TRANSITION AND TRANSFORMATION
The unexpected action of deep listening can create a space of transformation capable of shattering complacency and despair.
—Terry Tempest Williams
It’s an interesting story how I ended up in front of that discarded border barrier—the one covered with purple flowers—where this book begins. At the Paris climate summit I went to an end-of-day briefing panel that paired John Liu, a Chinese American filmmaker best known for a film titled Hope in a Changing Climate, with French anthropologist Barbara Glowzecski and Rob Hopkins, from the United Kingdom, of the Transition Network. Liu began to address the difference between “transition and transformation” in the spacious basement of a Paris hotel where they were giving a daily press conference.
“What is wealth? Wealth is not having more stuff but having more time so we can work less and spend more time with our families.” Liu said this after explaining that the whole global system was out of whack. There was economic value placed on things, often “useless things,” that were bought and sold, but the natural resources that we depend on to sustain life were not given any value at all. “We’ve devalued the source of life,” he said. Things like fresh water, soil, and biodiversity are where true value lies. If human economy were based on ecological function, he said, human efforts would be radically different than they are now.
“We need more time so we can have lemonade under the fig tree,” he told the audience in Paris to spontaneous, enthusiastic applause.
When I heard that Liu was going to be in the hypermilitarized U.S.-Mexico borderlands, I drove south from Tucson to Patagonia, Arizona, with David Hodges of Cuenca Los Ojos, the project Liu had come to see and directly experience. It was through this project, using the ancient traditions of water retention, that residents have transformed a good swath of land where native grasses, water, and animals were returning. It was on this transforming land where the discarded border barrier lay festooned with little purple flowers.
In her book Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit states that people often aren’t even conscious of their successes, or how the world can change in unimaginable ways in short periods of time. She talks about a type of activism in which people expect instant gratification, a type of civic engagement that focuses so much on the negative that we might miss the accomplishments, big and small.
Liu’s documentation of ecological restoration in the age of climate disruption fits Solnit’s vision quite well. In the film Hope in a Changing Climate, one part showed a parched area of the Loess Plateau in China. After the community came together and replanted trees and natural vegetation, stabilized the soil, and started using terraced agriculture, a sort of lush miracle emerged. The results told a new tale, reversing for a moment the Anthropocene-era narrative of degradation and doom. The vegetation created conditions such that water didn’t run off but was retained by the soil, via slow absorption. The plants and trees sequestered the carbon in the atmosphere. Agricultural yields increased to a much higher level than before. Liu went to Rwanda and Ethiopia and found similar miraculous tales of restoration. At one point the film depicted the rush of freshwater in a creek in Ethiopia that Liu said spontaneously emerged with the success of vegetation and water retention. His message was not only that it is possible to restore a degraded landscape, but that around the world people were coming together to do just that in an age of climate devastation.
This sort of ecological restoration was just one of countless ways that people could come together to create something new. Other ways could include the solidarity and humanitarianism of projects epitomized by—to take southern Arizona as just one example—No More Deaths, Samaritans, Humane Borders, and others that reject militarized borders and their global classification system, and offer hospitality and assistance to people who find themselves in dire circumstances, no matter who they are. In the era of intensifying climate change, such cross-border mutual assistance will be more important than ever before. However, it is in cross-border organizing—which rejects the nation-state frame—the real hope for change is located, defying a world that is artificially divided, coming together in potentially miraculous ways.
Now John Liu stood on top of a ridge in southern Arizona, near the town of Patagonia. There was a cool breeze that accompanies the late afternoon sun in March, painting the grass a golden hue. In terms of climate impacts, this was a place where large wildfires have become commonplace, where water issues were perennial, and where climate disruption and the most massive border surveillance structure collide. Alas, where we stood thinking about the ocelots, bobcats, mountain lions, and even jaguars that were at home in an environment dotted with mesquite, ash, hackberry, and walnut trees, we were only 30 miles away from the U.S.-Mexico border, and on aboriginal Tohono O’odham land. It was here that a muscular, spotted jaguar known as El Jefe was caught on a wildlife camera, at the time the only known jaguar in the United States. It didn’t elude me that the jaguar could have been watching us as we looked across the corridor to the Santa Rita Mountains and its highest peak, Mount Wrightson. “The jaguar,” Randy Serraglio of the Center for Biological Diversity said, “is a border issue.”
