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Rewilding Earth Podcast
Episode 155: Jaguars, Justice, and the Border Wall – Stories from the Frontlines With Russ McSpadden
00:45:11
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A
Foreign.
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B
It's also where, you know, Neotropical birds like elegant trogons land on the same trees as American robins or Mexican opossums and coatimundi use the canyons here. It's just so wild and so unique and so critical that isn't shut off by a wall. And as you know, I mentioned, the corridor is also one of the most important remaining pathways for Jaguars between the U.S. and Mexico. Jaguars have used this corridor since 2015 to reestablish territory in the U.S. there's the famous jaguar O, who moved through here at least twice and roamed the Santa Rita Mountains for many, many years. You know, which is. It's the mountain range that's visible from downtown Tucson. He was seen on trail cameras in the snow. He was confirmed to have hunted and eaten a bear. Both of these things are yet to be documented anywhere else in the Jaguars range.
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It you're listening to the Rewilding Earth podcast. I'm your host, Jack Humphrey. Russ McSpadden is an activist, writer, videographer, and media specialist at the center for Biological Diversity. As a Southwest conservation advocate, he works to protect wildlife and wild places of the American Southwest and Northern Mexico. He's deeply involved in a range of activities from monitoring habitats for jaguars and ocelots to using photography and drones to document environmental destruction. Russ also engages in legal battles and grassroots activism to halt projects like border wall construction, focusing on keeping vital corridors open for the movement of species. With a blend of scientific insight and storytelling, his work brings awareness and inspires action for the wildlife and wildlands of the American Southwest. Russ, thank you so much for taking the time to be on the Rewilding Earth podcast.
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B
Yeah, thanks so much for having me on, Jack. You know, I really glad to be here and share a little bit about the wildlife and wild places in the Southwest and Northern Mexico if we get to it. Yeah.
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A
As you work at the intersection of some incredibly complex issues in the borderlands, I want to leave it to you to characterize your work at the center. Start at a 30,000 foot view and then also, what do you see as the most urgent and defining threats in this region right now?
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B
You know, my work involves a real mix of things. You know, community organizing, a good bit of science and law, and good old fashioned storytelling. So I have a pretty eclectic portfolio of projects I work on at the center for Biological Diversity. I monitor and work to protect habitat for a whole host of Southwest species, from jaguars, ocelots and Mexican spotted owls to desert species like desert tortoises and also aquatic Species like spring snails and tiger beetles. And one of the center's biggest goals is to protect and expand landscape level connectivity. And that has us butting up against border walls, a proposed interstate, as well as mines and other large scale infrastructure development. And so, you know, I spend a lot of time in the field checking trail cameras where I've detected jaguar and ocelot. I might also be out flying a drone to spy nasty projects and where they're at. Or I could be in a court as a standing declarant or in classrooms with indigenous youth to name a local jaguar in their native language. I could be, you know, if I'm lucky, I'm out photographing a snail with my kid for an Endangered Species act petition. But you know, sometimes I'm actually protesting with community members in front of bulldozers or writing public comments, talking to journalists, you name it. My work generally leads me into politically complicated, sometimes potentially violent, even militarized landscapes where beauty and devastation keep very close company. And I can, you know, give a couple examples of that to get a feel for, you know, what it's like to be on the ground. Back in 2020, I found myself standing in the waters of the San Pedro river, which is this really incredible trans boundary desert river that flows north from Sonora into Arizona. This is a river that supports on the order of 400 species of birds. It's a birder's paradise. And to put that in context, that's nearly half of all species that are found in the entire United States and Canada combined. And I'm, I'm standing in this river in this gorgeous cottonwood gallery that winds through the desert. And I'm watching and you know, videoing as construction crews build a border wall across the river and are erecting stadium lights alongside it. So you know, it's this place of real beauty, but real violence and real tragedy. You know, another example is I've been hiking in a canyon in an area where know, a jaguar was known to be roaming at the time. And, and from literally seemingly out of nowhere, a 40 foot waterfall erupted from this monsoon cloud burst