The Coming Flood

0:14Speaker 1:On Labor Day, while you all listened to a delightful conversation I had with Molly Conger on the subject of buffalo and pronghorns and the many other megafauna we get to share the land with, I was up on a summit whose name I didn't know. Sometimes I call it names, but they aren't words I can broadcast. It's steep and loose, and at the top, the primary foliage is cholla. You can get to the top, and the view is worth it. But more likely than not, you're going to have to bleed for it. Anyway, there I was just after dawn, bleeding on the top of this prominence, looking around with my binoculars. It's a good time to look for animals, to look at the land in general, and to think about where I might explore before it gets too hot.

0:53Speaker 1:Looking out ahead of me, I could see peaks in Mexico, and in the US. And until a few years ago, that's all I would have seen. An unbroken flow of land, across which the mountain lions I hear in these hills could roam, and the mule deer those mountain lions hunt could wander. Now, though, through my binoculars, I can make out a giant scar on the landscape. The border wall stands out as a wound on a beautiful landscape, the state marking its territory in the most ugly and crude way possible, a forest of metal and rust amidst a chaparral and sagebrush. Since 1848, The border here has gone from being a thing on the map to a thing on the ground, and that has meant that everything that lives on this ground now has to live with a border it didn't consent to, and that makes no sense when it's projected onto the topography of our deserts and mountains.

1:46Speaker 1:Much of that wall is built on land that was previously accessible to everybody, and now it's accessible to nobody. Not far from where I'm sitting, almost exactly six years ago, I was out in the mountains with some Kumeyaay folks, The walls cut across their land, dividing them from each other in the name of two states that have arrived in the blink of an eye when we compare the timescale of the state to the timescale of indigenous history. The Kumeyaay people I was with were in ceremony, using legal protections for the practice of their faith to put themselves in between the huge construction vehicles and their ancestors.

2:22Speaker 1:In the soil where the first Trump administration wanted to blast, Kumeyaay ancestors had been laid to rest. The physical evidence of their remains have been found by tribal monitors in countless border sites. In 2020, through court cases and direct action, some of the wall building was stopped. By using ceremonies to slow down construction and their court cases to challenge it, folks from across Sukhumi Nation and from other tribes were able to stall out the Trump administration. The damage done to their homeland was still profound, but it could have been worse. In 2025, with Trump back in office, most of the laws that had protected this land, including the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, were waived by Secretary Nome. That wasn't the only law waived. I want to read a list of all the laws she waived, because I think it gives a good impression of things that matter less to these people than building a giant monument to grift and hatred. The National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act,

3:33Speaker 1:the Migratory Bird Conservation Act, the Clean Air Act, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, the Paleontological Resources Protection Act, the Federal Cave Resources Protection Act of 1988, the National Trail System Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Noise Control Act, the Solid Waste Disposal Act, as amended by the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Comprehensive Environment Response Compensation Liability Act, the Archaeological and Historic Preservation Act, the Antiquities Act, the Historic Sites, Buildings and Antiquities Act, the Eagle Protection Act, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the Administrative Procedure Act, Section 438 of the Energy Independence and Security Act, the National Fish and Wildlife Act of 1956, the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act, the Farmland Policy Protection Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, the Wild Horse and Burrow Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act and the Otay Mountain Wilderness Act of 1999. Each of these laws was passed for a reason. It's not easy in this country to restrain capitalism through the law. We have in fact

4:46Speaker 1:manifestly failed to do so to an extent that this state has facilitated a massive and remarkable extinction of the animals on the land it now lays claim to. But now, at the border, decades of effort to protect our animals, plants and land have all been undone. What we have instead is rule by decree. In the case of the Big Bend sector, where wall construction is destroying a unique and beautiful national park in Texas, we got this instead. I just landed in Texas, headed to Big Bend National Park.

5:17Speaker 2:Last night I put a pause on all activity in that.

5:20Speaker 1:Park as far as construction goes until I can get down there and do a personal evaluation, talk to some stakeholders, talk to local.

5:28Speaker 2:Law enforcement in that area, and more to follow this week.

