What is a border? Is it simply an edge: a sharp transition between one state and another? Or does it stretch beyond a single dimension, warping land and people through a self-perpetuating 'otherness'?

In this final chapter of Goatwalker, we uncover the ties that bind ecosystems, identities, and communities of all sorts – migrant or otherwise. We'll walk a path to restorative justice: a way to foster new livelihoods through conservation programs and the many uses of an oft-overlooked keystone species of the desert southwest.

Rigid borders are a foundational source of inequity. For as long as they persist, we face a growing need to care for the earth and for each other: to discover our own capacity for Sanctuary.

From Future Ecologies, this is Goatwalker, Part Four: An Open Wound.

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Before this episode, we suggest you start with Part One of this series: On Errantry

And then listen to Part Two: Sanctuary

And then Part Three: Saguaro Juniper

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For musical credits, citations, and more, go to futureecologies.net/listen/fe-3-10-goatwalker-pt4-an-open-wound

Help make Season 4 our best yet: Support the show and join our Patreon community at patreon.com/futureecologies

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As of August 2021, Jim Corbett’s "Goatwalking" has been re-issued in a new 2nd edition. You can purchase a hard copy or an e-book here

A 2nd edition of "Sanctuary for All Life" is also now available from Cascabel Books on Amazon or Barnes and Noble

You're listening to Season Three of

Future Ecologies.

Hey, folks. You've made it to the final

episode of our four-part series. If this is the first time you're

tuning in, you might prefer to go back to parts one, two, and

On Errantry, Sanctuary, and Saguaro Juniper. You can

find those episodes on the Future Ecologies podcast feed,

or by the links in the show notes. Otherwise, if you've been

with us all along, or if you're just the type to start a book at

the last chapter, carry on.

But before we return to our sojourn in the desert, a bit of

As well as being the end of this series, this is

also the last episode of our third season. We're already

brimming with ideas – and a few recordings – for season four.

We're so excited to bring you yet more beautiful, informative,

and necessary stories, and be back in your feed by January

2022. Thank you for listening. And thank you especially to all

of our Patreon supporters who have made our work possible. If

you'd like to help make our fourth season our best yet, the

way to do so is at patreon.com/futureecologies.

We've got a whole other podcast feed for bonus content, fun

swag, and a lively Discord server full of fantastic people.

If financial support isn't possible for you, you can still

help the show in a very important way. If this podcast

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please just share it with someone who you think would

appreciate it. Or even better, share it with lots of people. If

you post a rating and review, wherever you listen, you might

just see it show up at www.futureecologies.net

Okay, with that out of the way, we can rejoin my co-host Adam,

in the borderlands.

So as I said at the beginning, I've been working

on this series for several years now. And the whole time that

I've been making it, I've been trying to figure out just

exactly what it's supposed to be about. Maybe you've been trying

to figure that out, too. Is it about this man, Jim Corbett? Or

is it about migration, or environmental philosophy, or a

band of outcasts who stood up to a government that was violating

its own laws? Anyway, I've been thinking about all of this,

looking at all of the audio left on the cutting room floor. And

then something serendipitous happened: Someone sent us a book

called The Handbook of Ecocultural Identity. And inside

of it was an article that caught my attention, called Borderland

Ecocultural Identities. I got in touch with the authors, and the

first thing that I asked was:

what did they mean by the term

first thing that I asked was:

"ecocultural identity"?

I think it's still a term that's very much

evolving, and it's very much contested. And one of the great

things about this collection is that it gives a lot of different

viewpoints. But I think the way that we sort of conceptualized

it was eco cultural identity is understanding that social

identity or cultural identity is very much informed by the

natural environment, and also informs the natural environment.

So rather than thinking about them as analytically, or

theoretically distinct to say that there's nature out there,

and there's culture here, eco cultural identity blends those

concepts so as to say who we are as people is very much reflected

and reflective of the natural environment around us.

This is Dr. Carlos Tarin, one of the co-authors.

I'm an Assistant Professor and the Director of

Forensics in the Department of Communication at the University

of Texas, El Paso.

For those of us who cultivate more-than-human

relationships, this idea that nature and culture are bound

together is obvious. But in mainstream discourse and

academia, it's still kind of novel.

And so what a lot of scholars have been trying

to do is deconstruct that nature-culture dualism: to say

that we are part of that, that we are animals too. So when we

talk about animals, we're usually talking about non-human

animals, and we're really trying to reconceptualize that to say

"humans are also animals, and we live in those natural

environments just as much as any animal species does."

This is Carlos's first co author, Dr. Stacy

Sowards.