somewhere off in the distance. You know, it was like this really miraculous moment, just all this, this water shooting through the canyon of sycamores and agave and it was really glorious. And while I stood there it in awe, I'm also fully aware that this same mountain range has an open pit copper mine on track to rip a giant hole out of its heart. And then, you know, I think this sort of hammers at home just one last example, a few Years ago, I was trekking with a few people across the. The Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, which is, you know, down near the border, to see endangered pygmy owls in the Sonoran Desert. And I found myself in this rather bewildering explosion of flowers. It's a beautiful time of year, and I was just sort of taking it all in when I glanced a marker of a deceased migrant who had died in this really tragic but wondrous place. And all that's to say is, you know, the lands of southern Arizona and northern Sonora, Mexico, are dramatically beautiful, impossibly complicated. A living, breathing, wild world with, you know, some of the. The most vast and connected and beautiful landscapes I've ever seen. And it's also a place, you know, kind of under constant assault and in the geopolitical crosshairs, it seems. And it's a place of so much beauty that will. That will still break your heart every day. I mean, it really will. It breaks my heart all the time. You know, every. Every decision that we, meaning people, make here in these really vast landscapes seems to either knit life together or tear at it. And so I happen to work with the team and the community trying to. To do that. Knitting.
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A
Yeah. While also feeling sometimes like a war correspondent.
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B
Yes, there's. There's definitely that sense. I mean, and that's, you know, it's. In some ways that's hyperbole, you know, and in some ways that's very true, you know, but the various political figures and. And the Trump administration itself have declared this a landscape under invasion, which is certainly hyperbole, but that doesn't mean they haven't sent in armored vehicles and. And the National Guard and. And it really is a militarized zone.
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A
Yeah. I want to remind everyone listening that good amount of material, video and images that you've likely seen, especially from us, in doing the best we can to report on yours, in the center's work and like in Jordal and others who are also, in my mind, war correspondence. In a way, a war on nature is definitely raging. I want to remind everybody that a lot of that stuff is you. This is the guy, you guys, who does the drone footage of the border wall. I don't know how much of stuff has been picked up by regional and national news. I would imagine quite a bit, since there's not a lot of people down there doing the work ever that you've done. And if I want to just thank you too, because if it wasn't for you few, no one would know, really, truly. What was going on in the first four years of Trump administration with the wall being built, and certainly now as things are even continuing to ramp up and things are closing in. Thank you. And we really, really depend on you guys to know what's going on down there. There's, there's not going to be a peep from the national news on anything of substance. I'm convinced now.
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B
So thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you for bringing that up. And, yeah, you know, you brought up Lake and Jordal. You know, he's a, he's my colleague and a really good friend and, and he's a person that, you know, is, I've worked with for a very long time and through the first Trump administration's, you know, border wall frenzy. And, yeah, you know, his videos at the border and accompanied by often my photography and my drone videos and wildlife cameras that show, you know, a bear cub growing up, you know, just north of the border. And putting all that in context, that they've gotten pretty, pretty wide reach. And I think we've done a good job of just making all of those things available to media, you know, and we've got incredible local media in Arizona and we've, you know, we've had gotten some pretty, pretty big stories that have, I think, you know, helped us spread the story of how wild and amazing and under attack the borderlands really are. So it's been, you know, incredible to see.
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A
Well, if it, if the world was the way I'd like it to be, those images and the stories you guys have been telling would have been the end of all of this. And the wall would be coming down in ridiculous places that it's up and has absolutely no purpose or bearing on immigration whatsoever. And things would be getting better now. But that didn't happen. And it's not the world that I'd like it to be in that regard.
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B
We now have current threats, and I.
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A
Wanted you to talk a little bit about that. The San Rafael Valley and what's going on now. It's back, it's rearing its ugly head and it seems different.
