An Attack on the Border
by Christopher Sharp and Randy Gimblett
Lands adjacent to the U.S.-Mexico border are undergoing dramatic changes in their social and environmental history. Undocumented immigration, especially the most recent wave of people entering the United States through Mexico, is a complex topic that has dominated regional and national-level political discussions for the past decade or more. The biophysical impacts from unauthorized traffic through Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument (ORPI), which shares 30 miles of the international border between Arizona and Sonora, demonstrate that public lands are at the center of this issue. In recent years, ORPI and other public lands have become increasingly popular locations for drug smugglers and undocumented aliens (UDAs) crossing from Mexico into the U.S. In the mid-1990s, U.S. Border Patrol and U.S. Customs increased enforcement activities in more accessible urban areas of Arizona (e.g., Douglas and Nogales). These efforts ultimately diverted large numbers of UDAs and drug smugglers into more remote areas, including several national park units. A dramatic increase in resource impacts has resulted from illegal entry, law enforcement, and homeland security initiatives along the U.S.-Mexico border. These impacts threaten the unique flora and fauna of transboundary ecosystems such as the Sonoran Desert. In addition, these impacts have posed a considerable challenge to land stewards charged with developing conservation strategies and managing these unique and sensitive areas. While evidence of impacts at ORPI exists, little work has previously been done to determine if a consistent and predictable pattern of use and impacts can be established.
Chris Sharp and Randy Gimblett in the School of Natural Resources and Environment have been studying human impacts at ORPI since 2004 to determine if impacts are increasing especially with the installation of the border fence. Their study began in 2004 to examine the observable trail proliferation within ORPI’s boundary using satellite imagery, ground verification, and expert interviews. Observable linear impacts (trails) were recorded and georeferenced throughout the monument. The satellite imagery, ground data and interviews were compared to evaluate the accuracy of the methods. The study used four different image sets with dates ranging from 2002 to 2007 to evaluate changes in impact. The final geodatabase was statistically evaluated for trend analysis and pattern recognition. This study’s quantitative assessment is the first step in integrating the impacts of users and the behavior patterns associated with user distinct groups.
While the political boundaries and the rationale for travel across the border have changed over time, underlying factors remain constant. This region’s natural resources have a limited ability to absorb and recover from the impacts of human use. This study has concluded that human impacts continue to proliferate at an alarming rate across protected areas such as ORPI. Humans traveling across the border region illegally try to avoid detection, creating a dispersed pattern of impacts. These impacts range from degradation and loss of desert plant communities to large denuded areas with high degrees of soil compaction and susceptibility to erosion. Disturbance to threatened and endangered wildlife and higher mortality rates due to increased vehicle traffic remain prevalent. Garbage and archeological resource destruction remain concerns to land management agencies. Of grave concern is the proliferation of trails and travel routes, which help to disperse these primary and secondary impacts across the landscape. Clearly such impacts have increased at ORPI in a very short time period, leading to a more dispersed and greater overall ecosystem impact that has cascading and devastating effects across the landscape. In sensitive semi-arid environments such as the Sonoran Desert, especially as global warming continues to occur these will continue to be extremely slow to recover if ever. While illegal activities are commonly thought to contribute extensively to these impacts, this study illustrates that the presence of additional law enforcement under Homeland Security initiatives has significantly added to these impacts. The impacts are prolific and continue to escalate as greater resources outside of the local land management agencies’ such as ORPI’s control are added to the border region. While little is known about whether the human-caused impacts already observed actually exceed the ecosystem’s ability to recover only time and long-term monitoring can provide a glimpse of these recovery patterns. The time has come to ask for what values are these areas to be managed. This is a political and value-laden decision that needs to be addressed before a unique and biologically diverse example of Sonoran Desert is destroyed beyond repair. This can only start with effective cooperation between land management and law enforcement agencies working toward a common set of goals through creative solutions to natural resource protection in the context of intensified human impacts in borderland protected areas. A more detailed examination of this project can be found in the following chapter:
Sharp, C. & R. Gimblett. Assessing Border-Related Human Impacts at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. In: Conservation of Shared Environments: Learning from the United States and Mexico. (eds) L. Lopez-Hoffman, E. D. McGovern, , R. G. Vardy & K. W. Flessa. University of Arizona Press (In Press) pgs 226-240.
For further reading visit http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/BOOKS/bid2140.htm to purchase Conservation of Shared Environments: Learning from the United States and Mexico.
