The Wall and the Wilderness

0:02Speaker 1:It's a Saturday morning in late June. The desert a few thousand feet below will hit temperatures.

0:16Speaker 2:Above 110 Fahrenheit by noon tomorrow.

0:30Speaker 3:And everything from the rattlesnakes to the horses in this valley will seek shelter from the punishing sunlight. With some friends, and scrambling up a pile of boulders, each one the size of a truck, to try to reach a valley that's surrounded on three sides by walls, formed from these giant.

0:46Speaker 2:Balls of granite.

0:49Speaker 3:The rocks are like sandpaper. With a bit of courage and good shoes, you can smear your foot against a vertical rock and gain enough traction to push your body weight up. Then you find a little lip, Push your fingers into it until they hurt and pull. Then you smell your foot again, tell yourself to trust it, and keep repeating until you're where you want to go. Below us on the valley floor, the Hakumba wilderness stretches out into the heat mirage that blends with the horizon. From here it looks barren, rocky and hostile. I've spent a lot of time in those canyons. I know where there are lush palm oases, where the majestic peninsula bighorn sheep have their lambs, and where we have searched for missing migrants and their remains, and later built the little crosses that dot the canyons now as a way of trying to show kindness for the friends we never got to make.

1:48Speaker 3:Some have names, many to say desconocido, for the people whose bodies were too quickly returned to nature for them ever to be identified. The desert wastes little. and everything that dies out here quickly becomes part of the things that live out here. That's how life thrives in a place where many assume it couldn't. After more than a decade scrambling around these rocks, and getting choir spines in places you'd never think they'd end up, I love the desert.

2:14Speaker 3:It's magical to me, and the vastness and the sense of smallness keep bringing me out here, just like they take me out into the ocean west of here where I like to free dive. These vast, wild places where I don't belong, challenge me to watch the plants and animals that do belong here and learn from them so I can feel a little safer in their environment and share their home. Americans haven't always loved deserts. These days we live in an era of desert chic. America's great desert cities and towns, Tucson, Las Vegas, Joshua Tree, Martha and Santa Fe to name just a few, offer Instagrammable vistas and the opportunity for folks who don't know which end of a cow the milk comes out from to wear cowboy boots and bolo ties. But it wasn't always this way. Europeans first entered California from the desert side, a little over the horizon to the east of where I'm standing, where Melchior Diaz crossed to Colorado, quote, where he found the country very sandy, windy, and filled with large and high sandbanks. Shortly thereafter, Diaz would throw his lance at a greyhound that was chasing his sheep, end

3:21Speaker 3:up impaled on the rear of his lance in his groin, and sustained injuries that would cause his death three weeks later. His progress from outside Yuma to what is now Baja California has long been something of a source of fascination for me. The location of his grave isn't well known, but a lot of research I've read in very old newspapers leads me to believe it's likely in the hills above the dry lagoon sort of west of San Felipe. I've crossed that lagoon on a bike and experienced the vastness of the flats and the frustration of slogging slowly through thick sand in hot temperatures. Unfortunately, Diaz's expedition some 500 years ago was part of the colonization of this region.

4:01Speaker 3:And not all the colonizers at that time or later managed to fatally stab themselves in the dick. More's a pity. Diaz's expedition was the first of many, and it began 500 years of colonialism and genocide here. That colonial thrust continued into the 19th century, when this part of Alta California became part of the United States. and a line was drawn across this beautiful desert with scant regard for the mountains, oases and the bighorn sheep, who have been here far longer than the border. For a long time it was just a line. It didn't change much in these valleys. People still crossed to go to church or see their families. A few years ago my friends and I found some cattle that had wandered over, and the wild sheep crossed around here every year to survive the heat of the summer in Baja and to have their lambs on the north side of what is now the border.

4:51Speaker 3:Over time, some folks staked mining claims out here, where I'm standing wasn't that far from a silica deposit, and I always find cool quartz crystals out there. But they didn't really manage to develop those claims in a way that fundamentally changed these valleys. To the south of the border in Mexico, there are huge windmills, and for most of the valley, until very recently, they were really the only signs that colonialism and capitalism had made it this far.

