Collage of images by Jim Witkowski and Fabrizio Conti
An outline for a mesquite-based restoration economy
We suggest you start with Part 1 of this series.
Summary
What is a border? Is it simply an edge: a sharp transition between one state and another? Or does it stretch beyond a single dimension, warping land and people through a self-perpetuating ‘otherness’?
In this final chapter of Goatwalker, we uncover the ties that bind ecosystems, identities, and communities of all sorts – migrant or otherwise. We’ll walk a path to restorative justice: a way to foster new livelihoods through conservation programs and the many uses of an oft-overlooked keystone species of the desert southwest.
Rigid borders are a foundational source of inequity. For as long as they persist, we face a growing need to care for the earth and for each other: to discover our own capacity for Sanctuary.
From Future Ecologies, this is Goatwalker, Part Four: An Open Wound
Mesquite pods on Saguaro Juniper land
(Photo by Susan L. Newman)
Show Notes
This episode features Carlos Tarin, Stacey Sowards, Sarah Upton, Gary Paul Nabhan, Francesca Claverie, and John Fife. Narration was by Ana Zavala.
Music by Satorian, People with Bodies, Hidden Sky, and Sunfish Moon Light. Goatwalking Theme by Ryder Thomas White and Sunfish Moon Light.
This episode was produced by Adam Huggins and Mendel Skulski.
Learn more about the work of the Borderlands Restoration Network (and BECY program), No Más Muertes, and No One Is Illegal
As of August 2021, Jim Corbett’s books, both “Goatwalking” and “Sanctuary for All Life” have been re-issued as new 2nd editions, with paperback and e-books available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
Special thanks to Ilana Fonariov, Teresa Madison, Susan Tollefson, John Fife, Pat Corbett, Nancy Ferguson, Tom Orum, Gary Paul Nabhan, Gita Bodner, Amanda Howard and the University of Arizona, Sadie Couture, Phil Buller, Danny Elmes, Tema Milstein, Jose Castro-Sotomayor and Susan L. Newman.
This series was recorded on the territory of the Tohono O’odham, and produced on the unceded, shared, and asserted territory of the Penelakut, Hwlitsum, Lelum Sar Augh Ta Naogh, and other Hul’qumi’num speaking peoples. It’s important to acknowledge that the public lands that Jim would walk his goats on are also stolen Indigenous lands, as are the lands we live on.
Citations
Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books
Corbett, J. (1992). Goatwalking. Penguin Books
Corbett, J. (2005) Sanctuary for All Life: Wildland Pastoralism and the Peaceable Kingdom. Howling Dog Press (Cascabel Books 2nd Ed.)
Nabhan, G. (2018) Mesquite: An Arboreal Love Affair. Chelsea Green Publishing.
Nabhan, G. (2018) Food from the Radical Center: Healing Our Land and Communities. Island Press
Nabhan, G., and Burgess, M. ed. (2019) Mesquite Manifesto (second edition)
Tarin, C., Upton, S., and Sowards, S. (2020) Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity, Chapter 3: Borderland Ecocultural Identities. Ed. Milstein, T. and Castro-Sotomayor, J.
Walia, H (2013) Undoing Border Imperialism. AK Press.
Walia, H. (2021) Border and Rule. Haymarket Books.
You can subscribe to and download Future Ecologies wherever you find podcasts - please share, rate, and review us. We’re also on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and iNaturalist.
If you like what we do, and you want to help keep it ad-free, please consider supporting us on Patreon. Pay-what-you-can (as little as $1/month) to get access to bonus monthly mini-episodes, stickers, patches, a community Discord chat server, and more. This season, we’re taking a tour of some of our Seaweed Sojourners, with the help of Josie Iselin.
Future Ecologies is recorded and produced on the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the WSÁNEĆ, Penelakut, Hwlitsum, and Lelum Sar Augh Ta Naogh, and other Hul'qumi'num speaking peoples, otherwise known as Galiano Island, British columbia, as well as the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the Musqueam (xwməθkwəy̓əm) Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh), and Tsleil- Waututh (Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh) Nations - otherwise known as Vancouver, British Columbia.
Transcription
Introduction Voiceover 00:00
You're listening to Season Three of Future Ecologies.
Mendel Skulski 00:07
Hey, folks. You've made it to the final episode of our four-part series. If this is the first time you're tuning in, you might prefer to go back to parts one, two, and three: On Errantry, Sanctuary, and Saguaro Juniper. You can find those episodes on the Future Ecologies podcast feed, or by the links in the show notes. Otherwise, if you've been with us all along, or if you're just the type to start a book at the last chapter, carry on.
Mendel Skulski 00:37
But before we return to our sojourn in the desert, a bit of housekeeping: As well as being the end of this series, this is also the last episode of our third season. We're already brimming with ideas – and a few recordings – for season four. We're so excited to bring you yet more beautiful, informative, and necessary stories, and be back in your feed by January 2022. Thank you for listening. And thank you especially to all of our Patreon supporters who have made our work possible. If you'd like to help make our fourth season our best yet, the way to do so is at patreon.com/futureecologies. We've got a whole other podcast feed for bonus content, fun swag, and a lively Discord server full of fantastic people.
Mendel Skulski 01:26
If financial support isn't possible for you, you can still help the show in a very important way. If this podcast has moved you or helped you to see the world in a new light, please just share it with someone who you think would appreciate it. Or even better, share it with lots of people. If you post a rating and review, wherever you listen, you might just see it show up at www.futureecologies.net
Mendel Skulski 01:54
Okay, with that out of the way, we can rejoin my co-host Adam in the borderlands.