I'm a Professor in the Department of

Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

So Carlos and Stacy were attracted to this

idea of ecocultural identity, because it dissolves the

nature-culture duality that many of us grew up with. But what

really attracted me to this piece, Borderlands Ecocultural

Identities, was the author's engagement with the work of

queer feminist Chicana author and scholar, Gloria Anzaldúa.

So Gloria Anzaldúa is a borderland theorist, and

kind of one of the first person to really give words to this

feeling that many of us from the border – we felt, I felt it... I

think I speak for all three of us when I say, we understood and

felt these tensions before we even had the words for them.

This is the third and final co author, Sarah.

Hello, my name is Dr. Sarah De Los Santos Upton. I

am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at

the University of Texas at El Paso.

Sarah, Stacy, and Carlos draw deeply on Gloria's

seminal work, "Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza."

Anzaldúa's work highlights this kind of

tolerance for ambiguity that border-dwellers develop. And I

remember feeling like this is the first time that I've seen my

life and my experience represented in a text. It was

something that, you know, this person gets it, they understand

what it's like to be existing within these tensions, and

having to negotiate every part of your identity, every part of

your lived experience – and how that becomes so natural, and so

you don't even question it. And I think that that's a product of

being born and raised on the border.

In her writing, Gloria cycles rapidly between

languages, narrative styles and perspectives. reading it can be

an arresting and disorienting experience.

The writing in the book, I think, is really

fascinating, because she'll just interject Spanish words, and

Spanglish words, and Nahuatl words, and words that the

audience probably won't be familiar with – But it's sort of

a form of political resistance against really rigid academic

writing, right? It functions sort of as a critique of dry

scholarly writing to interject poetry and narratives and

mythology into the text. And so, I think her work in a sense is

performatively doing the sort of thing that she's arguing for

theoretically. And I think, living on the border and people

that that are from the border or that have experience here – this

is something we do on a daily basis.

Gloria actually has a term for people who

negotiate and cross these boundaries on a daily basis. She

calls them Nepantleras, from the indigenous Nahuatl word:

Nepantla, which means in the middle.

A Nepantlera is the person who lives in the state of

Nepantla, and who is confronted with that need to code switch

and to cross borders and to negotiate identities.

In Anzaldúa's own words:

Nepantleras function disruptively – like

tender green shoots growing out of the cracks, they eventually

overturn foundations, making conventional definition of

otherness hard to sustain.

What does it mean then, to be a Nepantlera living

in the Borderlands today? Say for example, in the place where

Sarah and Stacey and Carlos wrote this essay, the Twin

Cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. For

non-border-dwellers, these cities are probably most closely

associated with violence. That's probably because in 2010, cartel

violence in Ciudad Juarez earned it the title of murder capital

of the world.

Yet another unexplained slaughter in Juarez,

across the border from Texas, now widely called the murder

capital of the world.

Or perhaps it's because in 2019, a 21 year old

white supremacist drove across Texas to a Walmart in El Paso

and killed 23 people before being arrested.

Tonight law enforcement officials telling

ABC news that before the chaos broke out, that they believe the

suspect had been looking for a good place to target and shoot

And so you know, it's been a couple years now

Mexicans.

since that happened. But I think the legacy of that violence and

sort of just the awareness of not just feeling like you're

under attack symbolically, but feeling like you're under

attack, literally – it's something that I think a lot of

us are still very much processing as a trauma. And

we're dealing with this because it's... it's terrifying.

This traumatic legacy of violence that

border-dwellers live with – it's nothing new. The area now known

as Texas has an incredibly complex history of colonization,

slavery, war, and annexation. It was violently colonized first by

the French, then by the Spanish. And after Mexico gained

independence from Spain, Texas became a heavily contested

territory. Central to this conflict was actually Mexico's

prohibition of slavery, which was of course opposed by Anglo

settlers that were flooding in from the US South at the time.

US presidents from Andrew Jackson to James Polk would

preside over expansionist wars that eventually resulted in the

establishment of a permanent border between the US and

Mexico, with the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Importantly,

this treaty established the Rio Grande as the border separating

Texas and the Mexican state of Chihuahua. El Paso and Juarez

are actually geographically located at the exact place where

the Rio Grande becomes the border. And this has created

issues, because healthy rivers naturally have a tendency to

travel.

It was really based on the ebb and flow of the

river itself. So if there was a particularly heavy rainfall and

the river shifted course, the boundary between the US and

Mexico could also shift and so that led to people being

displaced. communities that were some time south of the border

were now suddenly north of the border. And that created all

sorts of challenges in terms of citizenship and land ownership.

These challenges famously came to a head with an

international land dispute over a community known as the

Chamizal, which was essentially part of the shifting floodplain

of the river. Now, though, it's just another urban neighborhood

in the El Paso-Juarez metro area, because due in part to the

dispute over the Chamizal, the US and Mexico decided to

channelize, the Rio Grande. This channelization of a formerly

wild river turned out to be the first step in the militarization

of the border – a militarization that extends from the 1960s to

the present day.