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B
So, you know, during his first term, Trump built about 225 miles of border wall across Arizona. And of that, a great many of those miles were across some of the most incredible protected ecosystems and landscapes in North America. You know, Arizona has the most protected federal lands on the border of any state, which really became actually, sadly, an Achilles heel, because Trump went after federal lands first instead of private lands. And so, you know, these are places, these are national Wildlife Refuges and national park lands and you know, the Pinakate and Grand Desierto Biosphere Reserve in Mexico. These places were all severed by miles and miles of border wall. Mountains were blasted apart, deserts were scraped, saguaro's toppled. We saw Native American cultural sites were dynamited and countless millions of gallons of desert groundwater were sucked up to mix concrete, you know, infinite amounts of concrete it seems, for footers to hold up the wall. And this of course damaged ancient spring systems, you know, that hold endangered fish and snails and frogs. And of course these springs are also critical water sources to countless birds and terrestrial species. And some of these spring systems, I mean, just so tragic, at the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Arizona, they may never recover. The pumping there was so intense, upwards of 700,000 gallons of water a day pumped out of the desert. And it was so intense that the pressure system of these artesian wells, the pressure system that drove this ancient water upwards to give life. And as part of the headwaters of the Rio Yaqui that flows into Mexico, that was destroyed, absolutely destroyed, they're now on life support, are pumps there to try to keep them running, try to keep the critters that rely on those springs alive. And just to put in context the biodiversity of some of these places. So the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge. According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, 1600 species have been documented at this pretty small wildlife refuge. And a recent 10 year study of bees in that area discovered almost 500 species of bees, solitary bees. And this is incredible. That's more bee species than is found anywhere else on earth. Right, right at the border. And yet the waters may never naturally return. And so I could go on and on, but you know, fast forward to today and there's DHS has issued a contract for construction of about 27 miles across this place called the San Rafael Valley. It's a place many people may have not have heard. And they also issued waivers which, you know, effectively erase the protections of more than 30 bedrock laws, you know, environmental laws, public health laws, cultural protection laws, that kind of thing. And so this is a valley. You know, I've Lake and Jordal and I have written a report about this valley. It's in, it's one of the last best wild jaguar corridors left at the US Mexico border. And you know, I think I want to try to describe the valley a little bit in the broader San Rafael Wildlife corridor for those that don't know it. Well, it's, it sits along the Arizona Sonora border south of Tucson and it's this sweeping grassland basin where pronghorn and porcupines and javelina and all sorts of amazing wildlife roam. And it connects four really amazing sky island mountains in Arizona. The Huachuca Mountains, the Patagonia Mountains, the Santa Rita Mountains and the Whetstone Mountains, all jaguar critical habitat. And it connects these two really important skyline mountains in Mexico. And you know, this corridor, it's really, you can't overemphasize it. It sustains extraordinary biodiversity because of its location and connectivity between the biotic communities of the Sierra Madre in Mexico and the Colorado Plateau to the north in the United States. These sky islands are like stepping stones across the desert. They represent really interesting biogeographic transition zones that connect ecosystem types that include desert scrub all the way up to pine forests and fir forests. At the peaks of some of these mountains, there's Douglas fir and quaking aspens and even snow cover in the winter. And when you travel up a sky island like one of these, you, you transition through at least a half dozen biomes. It's similar to, to traveling from Mexico to Canada. And so the San Rafael Wildlife Corridor is just a place of amazing continental convergence. And you know, one example is bears and jaguars tread on the same trails here that, that everyday Arizonans use for hiking. Like, it's pretty magical to be on the Arizona Trail, which goes from the border all the way north across the state, and realize that you're on a trail that's truly. Bears and jaguars have both walked down within recent weeks or months. It's also where neotropical birds like elegant trogans land on the same trees as American robins or Mexican opossums and kawatimundi use the canyons here. It's just so wild and so unique and so critical that isn't shut off by a wall. And as you know, I mentioned, the corridor is also one of the most important remaining pathways for Jaguars between the U.S. and Mexico. Three Jaguars have used this corridor since 2015 to re establish territory in the U.S. there's the famous jaguar El Jefe, who moved through here at least twice and roamed the Santa Rita Mountains for many, many years. You know, which is, it's the mountain range that's visible from downtown Tucson. He was seen on trail cameras in the snow. He was confirmed to have hunted and eaten a bear. Both