5:32Speaker 1:In case you're not familiar with that voice, that is a Commissioner of Border Patrol, Rodney Scott. He also served in a leadership position in the first Trump administration. During the Biden administration, he went to work for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a right-wing think tank. And in December of 2021, a San Diego court judge found that Scott had made a rape threat to former patrol agent and outspoken critic of Border Patrol sexual assaults, Jen Budd, when he posted on Twitter, quote, lean back, close your eyes and just enjoy the show. that was in a court case about a restraining order decades of legislation and debate expert input and work to preserve what we have left all tossed away instead we have a guy who generously could not possibly have expertise in all these areas and most likely has insight into none of them making a decision that impacts the land and the people animals and plants living there forever Let's talk about what that impact means, and begin by returning to where we left off last week, with the decaying remains of a peninsular bighorn ram in the border wire. Many of you would have thought it's

6:43Speaker 1:just one sheep, and yeah, it's just one sheep, but we don't have that many bighorns. And sometimes in particular, these rams can act as dispersers, spreading genetic diversity and growing the species range. If you're looking for an example of a disperser, check out the wolves that have colonized California of their own free will, on their own paws, without the releases and voter initiatives that we saw in Colorado. But there's more to it than that.

7:06Speaker 3:I did want to just comment on this idea that a single individual dying doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.

7:15Speaker 2:And I think, you know, I'm a biologist.

7:18Speaker 3:I'm kind of of a similar mindset where we're used to seeing animals die.

7:22Speaker 2:I mean, that's part of wildlife. It's part of natural communities.

7:27Speaker 3:But I think these anthropogenic-caused deaths, these human-caused deaths.

7:33Speaker 2:Which I expect to occur. I think there's going to be more of them.

7:36Speaker 3:This one ram caught in this razor wire is not going to be the end of this. But I think what people don't appreciate is that single individuals in Bitcoin populations in particular, when I talked about them having all this knowledge of the landscape and living up to 18, 20 years old, That single individual, if it happens to be that 20-year-old you that has the most knowledge in that population of all the resources accumulated over those multiple generations, and that individual is the one that dies, what else is lost with that one death?

8:11Speaker 1:There's a culture.

8:12Speaker 3:You know, we feel uncomfortable saying something like culture in wildlife, but that's what it is. It's a passing on of knowledge and information that helps people. that population survived. The longer that's retained, the more it's spread and shared. And I think we lose that. I think we also lose the potential for those long distance, rare migration events that can cause that gene flow that's so necessary to keep these isolated populations from suffering those effects of inbreeding.

8:43Speaker 2:So that single individual that died could.

8:46Speaker 3:Have been a ram that was You know, this sometimes happens once in 10 years where a ram's traveling up to 100 miles, like crazy distances on these dispersal, we call them walkabouts sometimes. And so I think we, as humans, we, you know, can kind of just ignore single deaths. But I think if you really understand these wildlife populations, that they matter more than we give them credit for it.

9:31Speaker 1:On a Sunday morning, in early June, my watch woke me up just before 3am. I hadn't got to sleep until midnight, nervous about how much water I'd need to pack. Despite years of travelling through deserts and mountains, they still scare me just a little bit. That's part of what I love about them, I just had time to make a pot of coffee before my friend arrived, and we set off for a pre-dawn trip into the canyons. Stepping off... into the desert always gives me a sense of feeling small, and the plan we had that day was no different.

10:06Speaker 1:In the desert, you could stand in a place that has not changed a great deal, despite the rise and fall of states and empires, that has resisted the ruthless exploitation of capitalism, in a country that has delivered the system and its historic consequences to so much of the world. You can also run out of water and die. So, packing a full hydration bladder, a couple of Nalgene's, and the podcast recorder, self-sealed with gasket maker, we set off.

10:41Speaker 1:Further east in Valley of the Moon, after a steep 3,500 foot drop-off, lie Meyer and Davis Valleys. These vast washes cut through the desert, and bloom in the springtime, when the arrowweed and ostetios come to life. In the summer, they'll hit temperatures that make the canyons feel like ovens. And in the spring, the winds here have been so strong, they caught my backpack and knocked me clean off my feet, as I scrambled from one valley into another. Deep in these canyons, you'll find desert palm oases, little islands of green and the sea of brown and beige. There used to be big lakes out here, and much more water.