And so now it's just become absurd in a lot of

ways the amount of securitization and

militarization – because it's not just a fence or a wall,

there's layers and layers of walls and fences. So now there's

this huge monstrosity that's probably 30, 40 feet tall and

made out of steel.

Carlos is referring to Trump's new border

wall here, which is really just one more layer of border

infrastructure among many.

It's just now I think, been taken to an extreme

– to a point where what exists of the river or what used to

exist of the river really doesn't anymore. I mean, you see

water, but the Rio Grande, especially when you're looking

in the parts of El Paso, that are most densely populated, it

doesn't really look like a river anymore. It looks like a cement

channel. And then a small trickle of a canal as it cuts

through the city and leaves El Paso.

Which I think is really an interesting

juxtaposition to the part of the river before it becomes the

border. So, as it's flowing in from New Mexico.

Before the Rio Grande enters El Paso, it flows

through the state of New Mexico, more or less right up to the

city limits.

So right as the rivers coming in, that part

isn't fenced. It's not walled, it's not cemented.

This means that, a short distance up river in the

city of Albuquerque, people can have a completely different

relationship with the same river. One that among other

things, involves trees and shade.

And there's this beautiful bosce full of

cottonwood trees. And I feel like that is something that was

taken from the city of El Paso, from the people who live in El

Paso and in Juarez. I know, growing up here, I was always

taught that, you know, nature is that pretty green environment in

that other place. But it's not in El Paso, because El Paso is

void of nature. And I know now that that is not true, but I

feel like there's this kind of internalized oppression that the

landscape experiences and that we experience from growing up

here. And it makes people feel separate from and almost

resentful of the natural environment here.

The channelization and militarization of the Rio

Grande as a border – It's emblematic of a lack of

tolerance in our society, for ambiguity, for fluidity, and for

basic social and ecological realities. It's an attempt to

a foundational violence that

structures relationships throughout the Borderlands. And

it's so tangible in a place like El Paso-Juarez. But that social

and ecological complexity can't be denied.

And I think that here, in the case of those

cement canals, we see it kind of manifesting through... there all

kinds of messages of resistance that have been painted on the

walls of those canals.

Sarah is referring to the constantly evolving

graffiti that is inscribed on and around the canals.

If you look at them, you're confronted with

these questions that ask you to consider what role the US is

playing in oppressing people in Juarez. And what role the US is

playing in creating a system where migration is necessary for

survival. And so I think that through our bodies and our

engagement with our environment, Nepantleras find where the

resistant potential is possible.

I would also add to that, I think in terms of

resistance and thinking about ecocultural identity, especially

in the border – the very act of survival, I would say, is an act

of resistance itself. Because the way that the border has been

policed and put under surveillance and militarized is,

in a lot of ways, an act of violence that we're not meant to

survive, right? We're not supposed to survive or thrive in

these conditions. And yet, you have acts of resistance, I think

that play out in normal or quotidian ways that are very

much just about survival. Right, and Anzaldúa specifically says

that, you know, her concepts and her theories of Borderlands and

border life are themselves about survival.

In Anzaldúa's own words, The US-Mexico border is –

Una herida abierta

– an open wound.

Where the Third World grates against the First,

and bleeds.

She writes,

Borders are set up to define the places that are

safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a

dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland

is a vague and undetermined place, created by the emotional

residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant

state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its

inhabitants.

This concept of the Nepantlera – of someone who

crosses borders and facilitates movement between worlds – I

think it applies beautifully to the work that Jim Corbett and

others did in the desert before, during, and after the Sanctuary

Movement. And this overarching notion of ecocultural identity,

that our lives and identities shape, and are shaped by both

culture and ecology. To me, it's an invitation to explore this

generative space, where nature and nurture are imbricated and

implicated within one another.

So, for this fourth and final part of our series, we're going

to sit with a few of these border crossers, who've formed

intimate relationships with the more-than-human world, and

who've used these relations to inform their approaches to

resistance in the Borderlands. What follows is a series of

conversations that bring the ideas that we've been discussing

in this series forward – into the harsh light of the present

day conflict along the US-Mexico border.

From Future Ecologies, this is Goatalker, part four: An Open

Wound.

We are talking to Gary Paul Nabhan, an Arab

American plant explorer, and nature writer, and Franciscan

brother, who among his Franciscan sisters and brothers

is known as Brother Coyote.

I promised that I'd bring Gary back, and here he

is. Getting the opportunity to sit down and interview Brother

Coyote was an absolute dream come true for me, and there was

so much to discuss. We talked for example, about the Saguaro

Juniper covenant.

