Dynamite Blasts and Paradise Lost [View all]

In mid-August, during what should have been the peak of the summer monsoon season, we were experiencing what southern Arizonans despairingly call a “non-soon.” The normally lush green grasslands of the San Rafael Valley were brown, crisp, and dry. Red dirt roads were swept up into the sky by dust devils dancing across the valley floor, their funnels twisting high into the air.

Wells were drying up on ranches, and 18-wheeler trucks were being loaded with cattle because they could no longer be sustained after years of drought. Scores of dead alligator juniper trees lined the foothills of the valley.

Amid these ominous signs of drought, I spotted something much more sinister: wooden survey stakes lining the Roosevelt Reservation, the 60-foot-wide, 632-mile-long strip of land along the U.S.-Mexico border set aside by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907 for federal access. This easement, established by the “father of American conservation,” has ironically enabled the rapid expansion of border walls.

When I saw the stakes, they elicited a feeling similar to witnessing a loved one at the end of life—a sense of stinging inevitability. The words “DO NOT DISTURB” were written on the stakes.

https://www.theborderchronicle.com/p/dynamite-blasts-and-paradise-lost?publication_id=373432&post_id=181729092&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=true&r=5f9foq&triedRedirect=true