump's war on the environment

    Climate countdown

    The animal species imperiled by Trump’s war on the environment

    A humpback whale breaches in the Pacific Ocean. The Trump administration has withdrawn regulations aimed at preventing humpbacks and other creatures from being entangled in nets off the west coast.
    Photograph: Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty Images

    Despite a grim outlook for American biodiversity, Trump has lifted protections for at-risk animals as part of his aggressive rollback of environmental rules
    75 ways Trump made America dirtier and the planet warmer
    by Paola Rosa-Aquino

    Main image:
    A humpback whale breaches in the Pacific Ocean. The Trump administration has withdrawn regulations aimed at preventing humpbacks and other creatures from being entangled in nets off the west coast.
    Photograph: Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty Images

    The prognosis for biodiversity on Earth is grim. According to a sobering report released by the United Nations last year, 1 million land and marine species across the globe are threatened with extinction – more than at any other period in human history.
    According to a recent study, about 20% of the countries in the world risk ecosystem collapse due to the destruction of wildlife and their habitats, a result of human activity in tandem with a warming climate. The United States is the ninth most at risk.
    Despite this desperate outlook, the Trump administration, as part of its aggressive rollback of regulations designed to protect the environment, has lifted protections for America’s animals. It has shrunk several national monuments and opened up a huge amount of federal land for oil and gas drilling, coalmining and other industrial activities – actions that conservationists warn could imperil species whose numbers are already dwindling and that are core to the health of our ecosystems.
    Here we look at some of the animals most at risk from Trump’s rollbacks.
    Wolverines More

  • in

    'Selling off the future’: Trump allows fishing in marine monument

    Administration opening areas off New England coast up to commercial fishing, a move experts say will hurt the environment Commercial fishing boats docked in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Photograph: Wayne Parry/AP Donald Trump is easing protections for a large marine monument off the coast of New England, opening it to commercial fishing. But ocean experts […] More