5:16Speaker 3:I've spent a lot of time in this area. I was camping out here when the third precinct burned in Minneapolis. I came out to the desert again six years later after CBP killed Alex Preti the day I left Minneapolis. Just a few miles away, my friends and I fared and sheltered and cared for thousands of people when the Biden administration corralled them in the desert without supplying food, water or shelter. I found peace here and I've seen terrible pain and suffering here. And throughout that time, I've developed a special reverence for the desert and the challenges and the opportunities it gives me. Our desert here is perhaps not the desert you think of when you think of desert. There aren't saguaros here. In the popular perception of the desert, they dominate the landscape, as they do over the western horizon in the parts of the Sonoran Desert that include the magnificent Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and the Torna Autumns Land. Here we have cholla, osatillo and arrowweed.

6:14Speaker 2:And rocks.

6:15Speaker 3:Tons of rocks. European Americans have long associated the desert with nothingness. The desert, to the unfamiliar, seems deserted. It plays a role in the Bible and the Quran for that matter. And it's not cast as a thriving ecosystem where the beautiful ability of life to adapt and overcome is on full display. Perhaps that's why it took longer for the United States to protect its desert landscapes. It wasn't until the 20th century, and often the latter half of it, that they gain the protections afforded by the national parks and wilderness designations that some parts of the desert now hold. Like other capital W wilderness areas in the United States, the Hukumba wilderness is covered by the provisions of the 1964 Wilderness Act. This act, and the discussion around it, forms many of your perceptions of wilderness and what it means. If I'd had an AI write this, or just a lazy journalist... you'd have almost certainly heard the adjectives untouched or pristine used in front of the word wilderness. They're used constantly to describe places where, according to this construct, people have not been. This isn't true

7:19Speaker 3:of the Hukumba wilderness, and it isn't true anywhere in the United States. Just like every inch of this country, the Hukumba wilderness is native land. And in this case, it's Kumeyaay land. In these canyons, I've seen pottery that has been there far, far longer than the United States has. This area only became the USA under Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. There are pieces of art on the rocks in some of those canyons, that are as beautiful as they are ancient. And next to them are morteros, where people sat and ground acorns. The wilderness is far from untouched. It's a place where people have lived and thrived for millennia, before changes in the climate and circumstances, or their persecution and genocide by various colonizers, caused them to move their residences somewhere else. Wilderness, like all our constructs, is a socially constructed thing. People in their discussions and debates around wilderness created the concept of wilderness. They have associated it with being untouched or devoid of people, and this is never true. It's an attitude peculiar to the coloniser, who does not see indigenous people as people perhaps, or

8:23Speaker 3:indigenous history as history. This is a special place, for me, because people and animals have lived side by side here for tens of thousands of years. For the most part, what has been absent is capitalism in the state. And that makes it special. Only now we're fucking trashing it. The Okumba Wilderness is a federal wilderness. That means that under the 1964 Wilderness Act, no mechanised travel is permitted, which is why you'll so often find my friends and I out here in our hiking boots, even in the heat of the summer, trudging through the rocks to leave water so that we don't have to trudge through the rocks and carry any more crosses out here. Representative Mike Lee, who will be a recurring villain in this podcast, introduced legislation last year that would allow for the paving of roads in wilderness areas, citing the need for border security.

9:30Speaker 3:a great many people who care about public lands were up in arms. This would forever change the character of our wilderness and destroy it for future generations, they said. They weren't wrong. Roads do change landscapes forever. What they were wrong about was thinking that this was preventable and that it hadn't already happened. In fact, as I look down on the Hukumba wilderness from the top of the Hukumba mountains, I can see plenty of roads. These roads were built with less fanfare, with less of Mike Lee's bullshit and with less loud congressional opposition. In the first Trump administration, they cut roads through desert, where plants and animals had eked out an existence in a difficult place through a millennia of adaption. They dragged tires across the tenacious desert plants, and they came with rollers and graders and scrapers, and destroyed the places they had, thanks mostly to their remoteness, but also to legal protections. been spared the worst ravages of capitalism and the state until now.

10:23Speaker 3:They're doing it again, right now, as you listen to this, through canyons where bighorn sheep and Kumeyaay art and people have been able to exist without the destruction and exploitation of the state that has diminished so many of our beautiful places. Now that destruction is coming, in the form of a Caterpillar D8 Dozer. About half a dozen of them, actually, perched up on the hillside, deep in the Hukumba wilderness. They drove out there on a road. It's 40 feet wide, and according to the Sierra Club, it's been surfaced with a polymer called soil tack to reduce dust. A plastic pipe carries water for concrete, and they've cut and levelled a pad for their vehicles so large that you can see it on satellite imagery from space. All of this valley is a cultural resource. All of it holds Kumeyaay belongings and countless centuries of evidence that people lived and thrived here long before the border came. All of that is lost because some politicians who've never been here destroyed it so they could pander to those xenophobic voters whipped up into a frenzy of hatred by the right-wing media that knows hate keeps people online longer and fills their coffers.