Yeah, and that's really one of the

greatest documents written in Arizona during my lifetime.

We spoke at length about Los Cabreros Andantes.

You cannot meet someone like Jim or John

without deeply feeling, as we say down here on the border,

that they walk the taco [laughs] That they just live it – and

their words are an offshoot of their life experience, rather

than a proposal about what to do with their life.

Gary is also someone who walks the taco.

Since his early involvement in organizing the first Earth Day

back in 1970, he's been foundational to the

international slow food, seed saving, and pollinator

conservation movements. It would be impossible to overstate the

influence that Gary's writing and leadership have had on

countless species and people, including myself. What I hadn't

realized, though, when I first got in touch with him, was that

he felt similarly about Jim and Los Cabreros Andantes.

John and Jim got to know the ranchers down in

southeastern Arizona, at the time that environmentalists and

ranchers were at odds with each other. And of course, Jim had

been a rancher. And so the seeds of the collaborative

conservation movement among ranchers and environmentalists –

now there's something like 24 groups around the West that are

finding common ground and rural landscapes along those lines –

started in conversations with those ranchers and

earth-firsters that John and Jim fostered and facilitated... just

unbelievable, unbelievable.

In fact, the title of one of Gary's latest books,

Food from the Radical Center, comes directly from those

conversations.

And that term was given to us by the first

rancher that Jim and John engaged in that peacemaking

between ranchers and environmentalist, Bill McDonald,

who's a MacArthur award winning rancher with the Malpai

Borderlands Group.

But it was Gary's most recent book, entitled

an Arboreal Love Affair that I wanted most to

talk to him about. Because, as I told him, it's become my

favorite.

[Laughs] That is so bizarre. I think, like, I

did it to entertain myself while I was recovering from a

concussion. I'm almost surprised when, you know, to see that it

actually got into print. Thinking like, of all the weird

things I've done with my life...

The book is kind of unusual. And that's actually

due in part to that concussion that Gary mentioned, which

interrupted his writing before he could finish it.

And I figured out that the only way to finish

the book was not to anthropomorphize the tree, but

to phytomorphyze the human. In this case, me. So rather than

doing what people have done with animals, and stories forever –

of sort of anthropomorphize them so that they're like us – my

journey was to see if I could become more tree like.

Gary calls this tree consciousness Arboreality.

Gary Paul NabhanArboreality:

getting inside the skin or the

Gary Paul NabhanArboreality:

bark of another being, yeah.

It's kind of hard to explain what this actually

means. And so I asked Gary to read a brief passage from the

beginning of the book for us.

Not long ago, I was thrown off kilter, and

suddenly brought to my knees by a bout of dizziness and nausea.

I could not immediately diagnose whether it was a case of

vertigo, of influenza, of the 67 Year Itch, or of the great

political malaise that was afflicting much of America, or

of an unprecedented rupture of my former identity. This illness

ravaged me while I was wandering through one of the great hyper

arid landscapes of the Americas:

Organ Pipe Cactus National

arid landscapes of the Americas:

Monument, which stretches along the US-Mexico border, like an

arid landscapes of the Americas:

iridescent mirror, reflecting the essential desert in each of

arid landscapes of the Americas:

us. Over several horrifying hours, I could not stand up even

arid landscapes of the Americas:

for a moment without falling back onto the earth. I could not

arid landscapes of the Americas:

look up without seeing the world spinning violently around me.

arid landscapes of the Americas:

And I could not open my mouth without discouraging my innards.

arid landscapes of the Americas:

And so, I slid back against the only thing behind me that would

arid landscapes of the Americas:

prop me up enough to keep me breathing. Otherwise, I would

arid landscapes of the Americas:

have expired.

arid landscapes of the Americas:

As I slumped against some unseen object that steadfastly kept me

arid landscapes of the Americas:

from sinking farther into the earth. I looked up just long

arid landscapes of the Americas:

enough to see limbs wildly waving above my head, bending to

arid landscapes of the Americas:

embrace me, and then I passed out.

arid landscapes of the Americas:

When I awakened, I had no immediate recollection of where

arid landscapes of the Americas:

I was or how I had gotten there. I felt unspeakably disoriented

arid landscapes of the Americas:

in every sense. After a few minutes of feeling completely

arid landscapes of the Americas:

abandoned by everyone I knew and everything I cared about, I

arid landscapes of the Americas:

caught a glimpse of the only clue in sight that might

arid landscapes of the Americas:

reorient me to my whereabouts, my whatabouts, and whoabouts.

arid landscapes of the Americas:

Next to me, under my left elbow, in fact, was a small metal

arid landscapes of the Americas:

placard that was stuck into the hard dry ground on a stainless

arid landscapes of the Americas:

steel spike. The placard simply said these words: Mesquite,

arid landscapes of the Americas:

Prosopis velutina. And so I began to entertain possibilities

arid landscapes of the Americas:

of what this placard might mean for me, to me, about me. Was it

arid landscapes of the Americas:

plausible that I had begun to metamorphose into a Mesquite

arid landscapes of the Americas:

tree? Might it be that my torso would become thickened and

arid landscapes of the Americas:

torqued into a somewhat twisted trunk? Could it be that those

arid landscapes of the Americas:

limbs I had glanced at were my limbs?

arid landscapes of the Americas:

Oddly, I felt drained of all humanity, ambition, and

arid landscapes of the Americas:

volition. It was as though I had lost my capacity to walk, run,

arid landscapes of the Americas:

or become mobile by any other means. And yet, for whatever

arid landscapes of the Americas:

reason, I no longer feared becoming sessile, which is to

arid landscapes of the Americas:

say, rooted in place. I no longer had any urge to get away,

arid landscapes of the Americas:

to go it alone, or to retreat to someplace else.

As Gary has become more tree-like, he's only become

more firmly rooted in his conviction that mesquites – much

like Jim's goats – might provide a viable ecological livelihood

for borderland dwellers.

My current project is trying to see that

whatever the Green New Deal morphs into over the next two

years – that a restorative economy with a strong foothold

in livelihoods generated by mesquite trees is part of it.

This project surfaced in 2019 with the

publication of the Mesquite Manifesto, which Gary edited.

One of the reasons he and his co-authors chose mesquite as a

focus, is because for many years, it was seen and treated

as a kind of arboreal weed by ranchers and other land

managers.

We've been fighting for last 30 years the

quote encroachment of mesquite on grassland, that was always

Savannah, originally. But with climate change models, we know

that the most obvious change that we're going to have in an

eight state area of the Southwest Texas, Oklahoma and

southern Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, California,

Arizona, is going to be the expansion and densification of

mesquite trees again. So, we can fight 'em – herbicides like

245-D, and grubbing them out of the soil with bulldozers, and

then five years later, they're back again. Or we can dance with

them. And I'm for dancing with mesquites.

Despite this fanciful language, in the

Mesquite Manifesto, Gary and his co-authors are focused on

addressing real economic issues that face border land

communities.

These counties here have double the poverty of

the rest of the country on either side of the line. And we

have to do something about that. It's the border in the world

with the greatest economic, healthcare, and livelihood

disparity. If someone makes 20 times as much for doing the same

auto mechanic work on this side of the border than in their

present job on that side of the border, who in their right mind

wouldn't want to move across the border and be paid in a

dignified way for the same work?

So instead of working to clear all of those

pesky mesquites off the land, perhaps thinks Gary, it's time

to embrace and take advantage of their many and varied uses. Of

course, learning to do this will take some training,

But everyone would go through a short course

on managing bees for mesquite honey; of learning how to cut

mesquite wood without killing the trees – by coppicing and

pruning them so that they provide more shade and food to

wildlife; while sustainably harvesting them over the years,

and using the smaller branches to slow down erosion in the

landscape where they are; of working to show people how to

mill the flour.

The flour that is of the mesquite pod, which I can

personally report is delicious, and nutritious, and versatile.

It's high in protein. It's a good source of zinc, iron and

calcium. And it tastes delicious and cookies, pancakes,

tortillas, you name it.

So the point is, there's syrups and

diabeetus-preventing flours, mesquite woodworking, mesquite

range management, mesquite biochar, that can all come from

these trees.

Bootstrapping this kind of mesquite-based

restoration economy might seem far fetched. But Gary has

actually already helped start a really unique program that

harnesses Borderlands restoration as an educational

and economic driver

What Borderlands restoration has

always done, where our goal is to connect people with their

landscapes through restoration – One way to always connect with

hire their children [laughs].

This is Francesca Claverie, and we met her at the

office of the Borderlands restoration network, where she

works just a short distance from Gary's home in the small town of

Patagonia, Arizona. We wanted to ask her about the Borderlands

Earthcare Youth Program.

Yeah, and that program is called the BECY

program, the Borderlands Earthcare Youth Program. It's

probably our most popular and well known thing that we do, and

it's just a six week program in the summer. And the whole goal

is to hire people – with money, not with like an unpaid

internship or credits. But to hire people in these rural

communities.

The program has taken place since 2013, in

border towns like Patagonia, Douglas and Nogales.

And it's wonderful and it brings

together, I don't know, just this very diverse group of

border dwellers – where you have some students that are driving

across the border every morning, and they get in line at 3:30 in

the morning to make it to work at six. Or you have some

students, that half their family lives in Mexico, but their

parents are Border Patrol agents. And just very

complicated, interesting people that are living in these areas,

that don't have that many job options if you're going to stay

in these towns.