11:18Speaker 1:Now it's all gone. but some kind of spring or seep keeps these lush little pockets alive, and offers priceless shade. The West was never really wild. It's been someone's home for thousands of years, but it's certainly rugged out here. On my topo map, there are three mountains in one of these valleys, named Kirk, Benny, and Glen. Those are their official names, as far as the government is concerned. I'm guessing whoever gave them that didn't ask the Kumeyaay folks who have lived here for millennia for suggestions. Like much of the California border, the 60 feet north of the actual border in these valleys is a national defence area now, an extension of the naval air facility in El Centro that means we can't go there, and the Marines now patrol the desert, protecting us from people who, in many cases, are making the same journey their parents or grandparents did. But to get to where I'm recording, outside of that area, you follow these valleys south, for a long time, then step and clamber over some boulders, then slide down a sandy slope covered with rocks. I would suggest not making that slide on your butt. After that,

12:36Speaker 1:you'll find the mouth of a canyon. That's all I'll say about exactly where this canyon is, because you probably shouldn't go. I want to take a moment to reinforce that. I don't think you should try and go here. It's a special place, and it's a dangerous place. I want to tell you about it, but I don't want to encourage you to visit it. After slogging through thick sand in the canyon mouth, my friend and I clambered over some boulders and looked down upon the start of the canyon proper. The sun hadn't come up over the canyon walls yet, and we wanted to be back to our car before the day hit the triple-digit highs we expected.

13:13Speaker 1:Framed by the walls, as we slid down a sandy rock slope, was the first of many little white crosses that dot this landscape. This one's for Martin. At least he had the fortune of being identified, of getting a name. Further down the canyon, a little blue cross sits on a hillside, where a friend found a child's remains. The plaque on it just reads Desconocidix. Unknown. To get there from here, one must pass at least three more memorial markers. On our way through the canyon, we stopped for a moment at each to pay our respects to them. There are buckets out here as well. Each of them with a threaded lid, sealed, are full of water, food and supplies to keep people alive out here. Completely full. The buckets are working really good out here. Nothing else is really.

14:13Speaker 4:Yeah, you can see the orange caps for the Gatorade scattered about.

14:16Speaker 1:Yeah, I've seen them go through even tin cans out here. One of those buckets is deep in the canyon, just a short walk from where friends found the remains of a child. This one has a message written on it. I'm recording something that's been written on the bucket. It means I believe in you. We're humans. We will be neighbors. Listen, we hope you have a good day. I hope you have... A peaceful walk. I hope you continue with respect. But there are things much older than those buckets here. On our journey through the canyon, we find morteros, and pieces of Kumeyaay art that are hundreds if not thousands of years old. Wow, so many morteros. Look, more over there too.

15:03Speaker 4:More morteros. Wow, so many you can't even count them.

15:08Speaker 1:Yeah, wow. Look at this. Some animals have been here.

15:17Speaker 4:There's so many.

15:21Speaker 1:These are deeper. I mean, there are maybe more than.

15:24Speaker 4:Generations of people that were here.

15:26Speaker 3:Here's an oval.

15:27Speaker 1:Yeah. Someone's dug into this.

15:31Speaker 4:More over here.

15:35Speaker 1:The whole canyon is filled with pots, lithic debitage, and other cultural resources. I don't want to describe what these things mean to Kumeyaay people without having Kumeyaay people explain that themselves and I wasn't able to find anybody to join me on this show. What I will say is that this canyon is also now filled in in several spots with a road that DHS appears to have cut through the canyon floor. It's big enough to see from space and I've tracked its progress for months before stepping off into the desert before dawn to confirm with my own eyes that this beautiful place has been forever changed.

16:09Speaker 1:Just approaching a little kind of oasis here. Palm trees. And we can see... Yeah, beautiful palm trees. It's funny to think about this path. It seems such an obvious path, you know, because it is. Because people have been taking it for millennia. It just sort of meanders through the canyon. So does this road now. With our super El Nino winter on the way, this road, which sits about eight foot above the floor of the canyon, will act like a dam. DHS has ignored hydrology before. Several sections of the wall were built without floodgates. A wall that divides Nogales, Arizona from Nogales, Sonora has caused flooding for more than a decade. In 2021, when sections of the wall were destroyed by monsoon rains in Arizona, they found out that ignoring best practices and laws doesn't really work and that you can waive a law But the state can't simply sign a document and make flood water any less powerful.