Adam Huggins 02:01
So as I said at the beginning, I've been working on this series for several years now. And the whole time that I've been making it, I've been trying to figure out just exactly what it's supposed to be about. Maybe you've been trying to figure that out, too. Is it about this man, Jim Corbett? Or is it about migration, or environmental philosophy, or a band of outcasts who stood up to a government that was violating its own laws? Anyway, I've been thinking about all of this, looking at all of the audio left on the cutting room floor. And then something serendipitous happened: Someone sent us a book called The Handbook of Ecocultural Identity. And inside of it was an article that caught my attention, called Borderland Ecocultural Identities. I got in touch with the authors, and the first thing that I asked was: what did they mean by the term "ecocultural identity"?
Carlos Tarin 02:53
I think it's still a term that's very much evolving, and it's very much contested. And one of the great things about this collection is that it gives a lot of different viewpoints. But I think the way that we sort of conceptualized it was eco cultural identity is understanding that social identity or cultural identity is very much informed by the natural environment, and also informs the natural environment. So rather than thinking about them as analytically, or theoretically distinct to say that there's nature out there, and there's culture here, eco cultural identity blends those concepts so as to say who we are as people is very much reflected and reflective of the natural environment around us.
Adam Huggins 03:39
This is Dr. Carlos Tarin, one of the co-authors.
Carlos Tarin 03:42
I'm an Assistant Professor and the Director of Forensics in the Department of Communication at the University of Texas, El Paso.
Adam Huggins 03:48
For those of us who cultivate more-than-human relationships, this idea that nature and culture are bound together is obvious. But in mainstream discourse and academia, it's still kind of novel.
Stacey Sowards 04:01
And so what a lot of scholars have been trying to do is deconstruct that nature-culture dualism: to say that we are part of that, that we are animals too. So when we talk about animals, we're usually talking about non-human animals, and we're really trying to reconceptualize that to say "humans are also animals, and we live in those natural environments just as much as any animal species does."
Adam Huggins 04:28
This is Carlos's first co author, Dr. Stacy Sowards.
Stacey Sowards 04:32
I'm a Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
Adam Huggins 04:37
So Carlos and Stacy were attracted to this idea of ecocultural identity, because it dissolves the nature-culture duality that many of us grew up with. But what really attracted me to this piece, Borderlands Ecocultural Identities, was the author's engagement with the work of queer feminist Chicana author and scholar, Gloria Anzaldúa.
Sarah Upton 04:57
So Gloria Anzaldúa is a borderland theorist, and kind of one of the first person to really give words to this feeling that many of us from the border – we felt, I felt it... I think I speak for all three of us when I say, we understood and felt these tensions before we even had the words for them.
Adam Huggins 05:18
This is the third and final co author, Sarah.
Sarah Upton 05:20
Hello, my name is Dr. Sarah De Los Santos Upton. I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Texas at El Paso.
Adam Huggins 05:32
Sarah, Stacy, and Carlos draw deeply on Gloria's seminal work, "Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza."
Sarah Upton 05:39
Anzaldúa's work highlights this kind of tolerance for ambiguity that border-dwellers develop. And I remember feeling like this is the first time that I've seen my life and my experience represented in a text. It was something that, you know, this person gets it, they understand what it's like to be existing within these tensions, and having to negotiate every part of your identity, every part of your lived experience – and how that becomes so natural, and so you don't even question it. And I think that that's a product of being born and raised on the border.
Adam Huggins 06:19
In her writing, Gloria cycles rapidly between languages, narrative styles and perspectives. reading it can be an arresting and disorienting experience.
Carlos Tarin 06:29
The writing in the book, I think, is really fascinating, because she'll just interject Spanish words, and Spanglish words, and Nahuatl words, and words that the audience probably won't be familiar with – But it's sort of a form of political resistance against really rigid academic writing, right? It functions sort of as a critique of dry scholarly writing to interject poetry and narratives and mythology into the text. And so, I think her work in a sense is performatively doing the sort of thing that she's arguing for theoretically. And I think, living on the border and people that that are from the border or that have experience here – this is something we do on a daily basis.
Adam Huggins 07:10
Gloria actually has a term for people who negotiate and cross these boundaries on a daily basis. She calls them Nepantleras, from the indigenous Nahuatl word: Nepantla, which means in the middle.
Sarah Upton 07:22
A Nepantlera is the person who lives in the state of Nepantla, and who is confronted with that need to code switch and to cross borders and to negotiate identities.
Adam Huggins 07:34
In Anzaldúa's own words:
Gloria Anzaldúa 07:36
Nepantleras function disruptively – like tender green shoots growing out of the cracks, they eventually overturn foundations, making conventional definition of otherness hard to sustain.
Adam Huggins 07:58
What does it mean then, to be a Nepantlera living in the Borderlands today? Say for example, in the place where Sarah and Stacey and Carlos wrote this essay, the Twin Cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. For non-border-dwellers, these cities are probably most closely associated with violence. That's probably because in 2010, cartel violence in Ciudad Juarez earned it the title of murder capital of the world.
News Media Clip 1 08:27
Yet another unexplained slaughter in Juarez, across the border from Texas, now widely called the murder capital of the world.
Adam Huggins 08:34
Or perhaps it's because in 2019, a 21 year old white supremacist drove across Texas to a Walmart in El Paso and killed 23 people before being arrested.
News Media Clip 2 08:45
Tonight law enforcement officials telling ABC news that before the chaos broke out, that they believe the suspect had been looking for a good place to target and shoot Mexicans.
Carlos Tarin 08:56
And so you know, it's been a couple years now since that happened. But I think the legacy of that violence and sort of just the awareness of not just feeling like you're under attack symbolically, but feeling like you're under attack, literally – it's something that I think a lot of us are still very much processing as a trauma. And we're dealing with this because it's... it's terrifying.
