This story originally appeared in Earth Island Journal.
On the 104-degree Fahrenheit afternoon of July 26, nearly 100 people piled in cars, vans, and buses had braved the hour-long drive from Ajo, Arizona, to the Quitobaquito oasis at the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. The oasis stands among the most biodiverse and ecologically significant landscapes in Arizona’s National Park system, where Indigenous cultural features may reach back 16,000 years. But it also stands in the shadows of a 30-foot-tall metal wall along the international boundary line, one to be complemented by a second so-called “smart wall” that will require the removal or destruction of even more native plants than the first.
Families from the Tohono O’odham Nation as well as Sonora, Mexico, and Arizona border communities had come together that July day for a Hands Around the Springs ceremony organized by the International Sonoran Desert Alliance (ISDA). Founded in 1993, the nonprofit works to “hold space for and convene stakeholders around topics of preservation and stewardship of the Sonoran Desert.”
Just before sunset, as everyone gathered around the shores of the acre-sized pool in the oasis or waded into its warm waters, Hia-C’ed O’odham elder Lorraine Eiler, an octogenarian descendent of former residents of the oasis and one of ISDA’s founders, offered this blessing in her native language and in English:
“Let us offer a prayer to our Creator to protect this place that is now being threatened by the construction of a second wall… It has always been here for the animals and plants and all the rest of us. It is the heart of the Sonoran Desert and yet is has now been put at risk.”
As the sun went down in the west and a full moon rose over the waters, people quietly strolled back to the vehicles, arm in arm, carrying babies and helping seniors navigate the trail in their walkers. From infants eight months of age, to elders over 80, citizens from four cultures in two countries — Tohono O’odham, Hia-C’ed O’odham, Anglo-American, and Mexican — held fast to their shared values. They demonstrated that like the proverbial tree standing by the water, their faith in one another “shall not be moved.”
I have been present for many such transborder gatherings, including a comparable event held at the Quitobaquito oasis on October 4, 2020, a day before the border wall went up here. That day, youth from both sides of the international boundary had run 35 miles from other springs to carry sacramental water to “replenish” and “heal” the sacred oasis after months of construction workers pumping 84,000 gallons a day from it to build a concrete footing for a wall that would block wildlife corridors and salt pilgrimage trails that had been used for millennia.
But Quitobaquito oasis is not the only landscape where transborder collaborations for environmental conservation and social justice have regularly taken place. Other such collaborations, strewn like rosary beads along the 2,000-mile US-Mexico boundary, include Friendship Park near San Diego just north of Tijuana (inaugurated by First Lady Pat Nixon in 1971) and the annual Hands Across the Border celebration by the cities of Brownsville, Texas, and Matamoros, Mexico, that has been going on since the 1950s.
These collaborations are about far more than lip service to international solidarity. They are focused on assuring there are tangible results and include efforts to maintain and even restore transboundary wildlife corridors for fish, wild turkeys, bats, badgers, jaguars, mountain lions, ocelots, wild turkeys, and other wildlife. They are about safeguarding a chain of sanctuary-like stopovers we call “nectar corridors” where white-winged doves, rufous hummingbirds, and monarch butterflies take refuge for a night or two to replenish their energy along routes that take them hundreds if not thousands of miles along their journeys.
Partnering organizations on both sides of the border share protocols for tracking monarch migration, planting out milkweed meadows, and assessing the population sizes of rare mud turtles, desert pupfish, and the Sonoran pronghorn.
In short, these cross-border alliances are focused on assuring that the critically-important ecological interactions taking place on the flanks of at least 10 of the 55 sky islands straddling the international boundary line aren’t disrupted.
They also stretch out east and west to both sides of the continental backbone or watershed divide of North America. Of course, this continental watershed line is far more ancient — and will last far longer — than any human-constructed wall intended to disrupt its ecological flows.
“Let us offer a prayer to our Creator to protect this place that is now being threatened by the construction of a second wall… It has always been here for the animals and plants and all the rest of us. It is the heart of the Sonoran Desert and yet is has now been put at risk.”
— Lorraine Eiler, Hia-C’ed O’odham elder
Years ago, coming back from a global wildlife conservation meeting in Mexico, I took a flight from Mexico City to Phoenix that routed us over a string of summits along the Continental Divide. We soared northward over a thousand miles of the peaks, forested mesas, and barrancas known as the Sierra Madre Occidental. Out the window, I glimpsed one steep drainage after another, plummeting to coastal plains that extend to the Pacific shores of northwest Mexico. It was my first time getting an aerial view of the region where, as an ecologist, I have done fieldwork for much of my adult life. And as I looked out over this wild watershed divide, I was struck by how naturally my eyes simply followed the water.
At the Sierra Madre’s northern edge, near Mexico’s border with the US, I could see where the long cordillera of the “Mother Mountains” splinters into a scattering of smaller ranges, like the Ajo Mountains, which form the eastern horizon above Quitobaquito. To the east, I could spot the highly-conserved Diamond A Ranch in the Animas Mountains near the Arizona-New Mexico border in the region called the Malpais Borderlands. On the far horizon, the many ranges in the Big Bend of Texas rose above the desert haze.