Among other things, these students spend

their days collecting native seeds for the organization.

This season, they're going to collect over

200 pounds of wild seed by hand, which if you've ever wild

collected seed before, takes dozens of people and hundreds

and 1000s of hours. So so much work.

They also work to reduce erosion on rangelands, by

installing monumental rock structures,

It's gabions, or trincheras, or just

rock structures. In general, there's all kinds of different

names and people in so many different cultures throughout

the world have often used erosion control structures.

The function of these structures is simple, but

critical to any hope of growing food in the desert. They exist

to slow and infiltrate water from the monsoon rains.

And these really violent storms come

through and will just dump a few inches in a matter of an hour.

And that will be it for a week. And when that happens, this

violent rain event will scrape away dirt, it'll scrape away

plants when it moves really quickly. And so if you don't

slow things down, you don't have water able to seep into the

landscape, which then brings up more plants and all kinds of

life around it.

What connects all of these projects is that they

have real, measurable positive impacts on border land,

ecosystems, communities and economies.

And in a community like this where we

hear well, we want the mine to be here because there's not

enough jobs for our kids – to say the 70 jobs plus that the

Borderlands Restoration Network has created in this community in

the last six years is enormous. In a town of 800, we've had 200

people volunteer with Francesca at the nursery. That's... that's

a fourth of the entire town! Those people no longer accept

that dualism that environment eliminates jobs rather than

creating them – that false dichotomy is out of their heads

now. We have conservative ranchers – I mean conservative

like not just conservative like to the far right of Charlton

Heston, but the far right of you know, Moses or or Attila the

Hun, I mean, these guys are like way out there. When they see

that their kids are excited by doing restoration work and they

get jobs out of it, they're donating to an environmental

group – something that they would never would have done five

years ago. And I can meet them on common ground.

Looking at the BECY program, there's really no

reason why a similar project that was focused on mesquite

couldn't have an even larger and longer term impact if scaled up

across the Borderlands. And if you've heard of calls for a 21st

Century Civilian Conservation Corps as part of the Green New

Deal, this would basically be a regional variation on that

concept. But Gary isn't totally attached to mesquite.

I'm really much more interested in you

know, the diversity rather than us fixing on a single plant or

resource or philosophy. I just never been dogmatic if it ends

up to be something else. Perhaps besides mesquite that can put

wind in the sails of creating more livelihoods, without

hurting the earth, I'm all for it.

Still, I couldn't help but notice the delicate,

unmistakable green tendrils of velvet mesquite blossoming out

of Gary's ears.

I think mesquite is sort of the gateway

drug to getting into a deeper appreciation of the many ways

that the natural resources here – this great biodiversity that

we have in this region – can be in service to vanquishing

poverty. That if people want to live in rural places, they need

to rethink the capacity to do something with the resources in

front of them. And because mesquite is a keystone species

that this whole nurse plant guild flourishes under. The wild

Tepary beans, and the Chiltepins, and the other foods

that I love are all dependent in some way on mesquite providing

shelter and sanctuary for them – just like Jim Corbett provided

shelter and sanctuary for so many people.

I think that this kind of ecocultural restoration

is sorely needed in the Borderlands today. Because this

is a place where incredible ecological and social violence

have basically been normalized. And that was before the latest

round of wall construction.

The Border Patrol can overrule the

Endangered Species Act, the Native American Religious

Freedom Act, and the Antiquities Act, to blade clean 8,000 years

of human history and 12,000 years of plant and animal

adaptation to deserts – calling eminent domain because of

national security purposes. That act of defiling nature and

sacred spaces.

This latest round of state violence against desert

ecologies and the lands and bodies of Indigenous peoples is

a direct consequence of the failure of US policies such as

prevention through deterrence, which continues to kill migrants

in numbers that are impossible to ignore for people who call

the border home.

You'll often see crosses out in the

wilderness. And you'll often just see shoes and like

sometimes baby shoes, and water bottles, and backpacks, and

things that are just in this area where we're doing work for

environmental reasons. But it's hard not to like feel connected

and feel associated with just the amount of people that are

moving in – for so many different reasons.

People like Francesca, who live and work in

the Borderlands, confront this ongoing violence on a daily

basis, and often find themselves in situations where they're

called upon to render aid. Gary told us a story that many border

dwellers will relate to. It was summer of 2019.

And we were coming across the border Fourth

of July from Mexico and got about six miles north of the

border and saw a young woman and a child on the side of the road,

and the woman looked despondent and fatigued. They had walked

all night, and gotten lost, and came across the Border. And

there was not a second, before we talked to them and realized

what they'd been through, where we had an option other than to

get them to safety. That's our ethical responsibility. It's not

a... it's not an option. When we took them to the Oregon Pipe

Visitor Center, they had no water or food. So we had to get

them medical attention. And then we knew that they probably be

taken back across the border, but we gave them as much

who could help him in the closest Mexican

side border town. And that was... even that was hard.