Adam Huggins 09:21
This traumatic legacy of violence that border-dwellers live with – it's nothing new. The area now known as Texas has an incredibly complex history of colonization, slavery, war, and annexation. It was violently colonized first by the French, then by the Spanish. And after Mexico gained independence from Spain, Texas became a heavily contested territory. Central to this conflict was actually Mexico's prohibition of slavery, which was of course opposed by Anglo settlers that were flooding in from the US South at the time. US presidents from Andrew Jackson to James Polk would preside over expansionist wars that eventually resulted in the establishment of a permanent border between the US and Mexico, with the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Importantly, this treaty established the Rio Grande as the border separating Texas and the Mexican state of Chihuahua. El Paso and Juarez are actually geographically located at the exact place where the Rio Grande becomes the border. And this has created issues, because healthy rivers naturally have a tendency to travel.
Carlos Tarin 10:31
It was really based on the ebb and flow of the river itself. So if there was a particularly heavy rainfall and the river shifted course, the boundary between the US and Mexico could also shift and so that led to people being displaced. communities that were some time south of the border were now suddenly north of the border. And that created all sorts of challenges in terms of citizenship and land ownership.
Adam Huggins 10:58
These challenges famously came to a head with an international land dispute over a community known as the Chamizal, which was essentially part of the shifting floodplain of the river. Now, though, it's just another urban neighborhood in the El Paso-Juarez metro area, because due in part to the dispute over the Chamizal, the US and Mexico decided to channelize, the Rio Grande. This channelization of a formerly wild river turned out to be the first step in the militarization of the border – a militarization that extends from the 1960s to the present day.
Carlos Tarin 11:30
And so now it's just become absurd in a lot of ways the amount of securitization and militarization – because it's not just a fence or a wall, there's layers and layers of walls and fences. So now there's this huge monstrosity that's probably 30, 40 feet tall and made out of steel.
Adam Huggins 11:50
Carlos is referring to Trump's new border wall here, which is really just one more layer of border infrastructure among many.
Carlos Tarin 11:57
It's just now I think, been taken to an extreme – to a point where what exists of the river or what used to exist of the river really doesn't anymore. I mean, you see water, but the Rio Grande, especially when you're looking in the parts of El Paso, that are most densely populated, it doesn't really look like a river anymore. It looks like a cement channel. And then a small trickle of a canal as it cuts through the city and leaves El Paso.
Stacey Sowards 12:24
Which I think is really an interesting juxtaposition to the part of the river before it becomes the border. So, as it's flowing in from New Mexico.
Adam Huggins 12:34
Before the Rio Grande enters El Paso, it flows through the state of New Mexico, more or less right up to the city limits.
Stacey Sowards 12:41
So right as the rivers coming in, that part isn't fenced. It's not walled, it's not cemented.
Adam Huggins 12:48
This means that, a short distance up river in the city of Albuquerque, people can have a completely different relationship with the same river. One that among other things, involves trees and shade.
Sarah Upton 13:00
And there's this beautiful bosce full of cottonwood trees. And I feel like that is something that was taken from the city of El Paso, from the people who live in El Paso and in Juarez. I know, growing up here, I was always taught that, you know, nature is that pretty green environment in that other place. But it's not in El Paso, because El Paso is void of nature. And I know now that that is not true, but I feel like there's this kind of internalized oppression that the landscape experiences and that we experience from growing up here. And it makes people feel separate from and almost resentful of the natural environment here.
Adam Huggins 13:46
The channelization and militarization of the Rio Grande as a border – It's emblematic of a lack of tolerance in our society, for ambiguity, for fluidity, and for basic social and ecological realities. It's an attempt to tame what cannot be tamed: a foundational violence that structures relationships throughout the Borderlands. And it's so tangible in a place like El Paso-Juarez. But that social and ecological complexity can't be denied.
Sarah Upton 14:15
And I think that here, in the case of those cement canals, we see it kind of manifesting through... there all kinds of messages of resistance that have been painted on the walls of those canals.
Adam Huggins 14:27
Sarah is referring to the constantly evolving graffiti that is inscribed on and around the canals.
Sarah Upton 14:33
If you look at them, you're confronted with these questions that ask you to consider what role the US is playing in oppressing people in Juarez. And what role the US is playing in creating a system where migration is necessary for survival. And so I think that through our bodies and our engagement with our environment, Nepantleras find where the resistant potential is possible.
Carlos Tarin 15:02
I would also add to that, I think in terms of resistance and thinking about ecocultural identity, especially in the border – the very act of survival, I would say, is an act of resistance itself. Because the way that the border has been policed and put under surveillance and militarized is, in a lot of ways, an act of violence that we're not meant to survive, right? We're not supposed to survive or thrive in these conditions. And yet, you have acts of resistance, I think that play out in normal or quotidian ways that are very much just about survival. Right, and Anzaldúa specifically says that, you know, her concepts and her theories of Borderlands and border life are themselves about survival.
Adam Huggins 15:58
In Anzaldúa's own words, The US-Mexico border is –
Gloria Anzaldúa 16:02
Una herida abierta
Adam Huggins 16:04
– an open wound.
Gloria Anzaldúa 16:06
Where the Third World grates against the First, and bleeds.
Adam Huggins 16:11
She writes,
Gloria Anzaldúa 16:12
Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place, created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.
Adam Huggins 16:55
This concept of the Nepantlera – of someone who crosses borders and facilitates movement between worlds – I think it applies beautifully to the work that Jim Corbett and others did in the desert before, during, and after the Sanctuary Movement. And this overarching notion of ecocultural identity, that our lives and identities shape, and are shaped by both culture and ecology. To me, it's an invitation to explore this generative space, where nature and nurture are imbricated and implicated within one another.
