Ephemeral Trash
By Randy Serraglio
Originally Published in the Canyon Echo, November/December 2008:
http://arizona.sierraclub.org/echo/2008/Nov08Echo_color.pdf
Last spring my partner and I hiked up Ramsey Canyon, the renowned bird haven in southeastern Arizona, with the intent to probe the dark heart of the Huachuca Mountains for the tantalizing treasure of mass migration. Unfortunately, in the deserts and Sky Islands of the Arizona border region, the thrilling beauty of avian migration is accompanied by the grinding tragedy of human migration.
In the first couple of miles, we were so bedazzled by tanagers and trogons and flycatchers busily plying riparian thickets and flitting through oak canopies that we made little headway. When we stopped for lunch well after noon, we sized up the remains of the day and decided to push through to our original goal, the crest of Bear Saddle and its sweeping vista of the headwaters of the San Pedro River in northern Mexico.
As we climbed away from Ramsey’s perennial water, the birds declined in diversity. A flock of pine siskin numbering in the hundreds raised an impressive hissing racket as it flowed from treetop to treetop through the forest. On this trail segment, we also encountered evidence of human migration, traveling the same direction and threatening to outnumber the siskin. Arrays of trash marked the hollows where camps had been made and meetings arranged. All manner of articles lay there, from empty tins of frijoles and drink containers boasting of “electrólitos!” to toiletries and perfectly good clothes.
We stopped at one such makeshift mini-dump to gather our breath in the thinning air and our thoughts on the matter. What misconceptions (or lies) compel people to carry such items as deodorant and designer jeans for miles through the wilderness, only to drop them here? Moreover, considering my tightening tendons and the incipient blisters on my toes, what on earth compels people to come this way in the first place?
After a dozen years of work on border-related issues in Arizona, I have that answer readily at hand: our tax dollars at work. Since the mid-’90s, the federal government has pursued a strategy of choking off traditional routes of surreptitious migration into the U.S. near ports of entry and consciously pushing border crossers into more remote areas as a calculated deterrent. The recent blitz of incredibly costly and environmentally-damaging wall construction is the latest iteration of this one-dimensional interdiction policy.
While this strategy has utterly failed to control undocumented immigration, it has succeeded in steamrolling fundamental legal protections for the environment and causing direct harm to border ecosystems. The fence fragments and destroys habitat, blocks wildlife movements that are crucial to the healthy biological functions of various species, and threatens to dramatically and permanently alter the hydrology of precious water courses such as the San Pedro.
Trash is a significant facet of the problem, especially since migrant trails now pass through far more environmentally sensitive areas than ever before. But trash is ephemeral – it can be cleaned up. The far greater ecosystem-level impacts of the wall may persist for generations, if not indefinitely.
###
Other News