17:10Speaker 1:The desert here floods fast. That's why you don't camp in these washes. They fill up quickly and the water moves with tremendous force. Every year, somewhere in the southwest, hikers will get stranded or killed by the power of the water flowing through the desert. But now these roads will change how that water flows. And before the road gets washed away, they'll create deep eddies that will churn up the canyon floor. churning through all the pot shards we were so careful not to touch or disturb, moving them around and breaking them up and taking them from where they may have been for centuries. This stuff is incredible that people have been walking by foot along this path for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. And now there's a road 150 metres away. Incredible to pull those away through here. Holy shit. Take a moment to just enjoy being in their presence, I think.

18:06Speaker 4:Oh my god, I cannot believe the road is right fucking here.

18:24Speaker 1:It's wild, isn't it? We are now 150 yards from a dirt road, I would say. You know, this place has been this place since before Cortez, before Columbus, before, you know, Washington and through the secure fence and through the Operation Gatekeeper and through the first Trump admin. And now there's a road here and it'll never go away. That piece of desert will never go back. Any human remains or Kumeyaay belongings that were there And gone now, forever.

19:07Speaker 1:I know, it kind of... It's very sad to reflect on. In this place where life has fought for so long to survive, the state is spending millions to make survival impossible. And in California, especially in California, that moment is being met with a profound and remarkable cowardice by our politicians.

19:48Speaker 2:I think right now, one.

19:50Speaker 3:We've been seeing is a complete lack of politicians speaking to this issue, especially in California. There's been a lot of silence and reluctance to engage on this, although I will point to and show the good example of Texas politics.

20:08Speaker 2:Where their politicians.

20:09Speaker 3:At local and county and, you know, even state and federal levels are engaging and saying that they don't think this is the right way to approach border security. I'm just impressed and grateful that those political entities are speaking up because we're not seeing that in California. And so I encourage everyone to call up at varying levels, you know, your representatives and say that you want them to Like, speak to this issue.

20:42Speaker 1:Republicans in Big Bend and ecological groups up and down the border have made statements about the ecological impact of what's going on. But too many of our California politicians remained silent. The only comment I got on the topic was from the CDFW, where communications manager Steve Gonzalez said, quote, CDFW has been clear with the federal government that border wall construction poses serious risks to protected wildlife, including bighorn sheep.

21:06Speaker 1:this is another tragic reminder of those concerns. Of course, there's money to be made destroying what should be preserved for all of us. Just like the hide hunters who killed the buffalo to sell their robes, or the fur traders who pursued the wolf to near extinction in much of the West. Some people today are choosing to line their pockets at the expense of all our future. The wall in Okumba is being built by Fisher Sand and Gravel, the same company that built the crowdfunded wall in Texas, which is in imminent danger of collapsing into the Rio Grande.

21:36Speaker 1:The same company whose founder, Tommy Fisher, pitched his wall proposal directly to the president using the most direct method. Going on Fox News.

21:45Speaker 5:Tommy Fisher is the president and CEO of the Fisher Sand and Gravel Company. He submitted a proposal to build a portion of the wall. He joins us live to explain. Thank you for your time this morning. One can assume if you want to get involved in this, you back the president and what he's trying to do.

22:01Speaker 1:Is that the case and why? That is.

22:05Speaker 6:Anyone who's been to the border knows that there's a crisis on both sides. And we possess the technology and the vertical integration to get this done. So when Homeland Security requested from the DOD another 218 miles of strategically placed fence, we wanted to.

22:21Speaker 1:Rise to the occasion.

22:22Speaker 6:So we basically put a price to not only build the fence, but the roads and the technology and get it done so they know exactly what it's going to cost and how long it will take. And we can do that under a year.

22:36Speaker 1:It will shock you to hear that he did not accurately estimate the cost and that the Hukumba contract is ballooning to more than twice the initial budget estimate. The initial project was budgeted at $ 574 million. Today, the contract sits at $ 1. 2 billion. It has also ballooned in scope, with a secondary barrier now being added. This isn't Fisher's first rodeo is causing flooding. In fact, they were sued by the last Trump administration for building a wall that would cause flooding in Texas. How about that wire that killed the ram? There are packing receipts left out in the desert for Allied Tube and Conduit. They make the wire.