The Sanctuary Movement never really ended. It

just went underground, took different forms, and continues

to manifest itself across North America when the need arises.

Down in the Borderlands, John Fife and others continue to

carry the work forward.

Well, you need to know that everything that we're

doing out in the desert now in terms of the organizations we

started, Samaritans and No More Deaths,

– An organization also known as No Mas Muertes –

is built on all the mistakes we made, and all the –

from our perception – things we got right during Sanctuary in

the 80s. We really took that experience and said how do we

take it out to the desert now?

With the escalating militarization of the

border, it's become too dangerous to cross migrants the

way that Jimmy used to. But congregations across the country

continue to offer public sanctuary to asylum seekers. And

groups like No Mas Muertes in the Borderlands continue to

render aid in any way that they can. Sometimes that's as simple

as leaving bottled water out in the desert on common crossing

routes. Unfortunately, the Border Patrol and US government

continue to attempt to derail these efforts.

And then they started slashing water bottles, and

destroying humanitarian aid out there. And then they tried

citing us for littering, leaving sealed one gallon water jugs on

federal land.

You might have already seen some of these

videos of border guards slashing potentially life saving water

supplies out in the desert.

Pick up this trash somebody left on the trail. It's

not yours, is it? All you have to do is tell me, is it yours?

These tactics and others are emblematic of an

escalating crackdown on Sanctuary-aligned movements.

Notably, in 2018, No Mas Muertes activist Scott Warren was

arrested and charged with a felony for feeding and

sheltering undocumented immigrants on their way north.

It was clear that the Trump administration wanted a rematch

of that historic Sanctuary trial.

So now, they've gone back to "Oh, we're gonna start

charging humanitarian aid volunteers with felony crimes",

so they're going to try it again. But what happened as a

result was our budget more than doubled, and the number of

people wanting to volunteer more than doubled, just as the

Sanctuary Movement more than doubled in the 1980s in the

seven months we were on trial. So that's where we are. My

judgment is, we're almost at the point where juries are going to

refuse to convict.

John's instincts turned out to be spot on. A

month after we recorded this interview, in the fall of 2019,

Scott Warren was acquitted of all charges by a jury in Tucson.

Today, the US government has actually failed at almost every

turn to criminalize civil initiative in the courts, let

alone in the minds of most Americans. I suppose that track

record, in and of itself, might provide some measure of comfort

to somebody like Scott Warren, who was until recently staring

down a potential 20 year prison sentence. But in speaking with

John, it was clear that he felt that there's just more to it

than that.

How do you build and sustain a movement that is

strong enough and powerful enough to endure all the attacks

and all of the attempts to destroy that movement to defend

human rights? I would argue from history. That's where faith

comes in, and the spiritual dimension to human life and

human community. And I would also argue that that's what

enabled the Sanctuary Movement, to not only sustain itself

through all of the criminal trials and all of the attacks.

It was the spiritual base that enabled us to sustain that and

eventually grow it to the point where we... we did prevail over

government.

Okay, so taking a step back for a minute: If

you're listening to this right now, then odds are, you're like

me, and like the majority of people involved in modern day

Sanctuary work, and environmental movements in

general, in that you don't ascribe to any organized faith.

If that's you, John has a message for you.

Too often in a secular society that we live in,

what I hear is "I'm spiritual. But I don't want to have

anything do with spiritual community. I don't have any way

to relate to that. Because you all have discredited it so badly

over so many years, that I don't want to be associated with that

established church." And I understand that – we have

discredited faith communities in most of Western Europe in the

United States for too long.

But according to John, that doesn't mean that we

shouldn't be organizing with alongside and through faith

communities to achieve ecocultural change.

I want to argue that the whole movement for

environmental and ecological rights has needed a spiritual

base – and science and fact and secular arguments have not been

able to build that movement nearly as effectively as

spiritual strength – for the movement to finally prevail.

Just to be clear, John is not saying that people

organizing for social change necessarily have to do that

through the Christian Church, or through Synagogue or Mosque, or

any other institutionalized religion. But he does feel

strongly that communities of faith are needed to sustain a

spiritual core to these movements.

Yeah, and there are two components to that. One is

ritual, right? You need a ritual that renews that spirituality on

a regular basis. Secondly, you have to have a community of

spirituality that enables you and me and everybody else to

sustain that. And to, as Jim said, do justice, not just

petition other people to do justice.