In the corridor there were hawks and vultures, kingfishers and kingbirds, hummingbirds and the magnificent elf owl that could be watching us with its ever-inquisitive face. It was wild, truly wild. The landscape seemed to drift off forever until it finally hit the mountain range. As in much of Southern Arizona, the landscape had the ability to break open the mind, create a sense of spaciousness, and induce new ways of thinking and perceiving.
“Is the meaning of life,” Liu asked an audience later that night in a Patagonia theater, “to buy and sell?” He answered himself: “I don’t think so. The Earth is beautiful. The people here are beautiful. All living things are sacred.” Liu described the Chinese pictographic characters for crisis that contained, he told the audience, “danger and opportunity.” This was a time of grave danger, Liu said, but it was also the opportunity to change.
“So you CAN’T go on in the way it is happening now. On a planetary scale, humanity is going to have to shift, there is going to be transformational change. And it will either happen consciously and carefully in a way that the best things about civilization can be saved, or it will be a really dangerous period in which some horrible things are going to occur.”
A TALE OF TWO WALLS
Professor Zoe Hammer of Prescott College asked a question in her Masters of Social Justice and Human Right class that made her students laugh. “What if the U.S. Border Patrol were put to work making community gardens?” At first the comment seemed outlandish. I imagined a border landscape of flowers and vegetables instead of barriers and Border Patrol. Never had the idea of two countries being so neighborly seemed so foolish. But there was a deeper undertone to Hammer’s question. When you looked at the overall budget, the money and resources allocated to the Border Patrol and its accompanying apparatus, couldn’t the money be spent more wisely? Couldn’t housing, education, health, or other human services use a boost in resources?
And Hammer’s comment went even further—was there a way to transform the border walls to something else, recapacitate the labor force performing that one task, and have its members dedicate their time and energy to the creation, production, and reproduction of another task? If you interpret community gardening to mean ecological restoration, and understand that this needs to happen on massive levels, including cross-border areas, to begin to restore degraded landscapes, then the suggestion suddenly doesn’t seem ludicrous at all. In fact, it seems like a reasonable, rational possibility with at least enough merit be seriously debated and discussed. Hammer’s point was that it was possible to imagine a new world, to transform the old into something new. Things can no longer stay the same.
As writer Betsy Hartmann asks: “Might the challenge of climate change provide an opportunity to rethink the meaning of development and economic growth in ways that promote redistribution of power and wealth while simultaneously protecting the environment?”1
Liu insisted that the whole nature of the economy needs to be changed from a transactional economy to a trust economy, from the lever of money to the lever of ecological function. According to Liu, our current economy is destabilizing the climate conditions on which all livings things depend. Instead of addressing the root problem, border militarization simply reinforces the destabilization by reinforcing the status quo.
It was about a month after I met with Liu that I arrived where we began, at the border barrier that had been ripped from the ground by Hurricane Odile and become covered with cobwebs and flowers, almost like a beautiful work of art. About a quarter mile up the wash known as Silver Creek, on the actual Mexico-U.S. boundary, Homeland Security had erected a new barrier to replace it. Behind the barrier, I could see an idling green-striped Border Patrol vehicle, and inside it an agent seemed to be watching us. I was at the San Bernardino Ranch in Sonora, just east of Agua Prieta.
For a moment, I realized I had in the same eyeshot both the border barrier (backed by the agent) and the gabions—the galvanized wire cages packed with rocks, embedded 18 feet deep to shape the contour of the streambed and riverbank. The gabions almost looked like intricate stone walls themselves. They were part of an ancient technique of strategically piling rocks to slow down the flow of water across the land. For the region, after years of mechanized farming, cattle production, and now a nasty drought, this once parched and barren landscape could begin to absorb this precious water, replenish the soil with life.
I was looking at two walls. One barrier was meant to keep people out. The other was based on the economy of ecological function that Liu was talking about. Before the gabions were built, rushing water from monsoon storms would take topsoil and leave cutting erosion. Now, there was water year-round.
I was with Juan Manuel Pérez, the foreman of the organization Cuenca Los Ojos (CLO) and in charge of 45,000 acres of restoration projects spread throughout the region. He was dressed in jeans and a white cowboy hat. While the Border Patrol agent eyed us, Pérez gestured to the reviving landscape around him. It was not only what was on the surface—the native grasses and sprouting desert willows and cottonwoods—that was so remarkable. It was also what was below: a water table that had risen 30 feet in the middle of a brutal 15-year drought that everywhere else was sucking the land dry. All throughout the borderlands and Arizona, after years of hotter weather and less precipitation, the grass had withered, the earth had cracked, and animals had died. Yet, water was recharging even 10 to 15 miles downstream from San Bernardino Ranch into Mexico, to places where people hadn’t seen it for decades. From brown to green, from completely dry to lush: to me, it seemed like a miracle.
