So Trump is stupid enough to spend billions building a border wall through the Big Bend region. The Guardian has an article today on this. Big Bend was the first national park I worked at. Ten years ago, I wrote about why this would be geologically stupid. This is one of the examples of the disconnect between “rural” and “urban”. People who spend their lives in the altered landscapes of our culture have little understanding of how natural systems work and tend to dismiss the concerns of those of us trying to speak for the land. So urban-based news media tends to focus on the effects on animal migration routes, disruption to residents’ daily life, cost. They don’t understand the implication of the fundamental reason this construction is so stupid. So I was delighted that this Guardian article finally included reference to it near the end of their article.
Alvarado fears the wall will destroy this land and the ranching lifestyle she cherishes. She witnessed the consequences first-hand in 2009, when a border wall built upriver on her aunt’s property turned into a dam during a storm.
“One good rain flooded out 1,000 acres of forage land and forced ranchers out of the area,” said Alvarado.
She fears the same thing will occur on her land, which is split by a massive arroyo, or arid creek bed “10 times the size of the Rio Grande.”
How can we pass “upward” understanding of the grassroots to those who spend their lives on concrete? Please pass this article on to others who might not have heard about this aspect of a 30 foot high, steel-slatted wall crossing the desert. Of course, one solution is to not build across the arroyos. But then what’s the point of the wall?
Bruce Hulbert
The inevitability of flooding in such areas would be obvious to any civil engineer. One would think that at least one would have reviewed the plans for such areas, and disapproved such nonsense. On the other hand—from a cynical point of view (I take no pleasure in having to say this)—it makes some kind of dystopian ‘sense’ if your real objective is to award lucrative building contracts to curry favor and political donations from dishonest construction contractors; stage photo ops & claim bragging rights so one can claim to have “done something significant” to a naive public (e.g., MAGAs and citified conservatives) in the right-wing press. The outrage of ranchers (they’re relatively few, after all), and the devastating effects on wildlife are of no importance to Trump or to the sycophantic incompetents he’s appointed—illegally—to run/degrade/destroy all public agencies.