11:31Speaker 3:But those talk show hosts, and most of the people voting for this, have never been out here, and they'll never know or care about what we lost. So let's talk about what we lost. If you've ever driven east from San Diego to El Centro, you probably looked over your right shoulder as you passed the Desert View Tower and wondered what it's like in the vast landscape to yourself. The terrain out here looks like God threw boulders into plaster the same way we threw pebbles at the stucco wall of the house I grew up in to create what I'm told was a very fashionable exterior in the 1980s.

12:04Speaker 3:To your south is a valley aptly named Valley of the Moon. I've seen horses there that run across the borders if it's not there, because it isn't to them. Valley of the Moon's a good name. The landscape looks nothing short of lunar. I've scrambled through the rocks and cacti up there to drop water, and camped there to escape cell signals and enjoy the desert as the sun comes up. I've seen all manner of surprising animals in that valley among the granite boulders. Snakes, of course, travel the valley floor. Cattle used to cross from Mexico to the USA until my friends herded them back. Turkey vultures circle on the thermals rising up from the ground, which frequently hits triple-digit temperatures in the summer. On the western edge of the valley, a pot-bellied pig called Gustava lived for months on the north side of the border wall, while Mexican National Guard soldiers fed her, standing in another country as they did, passing scraps through the border wall. Eventually, she went to live on a pig sanctuary.

12:56Speaker 2:No, really, she did.

12:57Speaker 3:Like I've checked, we found a real pig sanctuary. Nothing I've seen in the valley compares to the grace and majesty of the bighorn sheep, though. They're magnificent animals who dance across the rocks with a sure-footedness that reminds me They belong there and I don't. For centuries, these sheep have crossed from what is now California into what is now Baja California, having their lambs in the mountains to the north and then travelling south with them to access water all summer. This summer, some friends and I set off into the valley to drop water. In that water drop, I opened a show with some audio of. Unlike the sheep, we sweated, grunted and squeezed our way through the rock piles, hiking for six hours and covering a little less than five miles with our heavy packs full of water, Water for us and more water for others. I've not been back that far since 2024. In 2023, it served as a major thoroughfare for migrants after the end of Title 42.

13:51Speaker 3:Since then, traffic has slowed and we've been able to clean up much of the mess that comes with thousands of people are forced to walk across the desert. The valley is beautiful again. And with the 2023 migrant transit, just one of the many stories these rocks could tell if they talked. On this drop, though, we're going to tell a sadder story. The story of what happens when you try to draw a line in the sand with razor wire. That wire now stretches across a valley, not at the border, but near it. It seems the wire was laid wherever the DOD thought it might be easiest, effectively seeding hundreds of yards to Mexico in some places.

14:27Speaker 3:In the evening sun, you can see it glinting across hillsides, down through the valley and off into the desert. In that wire, deep inside a small side canyon, we found what we'd come to see. the decayed remains of a bighorn ram. The other voice you'll hear here is my friend James Cordero, who was leading this water drill.

14:48Speaker 2:We just walked up on the carcass. It's very burly terrain. This is definitely bighorn sheep country.

14:55Speaker 4:Nothing lasts long in the desert, man. Nothing goes to waste.

15:00Speaker 5:Oh, the smell.

15:08Speaker 4:Smell of death, yeah. So it got caught and then just died?

15:13Speaker 2:That's what we think, yeah.

15:14Speaker 3:And then got eaten. Down.

15:24Speaker 4:Yeah, the horns really got.

15:26Speaker 2:Worn down quick, hey.

15:27Speaker 4:Worn down.

15:28Speaker 2:Maybe something gnawed on them, man, to try and get... Thought they were bones, and they were trying to get the marrow.

15:32Speaker 4:Well, seeing how much they're even, like, bleached and dried and cracked... could have been here for a while oh right when the concertina wire came up yeah i bet because due to that time yeah that was what when they're putting it up here like january.

15:45Speaker 2:February that's the time when they move through yeah.

15:47Speaker 4:That's when they're going south yeah yeah yeah as we've seen in different canyons like outside of uh uh valley going going south in the in the wintertime for sure so yeah definitely.