Adam Huggins 17:33
So, for this fourth and final part of our series, we're going to sit with a few of these border crossers, who've formed intimate relationships with the more-than-human world, and who've used these relations to inform their approaches to resistance in the Borderlands. What follows is a series of conversations that bring the ideas that we've been discussing in this series forward – into the harsh light of the present day conflict along the US-Mexico border.
Adam Huggins 18:00
From Future Ecologies, this is Goatalker, part four: An Open Wound.
Gary Paul Nabhan 18:26
We are talking to Gary Paul Nabhan, an Arab American plant explorer, and nature writer, and Franciscan brother, who among his Franciscan sisters and brothers is known as Brother Coyote.
Adam Huggins 18:42
I promised that I'd bring Gary back, and here he is. Getting the opportunity to sit down and interview Brother Coyote was an absolute dream come true for me, and there was so much to discuss. We talked for example, about the Saguaro Juniper covenant.
Gary Paul Nabhan 18:59
Yeah, and that's really one of the greatest documents written in Arizona during my lifetime.
Adam Huggins 19:05
We spoke at length about Los Cabreros Andantes.
Gary Paul Nabhan 19:09
You cannot meet someone like Jim or John without deeply feeling, as we say down here on the border, that they walk the taco [laughs] That they just live it – and their words are an offshoot of their life experience, rather than a proposal about what to do with their life.
Adam Huggins 19:31
Gary is also someone who walks the taco. Since his early involvement in organizing the first Earth Day back in 1970, he's been foundational to the international slow food, seed saving, and pollinator conservation movements. It would be impossible to overstate the influence that Gary's writing and leadership have had on countless species and people, including myself. What I hadn't realized, though, when I first got in touch with him, was that he felt similarly about Jim and Los Cabreros Andantes.
Gary Paul Nabhan 20:04
John and Jim got to know the ranchers down in southeastern Arizona, at the time that environmentalists and ranchers were at odds with each other. And of course, Jim had been a rancher. And so the seeds of the collaborative conservation movement among ranchers and environmentalists – now there's something like 24 groups around the West that are finding common ground and rural landscapes along those lines – started in conversations with those ranchers and earth-firsters that John and Jim fostered and facilitated... just unbelievable, unbelievable.
Adam Huggins 20:43
In fact, the title of one of Gary's latest books, Food from the Radical Center, comes directly from those conversations.
Gary Paul Nabhan 20:50
And that term was given to us by the first rancher that Jim and John engaged in that peacemaking between ranchers and environmentalist, Bill McDonald, who's a MacArthur award winning rancher with the Malpai Borderlands Group.
Adam Huggins 21:05
But it was Gary's most recent book, entitled Mesquite: an Arboreal Love Affair that I wanted most to talk to him about. Because, as I told him, it's become my favorite.
Gary Paul Nabhan 21:17
[Laughs] That is so bizarre. I think, like, I did it to entertain myself while I was recovering from a concussion. I'm almost surprised when, you know, to see that it actually got into print. Thinking like, of all the weird things I've done with my life...
Adam Huggins 21:39
The book is kind of unusual. And that's actually due in part to that concussion that Gary mentioned, which interrupted his writing before he could finish it.
Gary Paul Nabhan 21:47
And I figured out that the only way to finish the book was not to anthropomorphize the tree, but to phytomorphyze the human. In this case, me. So rather than doing what people have done with animals, and stories forever – of sort of anthropomorphize them so that they're like us – my journey was to see if I could become more tree like.
Adam Huggins 22:15
Gary calls this tree consciousness Arboreality.
Gary Paul Nabhan 22:19
Arboreality: getting inside the skin or the bark of another being, yeah.
Adam Huggins 22:24
It's kind of hard to explain what this actually means. And so I asked Gary to read a brief passage from the beginning of the book for us.
Gary Paul Nabhan 22:39
Not long ago, I was thrown off kilter, and suddenly brought to my knees by a bout of dizziness and nausea. I could not immediately diagnose whether it was a case of vertigo, of influenza, of the 67 Year Itch, or of the great political malaise that was afflicting much of America, or of an unprecedented rupture of my former identity. This illness ravaged me while I was wandering through one of the great hyper arid landscapes of the Americas: Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, which stretches along the US-Mexico border, like an iridescent mirror, reflecting the essential desert in each of us. Over several horrifying hours, I could not stand up even for a moment without falling back onto the earth. I could not look up without seeing the world spinning violently around me. And I could not open my mouth without discouraging my innards. And so, I slid back against the only thing behind me that would prop me up enough to keep me breathing. Otherwise, I would have expired.
Gary Paul Nabhan 24:03
As I slumped against some unseen object that steadfastly kept me from sinking farther into the earth. I looked up just long enough to see limbs wildly waving above my head, bending to embrace me, and then I passed out.
Gary Paul Nabhan 24:30
When I awakened, I had no immediate recollection of where I was or how I had gotten there. I felt unspeakably disoriented in every sense. After a few minutes of feeling completely abandoned by everyone I knew and everything I cared about, I caught a glimpse of the only clue in sight that might reorient me to my whereabouts, my whatabouts, and whoabouts. Next to me, under my left elbow, in fact, was a small metal placard that was stuck into the hard dry ground on a stainless steel spike. The placard simply said these words: Mesquite, Prosopis velutina. And so I began to entertain possibilities of what this placard might mean for me, to me, about me. Was it plausible that I had begun to metamorphose into a Mesquite tree? Might it be that my torso would become thickened and torqued into a somewhat twisted trunk? Could it be that those limbs I had glanced at were my limbs?