of these things are yet to be documented anywhere else in the jaguars range. You know, he obviously he became a local celebrity and a national celebrity. But also, you know, more recently, the jaguar Yoko roamed the Huachucas. You Know, also detected in the snow on several occasions. And now Oshad is here. You know, he first came up sometime in 2022 or early 2023. And just this summer, this jaguar has been detected numerous times in more than one mountain range in the area. And you know, this is, this has all been amazing to see this sort of jaguars naturally reestablishing territory because, you know, at the center for Biological Diversity we fought for decades for, for this and you know, we won federal recognition of the jaguar's home in the US after, you know, many years of advocacy and litigation. You know, the government designated hundreds of thousands of acres of critical habitat in the Southwest, including the Sky Islands and the San Rafael Wildlife Corridor. And you know, so that the Trump administration now plans to wall this very wild valley off is devastating news and it will be devastating to the ecological integrity of the valley. And I, I could go into details about what they, you know, what it looks like out there now that construction has started.
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A
I don't know if that's, I was kind of, I don't want to know. I don't think anybody wants to hear this next part, but we need to. Yeah, so let's just rip off the band aid and get to it.
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Yeah. So in June, DHS announced the contract and announced the waivers for the wall across the valley. And it was a real punch in the gut for conservationists across the board in this region. This valley is just, it's a ecological gem. You know, we were also happy that this location didn't get walled in in the first administration and we're hoping it would stay protected forever. So because they, you know, using the Real ID act, they wiped away authority of federal and state laws in the area. This means construction can move at a real breakneck pace. That takes no account of the health and well being of the valley or the human communities or the animal communities in the area. And the machines are rolling in right now as we speak, ready to cleave a new massive barrier out there. I visited recently and I'm actually heading out there later today and construction crews are already on the ground. They have more than a dozen machines that are staged. You know, they've scraped away grasslands in the Coronado National Forest out there and they're, they're building something I hadn't seen before. It looks to be a really sophisticated camp. You know, they had announced that they would be building a man camp out there to house as many as 150 workers for the 900 day push to build the wall. And when I was out there. You know, I flew my drone around, and I was able to get a really good view of some of the. The staging areas. You know, and they've. They've built electrical boxes and they have trailers out there perhaps for housing. They, you know, and they. They've already started bulldozing, expanding the road, building a road, basically, you know, a dirt road right along the border to make access for the machines and the work crews, to get access to build a massive wall out there. And, you know, just like the first go round in my mention of water pumping elsewhere, we know that construction crews will pump thousands, if not millions and millions of gallons of precious and scarce water from on site to mix concrete that will no doubt impact the valley really, really incredibly. It's devastating to see, you know, and. And. But we are. We do have. We are challenging this construction by challenging, on constitutional grounds, the waivers that DHS has, you know, instituted to build this wall.
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A
I'm sure it's not for nothing. Can you tell us how many millions of immigrants come across in the San Rafael Valley every year? It must be just utterly millions for this level of construction and mobilization and spinach of treasure. It has to be for a good reason.
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B
Yeah, you know, you would think so, but, you know, it's exactly the opposite. Anyone who says that millions of people are going through the San Rafael is. Is lying for political reasons there. I have never seen anyone crossing in that area, and I spend a lot of time there, as I do in other parts of the border. And there are places where in certain times, people do cross in large numbers. And amazingly, you know, following Trump's first administration, where he built, you know, 250 miles of border, Wall Street, I was seeing most of that human migration was happening where his wall existed, in places like Organ Pipe, because there's a road nearby, and people were able to just, you know, cut through the bollard, and it would push right out of the way. And so people were coming through there. But the San Rafael Valley is not a place with mass human migration coming through there. It's so remote on either side of the border. It's dozens of miles from any significant road. And people would have to really travel across incredible distances, you know, with very little likelihood of success. You know, there are. There are huge mountains that, you know, have towers and infrastructure that Customs and Border Protection uses. It's a campaign promise, and it's millions and millions of dollars that will be wasted. But that's. Yeah, that's the world we live in here.
