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Former Arizona Governor Doug Ducey has agreed to remove a stockpile of shipping containers used to build portions of the wall at various locations on the southern Arizona border during his final days in office.
On a crisp early December morning, Eamon Harrity, wildlife project manager for the conversation group Sky Island Alliance, scanned the horizon with binoculars.
“So we got out of the oak forests of the Patagonian Mountains and into the San Rafael Valley. It’s a really beautiful, almost pristine desert grassland system,” he said.
Below, a herd of about 30 pronghorn antelopes bounced up and down in tall golden grass. Harrity says he has probably 300 of these animals throughout Arizona. They are one of dozens of transnational species that call the San Rafael Valley home.
“So we’re seeing about 10% of all pronghorn in the valley right now,” he said.
The valleys stretch almost seamlessly across borders, punctuated by rugged peaks called Sky Islands where dramatically different environments make way for the richest biodiversity in the world.
It is also nearly surrounded by a 30-foot steel bollard boundary wall built by the Trump administration across much of the Arizona border.
“The wall starts a little near Sierra Vista, goes through Naco, goes through Douglas, continues east, continues east, continues unbroken until it almost reaches New Mexico, and stops at Guadalupe Canyon. So it’s 70 miles. It’s a straight line.
A similar wall was to be built in the San Rafael Valley about 30 miles across the border, but construction had yet to begin when President Joe Biden took office and canceled his predecessor’s wall project. According to Harrity, the area is now one of the last and most important wildlife and water corridors left along the Arizona-Sonora border.
“This is a significant gap for animal locomotion and locomotion,” he said.
So about three years ago, the Sky Islands Alliance began using wildlife cameras to monitor how animals were reacting to the new border barriers and barrier-free areas. Dozens of cameras have been installed along the border, and in the miles north and south they capture everything from ocelots and mountain lions to javelinas and raccoons.
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Roughly every two months, Sky Islands Alliance researchers travel to the San Rafael Valley to collect data from dozens of wildlife cameras installed in the area.
then in his state state address Early 2022, then-government. Doug Ducey said Arizona will build its own barrier that the federal government has not yet done.
“Our borders are a patchwork of federal state tribes and federal lands, and Arizona can add physical barriers to our borders,” he said.
That’s not exactly true. Although there are some private and state lands on the Arizona border, they are predominantly under federal jurisdiction. The state is not allowed to build there. Nevertheless, last fall Ducey made two of his commissions. project In Cochise and Yuma counties, we built temporary walls for shipping containers. Both were built illegally on federal land.
In Cochise County, the governor’s office planned to use 3,000 containers to line up about 10 miles of Coronado National Forest land along the border. Once completed, it could have covered his third of the gap in the San Rafael Valley.
For researchers like Harrity, this project meant that this largely pristine border wilderness was suddenly endangered. He says it’s still too early to tell exactly what these changes will look like, but they want to make sure cameras inside and outside the border capture the impact.
“There is a certain amount of resources in this landscape that can support a certain amount of animals, such as deer and predators such as black bears, pumas and bobcats,” he said. In the way of getting rid of animals…the competition may increase. And that competition can cause a drop in survival. ”
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Harrity said some cameras were decommissioned and were due to be moved to other locations along the border, but the organization chose to keep them after the shipping container project was announced. .
The Cochise County project came to a halt in early December, thanks to the efforts of local protesters. A lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice against Arizona formally shut down projects in both counties days later.
Daytime animal crossings in the area nearly stopped for about three months when contractors hired by the Ducey administration were actively working on the project, Harrity said. Captured crossings occurred mostly in the early morning or late at night.
“Construction actually started in earnest around 7am and continued non-stop until 3:30pm, when it was always busy with people, lorries, noise and dust. So the wildlife is really gone,” he said.
Back at the Sky Islands Alliance office in Tucson, Harrity showed nighttime footage of cottontails crawling in and out of shipping containers. Footage from the same camera a few hours later shows a giant mountain lion.
On the other hand, the land itself is also damaged. Contractors used bulldozers to widen roads and create turnarounds. Activists say a 100-year-old oak tree has been knocked down. One of those trees housed a Sky Islands Alliance camera before being bulldozed down.
Justice Department lawsuits require Arizona to remove containers and begin environmental remediation in both Yuma and Cochise counties.
A Coronado National Forest spokesperson confirmed this week that the last container has been removed.
The project cost Arizona taxpayers more than $200 million, according to a contract between Arizona and construction firm Ashbulit.
Mark Fink, senior attorney at the Center for Biodiversity, says more questions lie ahead.
“As far as restoration is concerned, our biggest concern is how to restore some of the affected areas,” he said. It was a very expensive political stunt.”
Last year, Fink and other attorneys at the Center filed a lawsuit against the Cochise County project for environmental reasons. But the project moved ahead weeks before the federal government intervened.
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The San Rafael Valley is a transnational grassland, home to dozens of animal species and home to the headwaters of the Santa Cruz River.
Now that legal battle has moved to Governor Katie Hobbs. A spokesperson for the governor said in an email that restoration work, including the removal of drainage areas and roads, is being done by Ashbulit, but an estimate of the cost of the restoration is not yet available.
When it took the Justice Department’s case to court on Thursday afternoon, the governor’s office and other officials agreed to postpone the proceedings for the time being, and with the container removed, the federal agency has a next step for improvements. He said the steps needed to be evaluated.
Harrity says he’s relieved the barrier is gone, but whatever happens next, the Sky Island Alliance cameras will be there.
“There is always the possibility of further construction. “This was a reminder that it is always possible and that we need data that can effectively communicate that threats to the environment are real and that this is an important place to protect. .”