Gary Paul Nabhan 25:47
Oddly, I felt drained of all humanity, ambition, and volition. It was as though I had lost my capacity to walk, run, or become mobile by any other means. And yet, for whatever reason, I no longer feared becoming sessile, which is to say, rooted in place. I no longer had any urge to get away, to go it alone, or to retreat to someplace else.
Adam Huggins 26:27
As Gary has become more tree-like, he's only become more firmly rooted in his conviction that mesquites – much like Jim's goats – might provide a viable ecological livelihood for borderland dwellers.
Gary Paul Nabhan 26:41
My current project is trying to see that whatever the Green New Deal morphs into over the next two years – that a restorative economy with a strong foothold in livelihoods generated by mesquite trees is part of it.
Adam Huggins 27:01
This project surfaced in 2019 with the publication of the Mesquite Manifesto, which Gary edited. One of the reasons he and his co-authors chose mesquite as a focus, is because for many years, it was seen and treated as a kind of arboreal weed by ranchers and other land managers.
Gary Paul Nabhan 27:20
We've been fighting for last 30 years the quote encroachment of mesquite on grassland, that was always Savannah, originally. But with climate change models, we know that the most obvious change that we're going to have in an eight state area of the Southwest Texas, Oklahoma and southern Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, California, Arizona, is going to be the expansion and densification of mesquite trees again. So, we can fight 'em – herbicides like 245-D, and grubbing them out of the soil with bulldozers, and then five years later, they're back again. Or we can dance with them. And I'm for dancing with mesquites.
Adam Huggins 28:12
Despite this fanciful language, in the Mesquite Manifesto, Gary and his co-authors are focused on addressing real economic issues that face border land communities.
Gary Paul Nabhan 28:22
These counties here have double the poverty of the rest of the country on either side of the line. And we have to do something about that. It's the border in the world with the greatest economic, healthcare, and livelihood disparity. If someone makes 20 times as much for doing the same auto mechanic work on this side of the border than in their present job on that side of the border, who in their right mind wouldn't want to move across the border and be paid in a dignified way for the same work?
Adam Huggins 28:55
So instead of working to clear all of those pesky mesquites off the land, perhaps thinks Gary, it's time to embrace and take advantage of their many and varied uses. Of course, learning to do this will take some training,
Gary Paul Nabhan 29:08
But everyone would go through a short course on managing bees for mesquite honey; of learning how to cut mesquite wood without killing the trees – by coppicing and pruning them so that they provide more shade and food to wildlife; while sustainably harvesting them over the years, and using the smaller branches to slow down erosion in the landscape where they are; of working to show people how to mill the flour.
Adam Huggins 29:35
The flour that is of the mesquite pod, which I can personally report is delicious, and nutritious, and versatile. It's high in protein. It's a good source of zinc, iron and calcium. And it tastes delicious and cookies, pancakes, tortillas, you name it.
Gary Paul Nabhan 29:53
So the point is, there's syrups and diabeetus-preventing flours, mesquite woodworking, mesquite range management, mesquite biochar, that can all come from these trees.
Adam Huggins 30:08
Bootstrapping this kind of mesquite-based restoration economy might seem far fetched. But Gary has actually already helped start a really unique program that harnesses Borderlands restoration as an educational and economic driver
Francesca Claverie 30:27
What Borderlands restoration has always done, where our goal is to connect people with their landscapes through restoration – One way to always connect with people is: hire their children [laughs].
Adam Huggins 30:40
This is Francesca Claverie, and we met her at the office of the Borderlands restoration network, where she works just a short distance from Gary's home in the small town of Patagonia, Arizona. We wanted to ask her about the Borderlands Earthcare Youth Program.
Francesca Claverie 30:55
Yeah, and that program is called the BECY program, the Borderlands Earthcare Youth Program. It's probably our most popular and well known thing that we do, and it's just a six week program in the summer. And the whole goal is to hire people – with money, not with like an unpaid internship or credits. But to hire people in these rural communities.
Adam Huggins 31:15
The program has taken place since 2013, in border towns like Patagonia, Douglas and Nogales.
Francesca Claverie 31:22
And it's wonderful and it brings together, I don't know, just this very diverse group of border dwellers – where you have some students that are driving across the border every morning, and they get in line at 3:30 in the morning to make it to work at six. Or you have some students, that half their family lives in Mexico, but their parents are Border Patrol agents. And just very complicated, interesting people that are living in these areas, that don't have that many job options if you're going to stay in these towns.
Adam Huggins 31:48
Among other things, these students spend their days collecting native seeds for the organization.
Francesca Claverie 31:54
This season, they're going to collect over 200 pounds of wild seed by hand, which if you've ever wild collected seed before, takes dozens of people and hundreds and 1000s of hours. So so much work.
Adam Huggins 32:06
They also work to reduce erosion on rangelands, by installing monumental rock structures,
Francesca Claverie 32:11
It's gabions, or trincheras, or just rock structures. In general, there's all kinds of different names and people in so many different cultures throughout the world have often used erosion control structures.
Adam Huggins 32:23
The function of these structures is simple, but critical to any hope of growing food in the desert. They exist to slow and infiltrate water from the monsoon rains.
Francesca Claverie 32:33
And these really violent storms come through and will just dump a few inches in a matter of an hour. And that will be it for a week. And when that happens, this violent rain event will scrape away dirt, it'll scrape away plants when it moves really quickly. And so if you don't slow things down, you don't have water able to seep into the landscape, which then brings up more plants and all kinds of life around it.
Adam Huggins 32:57
What connects all of these projects is that they have real, measurable positive impacts on border land, ecosystems, communities and economies.