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A
It's maddening. Enough. But it's just when you realize that it's for nothing. It's for posturing. It's for. And they're doing millions and millions of years worth of damage that won't. I mean, it's just scar after scar that they can take the walls down today and they will never fix what they've done to the mountains. And by the way, the irony of putting a little, tiny, almost invisible fence if you're a mile away on an enormous freaking mountain, that is the most formidable thing I could think of crossing in the middle of the desert. Nothing says campaign promise and useless posturing than better than that to me.
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B
Yeah. And, you know, to add insult to injury there, and we've seen this, we've. Is that what construction crews are doing right now is making, you know, really accessible road infrastructure that you, you know, you could just drive across the valley at the border more easily. And, you know, we've seen in documents from, you know, the wildlife refuge manager at the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge that when these new big, smoothed out border roads existed, trafficking actually increased because the, you know, if you build a road, people will use it. It's an. It's a piece of infrastructure that gets. Gets used more. So it's just, you know, in a lot of ways, this project is, you know, the antithesis of, like, the stated goal of whatever border security. It doesn't. It's ineffective. And it also is, you know, counter to all that.
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A
The steaming pile of irony just grows day after day.
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B
Correct.
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A
Okay. And so you guys have had to sue like crazy all throughout this whole process with some victories and some not. And I think about this angle, I just don't understand. And a lot of people are still stinging from the fact that the federal government found a way to defeat its own laws. And waivers just don't make sense to people from my generation. These are unwaveable, immutable laws that were set in stone in our minds, and we're still in shock that they could have done it the very first time, the second and the 50th time. What is your hope for the fight? I mean, you guys have to sue, right? I mean, there's nothing you can do. You have to do it. It's your job. But is there any hope there?
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B
Yeah, there is some hope. You know, it's complicated, but yeah. So it was on July 8th of this year, about less than a month after Kristi Noem, the DHS secretary, issued waivers for the San Rafael are really, you know, pardon my French, but our badass Lawyers, you know, kicked into high gear and filed a really incredible lawsuit challenging those waivers on constitutional grounds. Now, full disclosure, you know, I'm not a lawyer, but I, you know, I'd like to explain a little bit about this waiver authority and just the violations and a little bit about the merits of our case. And, and I do think there's some hope in there, however small that might be, and considering the political climate that we're in and the courts. But so just a really brief background on this. There's this thing called the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility act of 1996. I think it's 1996, it gave limited power to waive a couple of environmental laws for border barriers. But the Real ID act of 2005, which was born in the post 911 security panic. And it's hard to remember back to those days, it seems so long ago, but there were these, you know, fears thrown around on the news that Al Qaeda would be pouring across the border to invade our country with, what do they call them, you know, sleeper cells and all kinds of things like that. And so the Real ID act gave the Secretary of Homeland Security, an agency that at that time was only about 30 months old. 30 months old, the power to waive any law that might slow border wall construction. And it also blocks a significant amount of judicial review, which serious constitutional problem. And so our lawsuit is, you know, looks very closely and argues very clearly that, you know, under the non delegation clause and Article 1 of the Constitution, in really plain and simple terms, it states that only Congress can make or suspend laws. But here in the Real ID Act, Congress handed one unelected cabinet secretary the power to set aside decades of legislation at the Secretary's will. And by doing so only in the borderlands, it also undermines constitutionally enshrined equal protection under the law, where border communities are stripped of certain protections under the law that the rest of the country is afforded. And so this is making its way through the court. Motions have been filed from both sides and we're just awaiting the next steps, you know, sort of with bated breath and, and some hope that the court will, you know, see that this is truly is a constitutional crisis. The waivers are a constitutional crisis.
