Wall Worries

Call it an expression of public will, or just political pandering;
either way, you can’t call the new wall on our southern border
benign.

Cutting a daunting swath from California to Texas, it has degraded
waterways, chopped up private property and wreaked environmental havoc
by severing wildlife-migration routes and pummeling habitat.

Now, three years after the construction began, and with nearly 700
miles of the fence and barriers complete, Rep. Raul Grijalva is pushing
for a fresh—some would say first—look at the environmental
fallout from the Secure Fence Act of 2006.

On July 23, Arizona’s District 7 congressman sent a letter to
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano urging her department to
conduct a full analysis of those impacts, and consider steps toward
repair. The letter was co-signed by 42 of his congressional
colleagues.

Grijalva says the time was right, given that Napolitano hails from
the borderland—she was Arizona’s governor before succeeding Bush
appointee Michael Chertoff last year as head of Homeland
Security—and that the fear factor behind the fence has waned a
bit.

“I sensed an opening,” he says. “Before, when we’d bring this up,
we’d hear, ‘Oh, you’re promoting terrorism,’ from Chertoff and his
minions. Anytime we’d even mention the idea of mitigation, study,
monitoring, evaluation, we’d hear ‘Aah, you’re helping harbor
terrorists.’ They’d wave that bloody rag every time.

“There’s a different attitude now,” Grijalva says, “a professional
attitude, not an ideological attitude. I know that Janet (Napolitano)
wants to do the job to keep the border secure. But she’s dealing with
it in a professional manner and a policy manner, which, to me, creates
an opening.”

Homeland Security spokeswoman Sara Kuban declined to comment on
Grijalva’s letter, except to say that Napolitano would be in contact
with the various members of Congress.

Meanwhile, Grijalva’s request has drawn plaudits from
environmentalists, including Dan Millis, coordinator of the Arizona
Sierra Club’s Borderlands Campaign. “To the Sierra Club, this is a very
important and very urgent issue,” Millis says, “and I definitely think
the timing is good. I don’t think a serious look at this has been taken
yet, at least by the higher-ups in the Department of Homeland
Security.”

The letter to Napolitano expressed concerns “regarding mounting
environmental and societal impacts related to border security
infrastructure and operations.” It also requests that the secretary
work with other agencies “to create and fund a robust border-wide
environmental monitoring program and to provide sufficient mitigation
funding for damage caused by border security infrastructure and
enforcement activities.”

That this letter was dispatched with any optimism at all reflects
the sea change since Chertoff’s time. In his drive to complete the
fence, he repeatedly brandished his congressionally granted authority
to waive bedrock environmental laws—such as the Endangered
Species Act and National Environmental Policy Act—to keep fence
construction humming. In many cases, he used the waiver as a threat,
browbeating land-management agencies into abdicating their
resource-protection responsibilities.

Southern Arizona’s San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area
could be a poster child for that abuse. The U.S. Bureau of Land
Management cobbled together a half-assed environmental assessment of
the fence’s potential impacts—concluding that the Normandy-style
barriers “won’t impede animals or people, because they have enough
distance from the ground up,” according to a BLM spokeswoman. “They’re
really just to keep vehicles from driving through the riverbed.”

But in hindsight, such kowtowing has “damaged” those agencies, says
Stephen Mumme, a border environmental management expert at Colorado
State University. “It has led to the impression along the border that
they’re not using sound science—that they were being heavily
influenced by political considerations in the Bush administration and
continuing even now.

“If anyone, they were responsible for saying—even if it was
politically unpopular—that they needed to have a better sense of
what’s going on,” Mumme says. “But in the last administration, I think
it was politically dangerous for managers to say that.”

Of course, Chertoff’s frantic pace didn’t occur in a vacuum. Even as
the project rolled forward, there was a steady drumbeat from
anti-immigrant right-wingers such as Glenn Spencer and his
Arizona-based American Border Patrol. Spencer’s group routinely flies
along the border to monitor the fence’s progress, and loudly complains
when there is a slowdown.

That pressure hasn’t entirely vanished; Grijalva’s efforts come as
the Senate is considering a measure to expand “pedestrian” fencing to
the entire 700 miles of barrier mandated by the Secure Fence Act. This
high steel fencing is meant to block people from walking across the
line, and is far more extreme—and damaging to wildlife—than
the vehicle barriers now lining much of the border.

But there’s been scant attention paid to the enormous social costs
inflicted by this security juggernaut. Consider the impacts endured by
Texas families who have seen their property—much of it passed
down through generations—sliced in half by the wall. More fallout
has been felt in Nogales, Ariz., where downtown merchants last year
were engulfed by floodwaters that had backed up behind a concrete
barrier placed in storm drains by the U.S. Border Patrol.

Then there’s the fiscal factor: Grijalva cites Congressional Budget
Office estimates that the border barrier has cost taxpayers an average
of $3 million per mile to build. Another 15 percent will be added for
continuing maintenance.

But the cost to the environment is incalculable. According to
biologists, damage to habitat and wildlife migration is impacting
species ranging from tiny lizards to mule deer, bighorn sheep, coatis,
bears and jaguars. That’s exacerbated by damage to watersheds and
riparian areas. Again, the San Pedro River could be a perfect example.
Two years ago, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers constructed a
“temporary” vehicle barrier across the river near Sierra Vista, south
of Tucson. The placement followed roughly two miles of fence already
existing within the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area.

Groups such as the Sierra Club fought that fence, and lost.
Meanwhile, the clock is still ticking, says Millis. He notes that the
Department of Homeland Security recently transferred $50 million to the
Department of Interior to help soften impacts upon endangered species
along the San Pedro and elsewhere.

“But that’s all off-site mitigation, basically trying to restore
potential habitat for endangered species in the same quantities that it
was lost along the border. It doesn’t really address the big problems
that are happening on the line every day, and that we have tons of
pictures of—wildlife blocked by the wall, huge erosion problems
in wilderness areas, etc., etc.

“Now there’s a huge priority on getting the science in order,”
Millis says. “This whole thing was really just shoved down our
throats.”

This article appears in Aug 13-19, 2009.