16:03Speaker 2:He's tangled he's really rolled around to try and get out right He's pulled a lot of that wire into like a V down here. And actually, this is an area where they don't have... Oh, they do. I thought they didn't have a top wire, but they do. It's just, it's all fucking tangled.

16:26Speaker 1:Damn, dude.

16:27Speaker 2:What a shame. They're such amazing animals.

16:53Speaker 3:Henry David Thoreau once wrote, When I consider that the nobler animal have been exterminated here, the cougar, the panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, deer, the beaver, the turkey, and so forth and so forth, I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed and, as it were, emasculated country. His study of the environment, he realised, was not capable of understanding it in its full extent, because those who had come before him had been so myopic as to destroy much of nature in order to try and force it into compliance with capital. Quote, I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and then to my chagrin, I think about that a lot. especially out here where light pollution means I can see the sky without the stars that capitalism stole from us. I think about where the future generations will get to feel small and in awe out here, like I do when I sleep in my bivy sack under the stars and listen for the footsteps of the desert animals in the night time. I wake up before dawn to see them enjoying the valley

18:22Speaker 3:and the brief moments of cool at the end of the night before the day begins with baking intensity and the valley clears and appears to the inexpert eye to be empty. To find out more about the lives of these sheep and what the loss of one of them meant, I spoke to Dr. Christina Aiello, who found that first bighorn and who works as a wildlife biologist.

18:44Speaker 5:My name is Dr. Christina Aiello. I'm a wildlife biologist with a non-profit called Wildlands Network.

18:51Speaker 3:First, I wanted to know just how many of these sheep there are. When we see them, it's often a handful of sheep or a fleeting glimpse as they bounce their way through terrain I wouldn't want to approach without a rope and harness.

19:01Speaker 5:So in the U.S., at least, the number sits at about 750 individuals throughout that entire mountain range. And that's been up from their lowest point when they were listed. So I think they had dropped down to about 300 was the estimate. So it was about a third of what they think that mountain range supported back in like the 1970s. So they saw a pretty serious decline there. And I mean, the good news is that they're on the rebound and a lot of the conservation efforts on the U.S. side have increased their numbers.

19:39Speaker 3:These efforts, ironically, were funded by some of the same entities that paid for the wire that killed this ram.

19:45Speaker 5:So the state listed them first in about 1970s under the California Endangered Species Act. But then the federal government listed them under the Endangered Species Act as endangered for that particular subpopulation in the peninsular mountain ranges. So with that came more protections to that habitat. So it slowed some of the losses that were happening there. you know, increased money and resources to do some concerted conservation efforts. So a captive breeding program formed based in the Palm Springs area. There's a nonprofit group that has a captive population and introduced a number of bighorn sheep into the kind of the northern peninsula ranges. And then from that effort, kind of a population expansion happened up in the northern end of the range as more habitat was protected there.

20:37Speaker 5:And it kind of trickled down into the southern part of their range.

20:41Speaker 3:I want to talk about the ESA soon, because that too is in danger. But let's get back to the sheep and what the wall is going to mean for them.

20:48Speaker 5:There's a particular population that we refer to as the Hakumba subgroup, and they pretty much make use of the entire Hakumba mountains and would move back and forth across the border pretty regularly. I would say that there's A pretty distinct shift with the seasons from non-summer to summer when water needs increase because there are more permanent and reliable water sources on the Mexico side. So we tend to see this group, almost all of them in Mexico in the summer. But then throughout the rest of the year, females tend to breed in the U.S., but the males are generally going back and forth all the time.

21:29Speaker 3:These are the sheep I've seen in the desert. And for as long as there has been a border, there hasn't been one for them. They live in areas so rugged and remote that very few people cross there. And building is incredibly difficult. So they've been able to travel north and south, despite decades of politicians posturing as tough on the border. But now the line on the map has become a line in the desert, a line drawn in razor wire and blood.

21:51Speaker 5:There's so many different impacts at so many different levels. So I'm going to kind of break it down, first from an individual animal's perspective. I mean, bighorn sheep, They are extremely tied to their environment and the home range that they were born in. We call this a philopatry, where they tend to not leave their natal range where they were born. And there are benefits to that, especially in a desert landscape, because you learn where the resources are.