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A
It really feels like a made for TV thing. I wonder if you ever think about who you want to play you in the John Grisham adaptation of this whole thing. Because it's got every single element. It's almost unreal. It almost. None of this really feels real when you look at things like this. It really does make me feel like we're a book club and you're just talking about a story that somebody thought up in their head and it couldn't possibly be real. But there's action, there's people on the ground like you, there's guys in the courts, there's, you know, running around, and we're trying to basically get a stay of execution for the San Rafael. Is that. Is that a good way to sum it up? Just.
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B
Yeah, no, I totally think that's right. I think, you know, and I think it would be a compelling movie. I don't know if, you know, later in life, if that ever came out, if I want to relive it all and watch it, though.
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A
Yeah, true. It's not going to be. Well, only if something could possibly come out of it, you know.
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B
Right, right.
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A
But so much damage has been done, and we need to honor that and not make light at all of really, the enormous amount as you described so eloquently, that we have lost, that nature has lost in this. In this region, which this all kind of brings me to what I usually have to ask our guests at times like this. Let's talk about hope in general. Like, how do you know about all these things? See these things, witness report on them, write stories about them, fly drones over things? And you've been doing it for so long, from the very beginning of all of this and the other battles that you fight, like in Oak Flat and the mining stuff, you're still getting out of bed in the morning. Like you got up today. How did that happen?
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B
Yeah, you know, hope is a hope. Oh, God. I have a very complicated relationship with hope and sometimes with getting out of bed in the morning. But it's interesting because not too long ago, a really dear friend of mine, Randy Seraglio, who used to work at the center, told me something that has really stuck with me. I think, you know, I had said something like, you know, hope is naive or hope is for suckers or something in a conversation we were having when I was feeling, you know, hopeless about so many things, which often happens. And he challenged me, you know, he said that hope isn't, you know, really the belief that everything is going to be fine, but rather it's doing the right thing, even when the odds are absolutely against you. And, like, even if failing seems to be the inevitable result. And in this definition, maybe because of the situation we're in here in the borderlands, I really like this definition. Hope is this action that pushes back against destruction despite despair and despite the odds, which are not really in our favor and these are truly heavy times. But honestly, they always are, probably. And the, the threats, speaking personally, the threats feel endless to the land, but also just to our rights and to the world we want to leave behind to future generations. You know, I have a 12 year old kid. I. And I think about this a lot and I feel an awful lot of despair. But, you know, when I, when I am with my kid and we spend a lot of time, you know, out checking trail cameras together or going to some of these places, he's even been out to the border with me, especially once when we actually defeated a shipping container border wall in the San Rafael valley back in 2022, 2023. And he went, I love that, by the way.
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A
You had a lot more fans when we saw that we could make that level of an effect at all, because everything just seemed impossible. They just barreled through and they didn't care what laws they were breaking or anything. But this time you guys stopped them and it looked horrible. And then all of a sudden they're hauling them back out. And I have to tell you, from this side, we were, I was just like, yes.