Gary Paul Nabhan 33:06
And in a community like this where we hear well, we want the mine to be here because there's not enough jobs for our kids – to say the 70 jobs plus that the Borderlands Restoration Network has created in this community in the last six years is enormous. In a town of 800, we've had 200 people volunteer with Francesca at the nursery. That's... that's a fourth of the entire town! Those people no longer accept that dualism that environment eliminates jobs rather than creating them – that false dichotomy is out of their heads now. We have conservative ranchers – I mean conservative like not just conservative like to the far right of Charlton Heston, but the far right of you know, Moses or or Attila the Hun, I mean, these guys are like way out there. When they see that their kids are excited by doing restoration work and they get jobs out of it, they're donating to an environmental group – something that they would never would have done five years ago. And I can meet them on common ground.
Adam Huggins 34:16
Looking at the BECY program, there's really no reason why a similar project that was focused on mesquite couldn't have an even larger and longer term impact if scaled up across the Borderlands. And if you've heard of calls for a 21st Century Civilian Conservation Corps as part of the Green New Deal, this would basically be a regional variation on that concept. But Gary isn't totally attached to mesquite.
Gary Paul Nabhan 34:42
I'm really much more interested in you know, the diversity rather than us fixing on a single plant or resource or philosophy. I just never been dogmatic if it ends up to be something else. Perhaps besides mesquite that can put wind in the sails of creating more livelihoods, without hurting the earth, I'm all for it.
Adam Huggins 35:03
Still, I couldn't help but notice the delicate, unmistakable green tendrils of velvet mesquite blossoming out of Gary's ears.
Gary Paul Nabhan 35:13
I think mesquite is sort of the gateway drug to getting into a deeper appreciation of the many ways that the natural resources here – this great biodiversity that we have in this region – can be in service to vanquishing poverty. That if people want to live in rural places, they need to rethink the capacity to do something with the resources in front of them. And because mesquite is a keystone species that this whole nurse plant guild flourishes under. The wild Tepary beans, and the Chiltepins, and the other foods that I love are all dependent in some way on mesquite providing shelter and sanctuary for them – just like Jim Corbett provided shelter and sanctuary for so many people.
Adam Huggins 36:12
I think that this kind of ecocultural restoration is sorely needed in the Borderlands today. Because this is a place where incredible ecological and social violence have basically been normalized. And that was before the latest round of wall construction.
Gary Paul Nabhan 36:30
The Border Patrol can overrule the Endangered Species Act, the Native American Religious Freedom Act, and the Antiquities Act, to blade clean 8,000 years of human history and 12,000 years of plant and animal adaptation to deserts – calling eminent domain because of national security purposes. That act of defiling nature and sacred spaces.
Adam Huggins 37:01
This latest round of state violence against desert ecologies and the lands and bodies of Indigenous peoples is a direct consequence of the failure of US policies such as prevention through deterrence, which continues to kill migrants in numbers that are impossible to ignore for people who call the border home.
Francesca Claverie 37:20
You'll often see crosses out in the wilderness. And you'll often just see shoes and like sometimes baby shoes, and water bottles, and backpacks, and things that are just in this area where we're doing work for environmental reasons. But it's hard not to like feel connected and feel associated with just the amount of people that are moving in – for so many different reasons.
Adam Huggins 37:44
People like Francesca, who live and work in the Borderlands, confront this ongoing violence on a daily basis, and often find themselves in situations where they're called upon to render aid. Gary told us a story that many border dwellers will relate to. It was summer of 2019.
Gary Paul Nabhan 38:03
And we were coming across the border Fourth of July from Mexico and got about six miles north of the border and saw a young woman and a child on the side of the road, and the woman looked despondent and fatigued. They had walked all night, and gotten lost, and came across the Border. And there was not a second, before we talked to them and realized what they'd been through, where we had an option other than to get them to safety. That's our ethical responsibility. It's not a... it's not an option. When we took them to the Oregon Pipe Visitor Center, they had no water or food. So we had to get them medical attention. And then we knew that they probably be taken back across the border, but we gave them as much coaching as we can: who could help him in the closest Mexican side border town. And that was... even that was hard.
Adam Huggins 39:06
The Sanctuary Movement never really ended. It just went underground, took different forms, and continues to manifest itself across North America when the need arises. Down in the Borderlands, John Fife and others continue to carry the work forward.
John Fife 39:23
Well, you need to know that everything that we're doing out in the desert now in terms of the organizations we started, Samaritans and No More Deaths,
Adam Huggins 39:32
– An organization also known as No Mas Muertes –
John Fife 39:36
is built on all the mistakes we made, and all the – from our perception – things we got right during Sanctuary in the 80s. We really took that experience and said how do we take it out to the desert now?
Adam Huggins 39:54
With the escalating militarization of the border, it's become too dangerous to cross migrants the way that Jimmy used to. But congregations across the country continue to offer public sanctuary to asylum seekers. And groups like No Mas Muertes in the Borderlands continue to render aid in any way that they can. Sometimes that's as simple as leaving bottled water out in the desert on common crossing routes. Unfortunately, the Border Patrol and US government continue to attempt to derail these efforts.
John Fife 40:23
And then they started slashing water bottles, and destroying humanitarian aid out there. And then they tried citing us for littering, leaving sealed one gallon water jugs on federal land.
Adam Huggins 40:40
You might have already seen some of these videos of border guards slashing potentially life saving water supplies out in the desert.
Border Guard 40:47
Pick up this trash somebody left on the trail. It's not yours, is it? All you have to do is tell me, is it yours?
Adam Huggins 40:53
These tactics and others are emblematic of an escalating crackdown on Sanctuary-aligned movements. Notably, in 2018, No Mas Muertes activist Scott Warren was arrested and charged with a felony for feeding and sheltering undocumented immigrants on their way north. It was clear that the Trump administration wanted a rematch of that historic Sanctuary trial.