From its rugged summits to its lush lowland springs, the Madrean Sky Island region is among the richest clusters for plants, wildlife, and vibrant Indigenous cultures remaining in North America. There are currently seven Indigenous Peoples — the Pascua Yaqui/Yoeme, the Tohono O’odham, the Cocopah/Cucapá, the Kumeyaay/Kumiai, the Pai Pai, the Western Apache/Nde, and the Kickapoo/Kikapú — whose territories and ancestral lands spread out on both sides of the border. People from all of these communities have legal right of passage across the border. And there are thousands of square miles of wildlands and managed tribal rangelands within 70 miles of the international boundary that are still relatively unfragmented.
For over five decades, the 7,000 documented plant and animal species of the Madrean Sky Islands have been capably managed by a coalition of Indigenous stewards from sovereign nations like the Tohono O’odham, Western Apache, and Pascua Yaqui, Mexican and American ranchers, professional biologists and conservationists, federal land managers, and citizen scientists.
Although each of these constituencies offers its unique brand of action on the ground, all are committed to protecting and restoring wildlife habitat and passage in the borderlands. One curious condition in this binational region is that conservation is not necessarily dominated by federal and state agencies — all land managers still play vital roles in bioregional efforts.
Bioregional alliances of private land owners doing voluntary actions without prodding — like those of the three-decade-old Malpais Borderlands Group — exemplify land-based families that have chosen to do the right thing for sustaining soil, water, plant cover, wildlife, and rural communities on 78,000 acres of conservation easements. One of the Malpais cofounders, rancher Bill McDonald, coined the term “the radical center” for this convergence of interests, for just behavior is far more “radical” than the Far Right or Far Left.
“However long a barrier stands at the border, most of these species will continue to survive merely because of the vast expanse of wildlands on either side … Let’s be very loud about the richness, depth, and complexity of the cultures, ecosystems, and biodiversity that come into contact in this geography. The wall should not define the borderlands.”
— Rodrigo Sierra Corona, executive director, Borderlands Restoration Network
Verlon Jose, chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation, who has family and tribal ties in both Arizona and Sonora, Mexico, has a straightforward outlook on the line that ostensibly divides his people’s ancestral territory. “We don’t see borders,” he told me last fall, as we walked through a saguaro forest beneath a mountain called Baboquivari Peak, one of the most sacred sites in the tribe’s cosmology.
In June this year, Tohono O’odham Nation filed a lawsuit against the US Department of Homeland Security for directing the construction of 62 miles of border wall across the tribe’s reservation lands without its consent. The suit was accompanied by 11 declarations, including by Jose, several other Indigenous spiritual leaders, archaeologists, wildlife biologists, and me attesting to the presence of sacred plants and sites in the construction area.
The proposed border wall could “jeopardize traditional plant gathering habitats and camping areas where O’odham have developed spiritual relationships with a multitude of sacred plants over millennia,” I wrote in my declaration.
After years of quiet negotiation, the Tohono O’odham Legislative Council had only recently entered a unique co-stewardship agreement with the US Bureau of Land Management to jointly administer the Baboquivari Peak Wilderness Area and another area surrounding Kitt Peak, both sacred mountains. Parts of these wilderness areas — sadly excluded from the reservation’s boundaries more than a century ago — now form a corridor for safe passage of wildlife, especially endangered and threatened felines, to at least as far as the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge right along the border.
The Western Apache, Kickapoo, and Kumeyaay Nations have also been involved in cross-border recovery efforts for species like Mexican wolves, monarch butterflies, and freshwater fish. And I have been fortunate enough to work with the Pascua Yaqui as they’ve begun rewilding some 5,000 acres of degraded ranchland, seeding hardy native desert plants under the protective shelter of mesquites. Although their reservation doesn’t sit along the border — it’s some 50 miles north, outside Tucson — the Yaqui, like other Sky Islands custodians, recognize that without preserving and restoring habitat on either side, any border-wall passage we create won’t matter.
Rodrigo Sierra Corona shares that view. A native of Queretaro, Mexico, he’s the executive director of the Patagonia-based Borderlands Restoration Network, which, among many other efforts, runs the native-plant seed center that supplies the Yaqui. “However long a barrier stands at the border,” he says, “most of these species will continue to survive merely because of the vast expanse of wildlands on either side… Let’s be very loud about the richness, depth, and complexity of the cultures, ecosystems, and biodiversity that come into contact in this geography,” Sierra Corona says. “The wall should not define the borderlands.”
He and other dedicated stewards of this region say that story of the borderlands should be not of crisis but of connectivity.
That is the kind of story International Sonoran Desert Alliance participants on both sides of the border are weaving together and telling. They do so through words at transborder gatherings like the one at Quitobaquito Springs in July, and through many affirming actions on the ground that take root despite the daunting political and ecological challenges to their shared homelands. Their efforts are rooted in a profound appreciation for all that the land has to offer.
Renowned Hispanic conservation leader Ernie Atencio uses a sonorous Spanish word to describe this cultural appreciation: “querencia” — a kind of love that extends beyond humans alone into caring for all creatures in a beloved place.
Gary Paul Nabhan is a political ecologist, ethnobotanist, and Franciscan brother who lives within sight of the lights at the US-Mexico border. He has been engaged in field studies of sacred springs, biocultural diversity, and cross-cultural conservation collaborations across the border for 50 years. His latest book, Water in the Desert, was released this summer by Milkweed Editions.