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B
Yeah, I mean, that, that was an incredible, you know, couple months of, you know, camping out there in front of bulldozers. And, you know, it was in the wintertime, so it was snowing in the valley on several occasions and quite cold. And to me, one of the most incredible things, and I'm not sure if this truly got into the media clearly, was that. So the last shipping container I was there for this was, I believe, January 31, 2023, and the shipping container, you know, was removed and the valley was, you know, cleared of that God awful, that God awful wall. You know, they had put, they had started putting concertina wire on the top. I had seen birds trapped in the, in that wire. It was just horrible. And less than two months after that last shipping container was removed, a wild jaguar crossed that area and entered the Huachuca Mountains. And that would turn out to be Oshad who, you know, along with Conservation Catalyst, I worked with the Tohon O' Odham nation and students there and elders and tribal leaders to name that cat Osha Nyugudam, which in Otham means jaguar protector. And so that cat came back, you know, less than two months after we had defeated that border wall. And that was for me, this incredible feeling of vindication that our efforts had really bore fruit. And what we had been saying was, the shipping container wall is going to block a critical jaguar Movement corridor really showed true, this jaguar return. And it's interesting because he, he left, you know, sometimes in late 20, 23, as far as we can tell. And then he came back again and he showed up just really weeks before construction crews started moving back into the valley. So, you know, this just, this one really incredible jaguar who have just so many emotions about, has shown us, you know, this keeping this valley open is really important to the recovery of jaguars in their northern range. There's so much incredible habitat for jaguars in this area. And especially in a world of climate change, the high peaks and everything in these sky islands are just really important for jaguars. And so all the people that were at that border wall battle and the return of Oshad, you know, those give me incredible hope. And I, you know, to just come back a second to, to hope, you know, it's, it's. I gather a lot from people. I'm just like, deeply inspired by my colleagues at the center for Biological Diversity, and I'm deeply inspired by the larger coalition of folks that, that surround me and inspire me, and that's groups like Conservation Catalyst and Sky island alliance and the Northern Jaguar Project and the Patagonia Area Resource alliance and the Scenic Save the Scenic Santa Ritas, the Lower San Pedro Watershed alliance, and most importantly, you know, tribal partners from the Tohono O' Odham Nation and the San Carlos Apache Tribe. You know, their leadership and knowledge, I learned from constantly and am inspired by. So, you know, these allies and sovereign nations, they show up day after day. And that more than anything, is what gives me hope.
- [36:27]
A
It's also just that there's a jaguar out there right now trying to do jaguar things. Yes, there's an ocelot, there's all the other species. And I know that everybody that listens to the show and you, everybody on the ground, all the organizations you just mentioned, and many, many more feel exactly the same way. It's like, how do you stop. How do you stop caring? You can't. You. We're with them to the end.
- [36:52]
B
Yeah, I totally agree. And big picture. Something I think about often is that, you know, we've gone through these times when walls become, you know, part of the zeitgeist, part of the fabric of. I don't know if it's, you know, increasing nationalism or other specific geopolitical issues, but, you know, during the Cold War, for example, you know, walls went up all over Europe and the Berlin Wall was built and people were trapped on one side. And in 89, when the Berlin Wall came down, so many Other walls came down almost, you know, overnight. And I'm hoping that this wave of nationalism and fear and paranoia and border walls will also someday pass. You know, I don't know when that will be. But, you know, one thing that I keep with me often is, you know, my father, when I was growing up, I was a military brat. He, you know, he served in the military and he gave me a piece of the Berlin Wall. I have it sitting here on my desk right now. And sometimes I just hold that up. That, that piece of the wall is a. And it brings me hope, you know, this. This wall that represented authoritarianism and control and, you know, people might have imagined it would be this militarized wall for ages. It almost collapsed suddenly. And that brings me some hope that I don't know when. I don't think anyone does. But I think that if we keep pushing forward and we keep elevating what is being harmed here, I think, I think we can do it. I think we can get the walls out of here someday.
- [38:35]
A
I would love to be here when that happens. I don't, I don't know if it was you, but someone filmed the wall collapsing in a strong wind along now what's really a long time ago. But yeah, I often think of that when I'm meditating on the whole thing coming down. And thanks to whoever caught that image. That was really awesome.
- [38:58]
B
I've seen that footage. Yeah, I'm not even sure who that was, but that was pretty incredible. I've seen sections, you know, just driving the border where wall has collapsed. I mean, quite often it happens more often than, you know, because so many of these places are remote that we just don't know. And they, you know, after a month or two, they, they, you know, replace the wall or repair it.