22:20Speaker 5:You start to develop these memorized pathways that you take that are keeping you safe from predators, getting you to the best resources efficiently. And in this extremely hot, arid landscape, that is incredibly important. And so this is a survival strategy for them. So the individual level, when you suddenly are traveling those pathways and trying to get to those resources, you've used your entire lives. And some of these animals can live 18 years or even 20 years. The females are very long lived. And you suddenly meet a razor wire fence. You're either going to panic because you're suddenly blocked from this very important resource. You're going to try and get through this barrier and get cut up, entangled, killed in some instances. Or if it's the physical wall and the barrier, you are now suddenly blocked. You now have to either turn around, go back where you came from, or you have to travel along this wall until you find an opening. And we've observed all of these reactions on the ground. This has all happened. We've had individuals trapped in the razor wire and killed. We've had individuals

23:34Speaker 5:come up to the border wall, kind of mill around for a while and turn around, come back the next day, turn around and just keep coming back until it just finally gave up. We've had individuals hit the wall. and travel what is extra exposure to the elements, which is a non-efficient pathway to try and get around it, where right now they could get around it, but pretty soon they're not going to be able to. So as you can imagine, that's going to have a lot of impacts on mortality, stress levels, condition, resource access for individuals.

24:11Speaker 3:The isolation not only prevents access to water, it can also limit the ability of the population to breed in a healthy way.

24:17Speaker 5:Over time, you start to see a buildup of genes that actually do you more harm than good. You get inbreeding that happens if you just don't have enough individuals and the only individuals to breed with happen to be your cousin. That's what you're going to end up with. I mean, the animals don't know their drive is to breed and they're going to breed with whatever's there. And if it's a related individual, it happens. And so it creates this buildup. and a reduction in genetic diversity. And that can cause diseases, it can cause mutations that decrease reproductive output, and it just makes them overall more susceptible to all the other threats that are already happening because they also don't have that genetic diversity to kind of adapt with the gradual change in the landscape to be more resilient to a new disease or to climate change and more arid conditions.

25:17Speaker 3:Having just seen the bighorn ram in the razor wire myself, I wanted to ask Christina what it was like to find the sheep.

25:23Speaker 5:We had been also observing bighorn through radio collars, GPS collars, that show their movements kind of at a regular interval. And I had noticed some individuals kind of showing signs that there might have been a barrier in another part of the Hukumba Mountains that I hadn't actually been to on the ground. So I'd gone out. observed that the concertina wire was up, but observed that it was kind of weaving in and out of boulder piles, really creating this bad situation where if I was an animal, I might see this fence and be like, oh, I could jump over that or, you know, I can get around that.

26:02Speaker 5:It didn't really look like this big rigid barrier. And so I had kind of inform my other wildlife colleagues that this was this was a situation I was like I think this is a bad situation where I just anticipate that an animal is going to try and cross this and they're going to get caught so that day when I was on hiking the valley of the moon trail I was going out to this region to see if there's any evidence of animals interacting and sure enough I After the long hike, which is actually quite beautiful, when you start early enough in the day.

26:36Speaker 2:It's amazing.

26:37Speaker 5:And I actually was having a great time because it's a little cooler. It's a little higher elevation. But when I got to the section of razor wire that I thought was concerning, I kind of scrambled up and over this rock pile because the wire is just like weaving in and out. So it's like at any point in here, there could be a bighorn stuck in. So I hiked as far as I could manage to get within the constraints of the temperature creeping up in the day. And there was this ram at a low point, not even in the rocks, just so tangled up. The concertina wire was wrapped around its horns, wrapped around its neck, wrapped around its leg. I mean, it was about as tangled as you could get. And clearly the wire had cut into it at multiple points. And it had been there for a while. I mean, it was already well in decay, desiccated and dried out. The skin was leathery. The bone and skull was exposed and it just had this like horrific expression on its face, just like head up towards the sky, clearly wrapped around and had suffered. That was the, its last moments on earth wrapped in this wire that as I had walked along it, I could have gotten

27:53Speaker 5:over easily as a human being.

27:58Speaker 3:I think that's what I want to end with this week. With the dead ram in the border wall wire, and the suffering the border has caused to so many people now being ruled on the wildlife that has lived here long before the border came here. Next week, we'll pick up with more on what the border is doing to our wild places, and a little on what you can do to help. If you'd like to email us, you can do it at naturalcausespod at proton.me.au I hope if you enjoyed this episode, you'll share it with someone who you think might like it. And if you've enjoyed what we've made so far, it'd be great if you could subscribe.

28:33Speaker 1:Natural Causes is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for Natural Causes listed directly in episode descriptions.

28:49Speaker 5:Thanks for listening.