2015 Conference

Full Presentation Panel

The panel examines the way perceptions create environmental reality on the U.S.-Mexico border.  The conceptual transformation of landscape into international border - from ecological to political - establishes in the minds of distant politicians and, ultimately, local residents, a set of associations that in turn determine the function of territory and the activities that can occur there.  Habitat becomes a security zone, and the imperatives of enforcement agencies supercede those of land managers and nature enthusiasts, and even the environmental laws that formerly protected the borderlands are suspended to make way for border walls and patrol roads.  This transformation in perception and reality alienates residents of border communities, and becomes an obstacle that prevents them from identifying with and embracing native habitat.  The ideology made physically manifest comes to shape the understanding of space, even of those who inhabit the borderlands.  Efforts to resist this process of degradation of both border communities and border natural area requires a radical re-mapping. 

This panel brings together educators/activists who live in the border communities of McAllen, Texas and San Diego/Tijuana--both ends of the international boundary. Working from direct experience of the ways border enforcement is reshaping landscapes and cultural practices, each panelist considers how the border’s representation in the public consciousness contributes to its environmental degradation, addressing first the border-wide “big picture,” and then narrowing the focus to local manifestations. Through the lenses of national politics, local community interaction (and avoidance), and direct personal exploration, panelists will discuss the different processes whereby perceptions of the border simultaneously respond to and contribute to the hardening of the boundary line and the establishment of a security zone, and lead ultimately to a transformation—a degradation of the borderlands in terms of both its physical integrity and in our consciousness. 

Waiving Environmental Laws in the Border Zone:  The Privileging of Enforcement over Ecosystems

Scott Nicol

In public and political discourse the U.S – Mexico border has become inextricably bound to fears of narcotics trafficking, human smuggling, and terrorism.  Facts that do not correlate with those fears are routinely brushed aside, and legislation has been passed that claims to impose “operational control” upon a zone that extends 100 miles into the U.S. interior.  Military tactics, including border walls and patrol roads, drones and forward operating bases, fixed checkpoints and the relaxing of rules governing search-and-seizure, have been applied to this border zone.  Proponents of this paramilitary posture view environmental protections as impeding the Border Patrol’s efforts.  This notion led to section 102 of the REAL ID Act of 2005, which granted the Secretary of Homeland Security the unprecedented power to waive any local, state, or federal law that might slow construction of border walls and patrol roads.  Thirty-seven federal laws have been waived.  The majority of these laws protected the environment, evidence that waivers arose from the belief that environmental laws and immigration enforcement are incompatible, and in the event (or expectation) of such conflict enforcement is to be given precedence. 

Bringing together interviews with federal land managers and internal documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, public statements and the author’s first person field observations, this presentation traces the attitudes that have led to the suspension of environmental laws along the U.S. – Mexico border and the resulting on-the-ground impacts.  It also includes discussion of ongoing Congressional efforts to expand the waiver to cover all federal lands within 100 miles of both the U.S. – Mexico and U.S. – Canada borders, and the broader precedent that is set by the waiving of environmental laws.  Finally it will explore the efforts of environmental organizations and border residents to block these efforts and reverse the narrative that is driving them.

The Extinction of Experience in a Border Security Zone

Stefanie Herweck

The Lower Rio Grande Valley of south Texas is an increasingly urban area, home to eight cities and many smaller communities with a total population of 1.3 million.  Because the native forests and brushlands were cleared widely for agriculture before the 1980s, and the area has undergone a period of rampant urbanization since the 1990s, only a few forested wildlands remain, mainly along the Rio Grande adjacent to the international boundary. These remnant forests and brushlands in the parks and wildlife refuges represent the only opportunity Valley residents have to learn about and connect with their natural heritage.  However, the ramp-up in border security is transforming these areas into heavily- patrolled interdiction zones, and residents are confronted by images on TV of circling helicopters, armored personnel carriers, and patrol units dressed in camo and flak jackets prowling the brushlands.  As a consequence, local residents increasingly see natural areas along the border as dangerous and avoid spending time there.  Following Robert Michael Pyle and his conception of the extinction of experience, I argue that desperately needed conservation begins with human-nature interactions at a local level, and that this perception of danger and avoidance on the part of local border residents is creating a feedback loop, with border security activities leading to increased fear and alienation from nature on the part of local residents, whose failure to advocate for the preservation of local native habitat and wilderness recreation results in yet more buildup of border security operations and infrastructure, which in turn damages habitat and threatens species. I investigate how this destructive pattern is playing out in the Rio Grande Valley and what is being done to resist it by analyzing the available local data about crime, safety, park visitation, and recreation and by interviewing land managers and environmental educators.

Paths and Edges:  Global South Itineraries and the Border Wall in Tijuana-San Diego

Jill Marie Holslin

Twenty years of walls on the US-Mexico border have given us plenty of evidence: walls divide and disrupt human communities, fragment wildlife corridors, cut off migration paths and block water flows. Walls produce irreversible effects on the landscape.  Thus the physical infrastructure that marks the international boundary between the US and Mexico is in fact productive. Infrastructure, while at first marking an arbitrary line in the sand, in turn produces its own reality by virtue of its own permanence. Since the first stone cairns were placed on the international boundary in 1851, markers have created an illusion that the national boundary has always been there merely waiting to be discovered, as though it were a feature the natural environment. Maps also function as boundary markers in this sense. Topographic maps produced by BLM, USGS and INEGI in Mexico typically show only one side of the national border and leave the other side blank, inadvertently reifying national boundaries. Yet, residents of the borderlands experience both sides of the international boundary as a single, lived in space. As urbanist Kevin Lynch argued, residents employ cognitive mapping to make sense of their own reality, using paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks to organize and represent their own daily itineraries. In this paper, I use Kevin Lynch's heuristic of cognitive mapping to theorize my own work as a writer and border artist, mapping the border wall between San Diego and Baja California.  Hiking, photography, ethnographic research, comparative use of Google maps are forms of visual and cognitive mapping that I use to re-envision and create new ways of seeing the region.

Ruth Wallen

Staying in Place: appropriate boundaries in the San Diego/Tijuana region

Whereas twenty years ago the San Diego/Tijuana border was marked by an easily scalable fence, now bright lights and a triple layered wall extend far out into the sea.  The border fence is echoed in increasing numbers of gated-communities throughout San Diego County and along the Baja California coastline.  Moreover the proliferation of these communities is indicative of an opposing phenomena--ever expanding sprawling real estate development. This performative lecture will advocate for the creation of bounded relationships to place. Drawing from artworks that combine image, text and audio, I will argue that rigid boundaries that are ineffective against the spread of pollutants but perpetuate economic inequity and injustice and residential construction of ever larger single family homes are both ecologically problematic.  Much of my presentation will focus on the example of North City West, an area within the San Diego city limits that has gone from rural to suburban during the last thirty years.  This presentation will offer a provocation, reframing the question of “confronting” borders to one of creating bounded relationships to place, within which integrated communities can develop and thrive.