John Fife 41:17
So now, they've gone back to "Oh, we're gonna start charging humanitarian aid volunteers with felony crimes", so they're going to try it again. But what happened as a result was our budget more than doubled, and the number of people wanting to volunteer more than doubled, just as the Sanctuary Movement more than doubled in the 1980s in the seven months we were on trial. So that's where we are. My judgment is, we're almost at the point where juries are going to refuse to convict.
Adam Huggins 41:58
John's instincts turned out to be spot on. A month after we recorded this interview, in the fall of 2019, Scott Warren was acquitted of all charges by a jury in Tucson. Today, the US government has actually failed at almost every turn to criminalize civil initiative in the courts, let alone in the minds of most Americans. I suppose that track record, in and of itself, might provide some measure of comfort to somebody like Scott Warren, who was until recently staring down a potential 20 year prison sentence. But in speaking with John, it was clear that he felt that there's just more to it than that.
John Fife 42:36
How do you build and sustain a movement that is strong enough and powerful enough to endure all the attacks and all of the attempts to destroy that movement to defend human rights? I would argue from history. That's where faith comes in, and the spiritual dimension to human life and human community. And I would also argue that that's what enabled the Sanctuary Movement, to not only sustain itself through all of the criminal trials and all of the attacks. It was the spiritual base that enabled us to sustain that and eventually grow it to the point where we... we did prevail over government.
Adam Huggins 43:32
Okay, so taking a step back for a minute: If you're listening to this right now, then odds are, you're like me, and like the majority of people involved in modern day Sanctuary work, and environmental movements in general, in that you don't ascribe to any organized faith. If that's you, John has a message for you.
John Fife 43:53
Too often in a secular society that we live in, what I hear is "I'm spiritual. But I don't want to have anything do with spiritual community. I don't have any way to relate to that. Because you all have discredited it so badly over so many years, that I don't want to be associated with that established church." And I understand that – we have discredited faith communities in most of Western Europe in the United States for too long.
Adam Huggins 44:24
But according to John, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be organizing with alongside and through faith communities to achieve ecocultural change.
John Fife 44:35
I want to argue that the whole movement for environmental and ecological rights has needed a spiritual base – and science and fact and secular arguments have not been able to build that movement nearly as effectively as spiritual strength – for the movement to finally prevail.
Adam Huggins 45:04
Just to be clear, John is not saying that people organizing for social change necessarily have to do that through the Christian Church, or through Synagogue or Mosque, or any other institutionalized religion. But he does feel strongly that communities of faith are needed to sustain a spiritual core to these movements.
John Fife 45:24
Yeah, and there are two components to that. One is ritual, right? You need a ritual that renews that spirituality on a regular basis. Secondly, you have to have a community of spirituality that enables you and me and everybody else to sustain that. And to, as Jim said, do justice, not just petition other people to do justice.
Adam Huggins 45:57
Now, you might disagree with John. And I can say personally, that I am one of those secular folks. I'm incredibly wary of institutionalized faith communities. And you don't have to look very far in my part of the world to see the incredible harms that the Church has done to communities throughout history. On the other hand, John and Jim success with the Sanctuary Movement speaks for itself. And I think it's safe to say that Jim, the solitary Quaker, wouldn't have made it very far without choosing to come into the fold of the Church with John.
John Fife 46:31
My reading of history is that Church or Synagogue, or Mosque, or Temple, or whatever the faith community has been, has always had a choice: to align itself with Empire, or to align itself with the liberation of people and ecosystems. And the church has always been at its worst when it aligned itself and blessed Empire. And it's always been at its best when it has built community and movements to resist Empire.
Adam Huggins 47:12
In this way, both Jim and John challenged us to be faithful, to make covenants with our human and more-than-human relations, and to hold fast to them as part of a community.
John Fife 47:27
I just want to advocate to all those individual spiritual people. You can't do it without community, and you better start understanding that.
Adam Huggins 47:52
Like so many people these past few years, I've been transfixed by the incredible violence and suffering that characterizes the US-Mexico border. And for that matter, border regions across the planet, from the island of Nauru to the Mediterranean Sea. It's clear that these abject spaces have been intentionally constructed to perpetuate permanent states of exception, where both human and more-than-human lives are forfeit. The cruelty and contempt of the Trump administration brought these ongoing harms into sharp relief. But it neither created nor consecrated the border. In effect, we all did. And we all do by continuing to accept bordering regimes as legitimate. The new Biden administration won't do anything to change this simple fact.
Carlos Tarin 48:44
I think there was a lot of optimism that with Joe Biden getting elected things we're going to take like a complete 180. And that hasn't really been the case. I mean, granted, I will take Joe Biden over Donald Trump any day of the week. But I think a lot of the complicated issues – around immigration, around the border, around securitization of the border and militarization of the border – Those things are still the same, if not worse, because now they're not sort of being catalyzed in the national discourse.
Adam Huggins 49:18
Several layers below the national discourse, though. There are those who argue that borders can and should be abolished; that we should live in a world where no one is illegal. Activist and author Harsha Walia has argued that border imperialism is a strategy to divide and conquer what would otherwise be a multi-ethnic, multicultural international working class. She's argued that even liberal and progressive movements tend to draw a false distinction between so-called "deserving migrants" or asylum seekers, and so-called "undeserving migrants", economic migrants. You may remember from Episode Two, that the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s was guilty of this, in its own efforts to seek social licence.
Adam Huggins 50:03
Personally, I find these arguments incredibly compelling as a matter of principle. Although, of course, the implications of a borderless world are immense. And in an increasingly conspiratorial and nationalistic society. Those of us who share these views are clearly in the minority. But if we accept that, for now, borders will continue to be a necessary evil. It's important for all of us to recognize that the violence will continue. There's simply no way to reconcile these artificial divides with the breathtaking complexity and diversity of life on a changing planet. And with the destabilization of ecosystems occurring at a global scale, that's only going to become clearer. Because the only recourse that any life form has to intolerable conditions is to move.