23:14Speaker 1:The parent company actually got a sustainability award last year, which I think is a very nice encapsulation of exactly what greenwashing looks like. That parent company is called Atcore International. Government contract data show they've made tens of millions of dollars since 2025. And FEC data shows their CEO making some donations to Republicans. Not massive ones, I noticed one of them was to one of the sponsors of the entirely inappropriately named Dignidad Act, which pretends to be immigration reform, but aims to create a migrant underclass with no path to equality. The company was sued last year for securities fraud, and settled this year in a class action, alleging the fixing of prices for PVC pipes. This rogue gallery of contractors and massive scale of destruction can be stopped by one thing though. The only thing the government respects out here.

24:00Speaker 1:Private property. Look at my map as we tried through those canyons. I noticed something odd on the land ownership filter, which I must have accidentally left on. Everything else out here is coloured yellow, for wilderness. But I noticed some boundary lines. It turns out that several plots of private land sit in the middle of the wilderness. They were never incorporated in 1994, when this particular wilderness was created by an act of Congress. The wall construction I could see seemed very close to, if not on, some of that land on satellite images. so I called the listed landowners to see if they were aware. They never got back to me. But since then, the CVP smart wall map shows the wall going around their land, to the north, effectively sealing off their property and ceding hundreds of acres to Mexico. By the time you hear this, the wall will be longer and the destruction greater. It'll be late summer or early fall, and perhaps the super El Nino we have been promised will have already begun. Perhaps that road is already gone, and the canyon is already flooded.

25:01Speaker 1:Perhaps it hasn't yet. Till things cool off, I can't walk out there to find out. I want the rain to begin, it's not safe to be out there. For most people listening, the things we will all lose will be things that they have never seen. But perhaps for many of you, knowing they were there still has a value. It's impossible for the state and capitalism to put a value on things like this. On knowing we share this land with amazing animals. On art being present in a place it has existed for millennia. On uninterrupted landscapes. on water and animals being able to flow across them, on wilderness and on knowing our tax dollars are not being spent by the billion to make it more likely that children will die in the desert. I think we can all understand that has value even though we can't calculate it.

25:45Speaker 1:And if you value our wildlife, our wild places, our history and our land at all, then you can't support this wall. Before I go, I want to address an argument that I hear raised against the wall. or in favour of not building it in wild places. Because I think that argument sucks. People like to cite CBP data and say that places like the Big Bend National Park have very low crossing numbers, so they don't need wall. I think this is spineless. We shouldn't be opposed to the wall because we don't need it in some places.

26:17Speaker 1:We should be opposed to the wall because we don't need it anywhere. The wall is a monument to hate. It is a machine for killing people who come here to ask us for help. People I care about deeply have suffered life-altering injuries falling off the wall. People I never got to meet have died falling off the wall. There is no CBP encounter threshold that would make that okay. There is no DHS data that would persuade me to sell my wild places to the state or to sign away our bighorns for the false promise of a social contract with the state that would keep me safe. If there was only one migrant at the border, or if there were one million, I wouldn't accept the destruction of that Kumeyaay heritage, and you shouldn't either. Building new wall will change crossing dynamics. It will force people into harder, more remote and lower traffic areas. And by doing that, it will kill them. Border traffic can change, but it won't stop. If the desert has taught me anything, it's that life finds a way. What can stop and what has to stop is this destruction of the land we all share, to make a few construction contractors rich and

27:21Speaker 1:a few politicians happy. We shouldn't be retiring about this. I'll couch our arguments in cowardly language like I care about border security, but this is all native land. The border came far after the sheep and the people who are this land's traditional and current custodians. We should build bridges, not walls. We shouldn't be afraid to speak up for the land and the animals when they cannot speak for themselves. I hope you've enjoyed listening this week. If you'd like to get in touch, you can contact us, naturalcausespod at proton.me.

27:51Speaker 1:It's a proton mail address. If you want your message to be encrypted, you'll have to send it from a proton mail address as well. And I hope you join us next week when we're talking about eggs.

28:03Speaker 7:Natural Cause 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. Thanks for listening.