In this microcosm along a remote area of border, it was clear that these two contrasting visions embodied the future struggle that was upon the world. As the Trump administration moved forward with promises of hyper-racialized border building, you could say what I saw that day on this ranch was a tale of two walls: one about restoration, the other about exclusion.
We were in a place where the Rocky Mountains meet the Sierra Madre, where the Chihuahua and Sonoran deserts merge, a place of wondrous biodiversity. This habitat was home to the most species of bees in the world, and the most species of butterflies in North America.
However, due to the drought and degradation, it was an area where, according to most U.S. national security assessments, water shortages and other climate shocks could propel mass migrations of people to the United States from this region, from places like the community of 29 families located approximately 10 miles upstream called 18 de Agosto. When resident Alberto Teran started farming there in 1976, he told me, “We had very little water.” They had dug wells in the parched land, but it was difficult to get the water they needed for harvest and animals. Because of this, when the Cuenca Los Ojos (CLO) projects began in the 1990s, 18 de Agosto was dead set against it, thinking, as Teran put it, that the 40,000 trincheras (small rockpile dams) and 50 gabion dams “were going to leave us without water.”
Who could blame them for thinking this? Mexico had just entered the NAFTA era; the country’s natural resources were put up for sale to the highest bidder, and the Mexican government was cutting subsidies and credit to small farmers like Teran. Add to this the aridity of the changing climate, and you had a classic example of sociologist Christian Parenti’s “catastrophic convergence,” a fusion of political, economic, and ecological displacement. People started to leave—including Teran’s four children—for factory work in the city, or for the United States.
Then the miracles started to happen. A year later, the community began to notice that they had more water, and it was retained for longer periods of time. Water started to appear in places it had never been found before. Teran told me the river began to run year-round again. He told me again the miracle: in the middle of the drought, the water table in the San Bernardino Valley began to rise, while everywhere else water tables were falling.
And the water table, as Perez said back at the borderline, “doesn’t respect the international boundary.” It rose on the United States side as well. On both sides of the border, there was a return of biodiversity, biomass, and accumulation of organic material, the essence of ecological function.
Behind the discarded border barrier, David Hodges—pointing out not only the cottonwoods and willows, but also the native grasses—said that we had passed the “tipping point.” The wording struck me, because in the literature of climate projections, tipping point is almost always used in reference to a catastrophic point of no return—accelerating methane release, ice sheet disintegration, mass extinction, intensifying superstorms, and endless droughts. For Hodges, the tipping point meant that diversity was overcoming the barren blight, that water was coming year-round, that birds were present, even the glossy ibis with its beautiful curved bill. “We need to do this for future generations,” Pérez told me.
This was just a small, increasingly fertile example of the possibilities, but there was something about this ruined border wall—filled with arachnids, surrounded by a restoration project, and menaced by an idling Border Patrol vehicle—that provided a glimpse of the common crossroads, not only in the U.S. borderlands, but throughout the world.
The second time I stood at the Silver Creek Wash, instead of the Border Patrol I saw a distant surveillance tower that hadn’t been there a few months before. I assumed it was the Elbit Systems tower, one of 52 such towers (as part of a potentially billion-dollar contract for the private Israeli company) that DHS was constructing in the southern Arizona borderlands, equipped with high-powered night-vision and thermal energy cameras as well as complex radar systems.
This time I was with Alberto Teran from 18 de Agosto. This tower was in my view as he told me about the water now flowing year round in the stream through his community, how they were going to continue the water restoration project there, how they were trying to revive the agriculture.
Back in Tucson later that week, thinking of that surveillance tower and 18 de Agosto, I asked one of the founders of Cuenca Los Ojos, Valer Austin, given the success of the restoration at San Bernardino, what could CLO and other restoration groups in the borderlands do with the close to $20 billion designated to border and immigration enforcement each year? When she heard that number she, like many others, said, “Oh my God.” Then quickly, “That money could be put to better use.”
Austin said that CLO had invested millions and had restored a big swath of flora and fauna.
“But what if you had a hundred times that money? You would get a whole river system to run. It would expand like ripples, out and out and out. It would touch people for miles on either side of this river.”
“With that kind of money,” Austin continued, “we could restore a lot of streams that on the ground would alter climate change in the region. It would make a huge difference. It would change the economics [of the region]. It would change health. It would change everything on the border.
“It would make all the difference between life and death.”