- The trail of environmental destruction along Arizona's
border with Mexico is growing at increasingly rapid rates, overwhelming
land managers and making a mockery of the wilderness designation those
lands carry.
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- Vast stretches of borderland in southwestern Arizona,
deemed pristine respites by Congress, are pockmarked with the debris of
illegal immigration from rusting cars to the rutted trails they and their
Border Patrol pursuers cut into the fragile desert crust.
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- When measured against the threats to homeland security
or the real risk of imperiling human life, wilderness protections rank
a distant third in priority. advertisement
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- This has roiled some conservationists, who complain that
Border Patrol activities have pushed too far into the desert interior while
intruding more and more on the natural environment.
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- They're especially critical of a Border Patrol plan that
proposes to expand off-road operations, introduce towering stadium-style
lights in critical enforcement areas and build more roads and fences.
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- The public-land managers who run these wilderness areas
say they're in the difficult position of trying to protect natural resources
and wildlife while acknowledging the needs of border security.
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- So wilderness advocates are now pushing to move control
efforts closer to the border. They hope the Border Patrol can contain the
illegal tide without lapping far into the desert, although they acknowledge
it would take more money to get increased manpower and better technology.
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- "I think you can solve a lot of it by looking into
Mexico," said Fred Goodsell, founder of an Ajo-based group he calls
Sonoran Desert Protectors.
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- A volunteer for the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge,
Goodsell argues that the Border Patrol should be equipped with detection
devices that can be pointed south, instead of north, with the idea of intercepting
undocumented immigrants as soon as they cross the international border.
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- The Border Patrol acknowledges that control efforts close
to the border would stop much of the damage farther into the desert.
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- What's lacking, however, is money, not only for technology
but for the increased manpower and other equipment needed to draw a tighter
net around a porous border, said Joe Brigman, spokesman for the Border
Patrol's Yuma sector.
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- The patrol agency tries to be environmentally sensitive,
he said, by limiting its off-road usage as much as possible and relying
on airplanes and helicopters for patrol.
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- But they've drawn scorn from some conservationists for
the use of Humvees, a practice that Brigman defends as necessary to protect
officer safety.
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- "The bad guys in this whole scenario are not the
Border Patrol," he said. "It's the illegal-alien smugglers and
the drug smugglers. They're the ones coming in illegally."
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- Land managers say the shifting trends in border policy
have brought intensive and intrusive enforcement efforts to remote areas.
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- "Border Patrol does cause a lot of environmental
damage, but imagine where we'd be if the Border Patrol were not out there,"
said Roger Di Rosa, manager of the Cabeza Prieta refuge.
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- Besides, he said, how do you argue against national security?
The person who gets into the United States because the Border Patrol had
its hands tied by environmental concerns could very well be the terrorist
who will ignite the next Sept. 11-type attack, he said, citing a common
concern.
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- There are ways to respect wilderness and the environmental
protections it entails while still providing security, said Superintendent
Kathleen Billings of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.
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- A prime example is the vehicle-barrier fence along Organ
Pipe's border with Mexico. So far, 18 miles of a steel-and-concrete fence
are in place, blocking cars, SUVs and trucks, many of them carrying bulky
loads of drugs. Billings said the results were immediate.
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- "It essentially has stopped all illegal-vehicle
traffic," she said, pointing to the fence's hip-high steel crossbar.
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- "But it has increased the vehicles crossing at the
edges."
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- And that is a metaphor for the larger problem along the
border in southwestern Arizona.
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- Di Rosa calls it "shifting on your neighbor."
Put up a barrier in one spot, he said, and the immigrant traffic simply
moves to a less-restricted location.
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- There also are long stretches along the border where
normal post-and-wire fencing have been stolen.
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- Even if the entire U.S.-Mexican border were equipped
with the vehicle-barrier fence (a costly impossibility, given Organ Pipe
plans to spend $17 million to build 29 miles of fence), there would still
be foot traffic, the Border Patrol's Brigman says.
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- "There's tremendous amounts of problems caused by
the walk-in traffic," he said.
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- A recent tour of the wilderness areas in southwestern
Arizona gave ample proof of that. In Organ Pipe, rusting tin cans, shattered
plastic water jugs, socks and human waste accumulate near popular watering
holes. Spray-painted graffiti deface rocks and cactuses alike.
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- Last year, the National Parks Conservation Association
named Organ Pipe one of the nation's 10 most-endangered national parks
due to the stresses of border traffic.
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- Di Rosa is shopping around the idea that the cumulative
effects of border problems, from safety concerns to terrorism prevention
to environmental damage, amount to a disaster, and that such a disaster
should qualify for emergency federal assistance.
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- "It would be a way for the land-management agencies
here, which are way overtaxed, to get some kind of funding to deal with
this," he said.
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- http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0325borderenviro.html
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