- [39:17]
A
But there have been so many different layers of border security over the decades that our government has spent billions and billions and billions of dollars on, like, night vision, which I know that some senator somewhere was really, really proud to introduce this since, you know, this is the latest in technology. We don't need a whole bunch of lights out there. That would be too expensive. And we got this night vision stuff. And then that bill came and went. We got night vision stuff. And then we had all this other technology. And then some guy comes decades later and says, let's flood the whole place with light, thereby completely erasing the value of night vision. And the billions and billions and billions of dollars we spent on that. Now we're. Now we want to have the stadium stuff, stadium lighting speak to that issue. I mean, the irony is not lost on you, I'm sure.
- [40:08]
B
Yeah, after, after that first round of massive border wall construction in the first Trump administration, I was foiling all the agencies, the National Park Service and the BLM and Customs and Border Protection, just trying to figure out how much lighting was actually put out there, when would it be turned on? Because, you know, that wasn't clear. And I got nothing. It was crickets. Nobody was saying anything. And I made some phone calls to the National Park Service, like, how do you not know how many lights are across the lands you manage or whether or not they're on? And yeah, just crickets. So I spent a couple months on foot, on mountain bike, in four wheel drive truck, driving the entire, or driving or riding or walking the entire US Mexico border in Arizona to, to count these out and to map these out, you know, and I, I worked on a report on that where it was about 1800 Stadium lights were built up there. And, you know, off the record conversations with border patrol agents in the field revealed that, you know, they were really concerned about these lights coming on because, you know, they felt that one tactical advantage they had was night vision and these other surveillance tools that they could use from a great distance and see people, you know, 20 miles away moving across a landscape and they could move into position to apprehend and all that kind of stuff. But that lighting actually floods out the field of vision for a lot of that equipment and messes with certain sensors and other things at the border. And so, you know, we were also told that these concerns were being expressed, you know, up the chain of command. And so, like, what we saw with all the, you know, the lights are still not on. After our report came out on that, you know, media started reaching out to DHS and CBP a lot and they publicly announced that they would not turn these lights across these, you know, really significant conservation lands. They would not turn them on until they did an actual NEPA process. So they were willing to not even waive the law for this. And it makes me think, you know, the choice to build the put lights out there was probably not even well planned out. I mean, that's another side effect of the waivers. Not only does it risk driving species extinct or damaging rivers or springs, it also just means bad planning for a project. They don't have to go through the process of actually planning and seeing what's happening, you know, useful, what would meet the goals of the project, all of those things. They can just waive all that and just build Whatever they want. And so where are the guardrails?
- [42:47]
A
You know, like, where. We all assumed, all of us assumed that there were more guardrails that, you know, political administrations come every four years, maybe every eight years, but mostly four. And lately. And there's continuity. There's somebody standing there going, hey, you can't do that with the lights, because we got this night vision stuff. And everybody on the border finds it to be far more effective. So it's almost like the trend now is to wipe the slate clean every time. And there's literally no way to run a country to have any continuity in the environmental laws and how they're applied and whether they're enforced. If every administration can just come in and without any consequences or any pushback, just wipe the slate clean like that, it is incredibly frustrating.
- [43:34]
B
It. Yeah, it's. Yeah, you hit it right on the head. I agree.
- [43:39]
A
So I need you to do something about that. Russ.
- [43:43]
B
I'm getting on it. Don't worry.
- [43:44]
A
I know you have some time somewhere in your schedule to get the whole government fixed, but, I mean, my hope and my big thing is that people like you exist there, that you're getting us the information we'd otherwise not get. And I, again, thank you so much for the work that you do because you put yourself in situations I know you don't want to be in. I know you don't want to witness firsthand, and that, luckily for us, sometimes we only have to see it secondhand. I know it's really hard. What you do and what you have done and that you continue to do it is a real gift to nature and to all of us who care. And on behalf of the Rewilding Institute and everybody, just thank you for your great work.
- [44:27]
B
Thank you, Jack. Yeah, I appreciate that. It's also an honor to be able to be in a position to do this work and work with the incredible people that I do.
- [44:39]
A
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