John Fife 50:54
There are more people migrating on the face of the earth today than ever before, because of climate change. And we're going to be in deep trouble on both counts of climate change and the ecology of the earth, and on how we deal with human movement because of it.
Stacey Sowards 51:14
This is a wicked problem, if we want to call it a problem. Like, you can't just reform immigration as a policy or a set of laws in the United States. But if you try to address the root causes of migration patterns from Mexico, from Central America, we're talking about poverty, violence, corruption. Those aren't problems that you just solve in one presidential administration, right?
Adam Huggins 51:42
For now, the onus is on us to do whatever we can to provide Sanctuary,
Gary Paul Nabhan 51:47
Why are people coming from Central America? Poverty and social unrest in their own communities. Why would we not want to help them? Why do we think that they should be further marginalized – rather than doing what Americans aspire to do all along, but we failed so miserably the last few years to do in any comprehensive way. And that's to help people in need.
Adam Huggins 52:12
We can do that by organizing through faith communities, or through aid work. And we can also do that, by making the connections between caring for the earth and caring for its people.
Francesca Claverie 52:23
We would hope that by the nature of people wanting to support the ecosystem and the world that we live in – And when you think about migrating butterflies, and migrating bats, and migrating jaguars, the whole gamut of what comes through here – that with that, as people learn to connect to the landscapes where they live, whoever they are, and whatever they believe, politically, you would also support and want to connect with migrating people that are coming through this area for all kinds of reasons and having to use the very same landscapes that we're living in– that we all want to be healthy, that we all care about. The work that supports the migration of life and biodiversity should also support the work of humans, because we're all part of the same system.
Adam Huggins 53:07
At this point, it's clear that conditions are going to get worse, ecologically and likely also politically and economically. A certain amount of this is already baked in, as climate scientists like to say, and we're already seeing people, communities and whole nations closing themselves off as a response to fear.
Gary Paul Nabhan 53:26
But the point is, people have those those fears. Now we're in a political atmosphere where fear politics is demoralizing people, but fear still plays out. And we just have to be brave enough, as Jim and John have their whole lives, to say "I just don't accept those boundaries are ephemeral. They're... they're hurting people more than they're helping."
Adam Huggins 54:01
Perhaps you think that this is only an issue that is playing out in the Borderlands, or out in the desert, that these are just the stories of people adapting to life in harsh circumstances. But I've come to believe that we will all need to learn to become Nepantleras – to become border crossers. We all must learn to transcend these divides between the human and the more than human, between settler and Indigenous, between black and white, legal and illegal, ecological and cultural. And until we can do that, we need to do what we can to heal the open wounds all around us.
John Fife 54:39
Sanctuary for All Life means that we have to preserve a viable ecosystem so that human beings and human life – as well as all life, all species – can not only survive, but thrive by the end of the 21st century.
Adam Huggins 55:03
That's the wisdom that I've been able to glean from my time in the desert. Take what you will from it. As Jim would have said, This is no teaching. But it sure as hell is a testament.
Adam Huggins 55:50
Goatwalker is produced by myself, Adam Huggins and Mendel Skulski for Future Ecologies. Ilana Fonariov is the Associate Producer for the series.
Adam Huggins 55:59
For photos, citations and more information about the people and events described in the series, visit futureecologies.net.
Adam Huggins 56:10
Before we continue with the credits, I want to extend my deepest gratitude to everybody who spoke with me for this series, and to everyone who is working to create a world where no one is illegal, where all life is sacred, and where Saguaros grow together with Juniper trees.
Adam Huggins 56:29
In this episode, you heard Dr. Carlos Tarin. Dr. Stacey Sowards, Dr. Sarah Upton, Gary Paul Naban, Francesca Claverie, and John Fife. Narration was by Ana Zavala.
Adam Huggins 56:45
I highly recommend you check out any one of Gary's many books. In this episode, we discussed Mesquite: An Arboreal Love Affair, and Food From the Radical Center. The Rutledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity is available on their website. And as mentioned previously, both of Jim Corbett's books are being reprinted. You can order the expanded second edition of Sanctuary for All Life on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. And if you'd like to be informed when the new edition of Goatwalking is available via Kindle Direct Publishing, you can email goatwalking2021@gmail.com
Adam Huggins 57:21
Music was by Satorian, People with Bodies, Hidden Sky, and Sunfish Moon Light. The Goatwalker theme is by Ryder Thomas White, and Sunfish Moon Light.
Adam Huggins 57:33
Special thanks to Teresa Madison, Susan Tollefson, John Fife, Pat Corbett, Nancy Ferguson, Tom Orum, Gary Paul Nabhan, Gita Bodner, Amanda Howard and the University of Arizona, Sadie Couture, Phil Buller, Danny Elmes, Tema Milstein, Jose Castro-Sotomayor and Susan L. Newman.
Adam Huggins 57:58
Future Ecologies is an independent production supported by our patrons. To join them go to patreon.com/futureeecologies. Thank you for supporting us.
Adam Huggins 58:09
This episode and this series was recorded on the traditional territory of the Tohono O’odham, and produced on the unceded, shared, and asserted territory of the Penelakut, Hwlitsum, Lelum Sar Augh Ta Naogh, and other Hul’qumi’num speaking peoples.
Adam Huggins 58:26
As Mendel said off the top: That's all for this series, and for this season. Thank you for listening, and stick with us. We'll be back in your ears by the New Year. Take care everyone.