Now, you might disagree with John. And I can

say personally, that I am one of those secular folks. I'm

incredibly wary of institutionalized faith

communities. And you don't have to look very far in my part of

the world to see the incredible harms that the Church has done

to communities throughout history. On the other hand, John

and Jim success with the Sanctuary Movement speaks for

itself. And I think it's safe to say that Jim, the solitary

Quaker, wouldn't have made it very far without choosing to

come into the fold of the Church with John.

My reading of history is that Church or Synagogue, or

Mosque, or Temple, or whatever the faith community has been,

to align itself with Empire, or to

align itself with the liberation of people and ecosystems. And

the church has always been at its worst when it aligned itself

and blessed Empire. And it's always been at its best when it

has built community and movements to resist Empire.

In this way, both Jim and John challenged us to be

faithful, to make covenants with our human and more-than-human

relations, and to hold fast to them as part of a community.

I just want to advocate to all those individual

spiritual people. You can't do it without community, and you

better start understanding that.

Like so many people these past few years,

I've been transfixed by the incredible violence and

suffering that characterizes the US-Mexico border. And for that

matter, border regions across the planet, from the island of

Nauru to the Mediterranean Sea. It's clear that these abject

spaces have been intentionally constructed to perpetuate

permanent states of exception, where both human and

more-than-human lives are forfeit. The cruelty and

contempt of the Trump administration brought these

ongoing harms into sharp relief. But it neither created nor

consecrated the border. In effect, we all did. And we all

do by continuing to accept bordering regimes as legitimate.

The new Biden administration won't do anything to change this

simple fact.

I think there was a lot of optimism that with Joe

Biden getting elected things we're going to take like a

complete 180. And that hasn't really been the case. I mean,

granted, I will take Joe Biden over Donald Trump any day of the

week. But I think a lot of the complicated issues – around

immigration, around the border, around securitization of the

border and militarization of the border – Those things are still

the same, if not worse, because now they're not sort of being

catalyzed in the national discourse.

Several layers below the national discourse,

though. There are those who argue that borders can and

should be abolished; that we should live in a world where no

one is illegal. Activist and author Harsha Walia has argued

that border imperialism is a strategy to divide and conquer

what would otherwise be a multi-ethnic, multicultural

international working class. She's argued that even liberal

and progressive movements tend to draw a false distinction

between so-called "deserving migrants" or asylum seekers, and

so-called "undeserving migrants", economic migrants.

You may remember from Episode Two, that the Sanctuary Movement

of the 1980s was guilty of this, in its own efforts to seek

social licence.

Personally, I find these arguments incredibly compelling

as a matter of principle. Although, of course, the

implications of a borderless world are immense. And in an

increasingly conspiratorial and nationalistic society. Those of

us who share these views are clearly in the minority. But if

we accept that, for now, borders will continue to be a necessary

evil. It's important for all of us to recognize that the

violence will continue. There's simply no way to reconcile these

artificial divides with the breathtaking complexity and

diversity of life on a changing planet. And with the

destabilization of ecosystems occurring at a global scale,

that's only going to become clearer. Because the only

recourse that any life form has to intolerable conditions is to

move.

There are more people migrating on the face of the

earth today than ever before, because of climate change. And

we're going to be in deep trouble on both counts of

climate change and the ecology of the earth, and on how we deal

with human movement because of it.

This is a wicked problem, if we want to call it a

problem. Like, you can't just reform immigration as a policy

or a set of laws in the United States. But if you try to

address the root causes of migration patterns from Mexico,

from Central America, we're talking about poverty, violence,

corruption. Those aren't problems that you just solve in

one presidential administration, right?

For now, the onus is on us to do whatever we can

to provide Sanctuary,

Why are people coming from Central America?

Poverty and social unrest in their own communities. Why would

we not want to help them? Why do we think that they should be

further marginalized – rather than doing what Americans aspire

to do all along, but we failed so miserably the last few years

to do in any comprehensive way. And that's to help people in

need.

We can do that by organizing through faith

communities, or through aid work. And we can also do that,

by making the connections between caring for the earth and

caring for its people.

We would hope that by the nature of

people wanting to support the ecosystem and the world that we

live in – And when you think about migrating butterflies, and

migrating bats, and migrating jaguars, the whole gamut of what

comes through here – that with that, as people learn to connect

to the landscapes where they live, whoever they are, and

whatever they believe, politically, you would also

support and want to connect with migrating people that are coming

through this area for all kinds of reasons and having to use the

very same landscapes that we're living in– that we all want to

be healthy, that we all care about. The work that supports

the migration of life and biodiversity should also support

the work of humans, because we're all part of the same

system.

At this point, it's clear that conditions are

going to get worse, ecologically and likely also politically and

economically. A certain amount of this is already baked in, as

climate scientists like to say, and we're already seeing people,

communities and whole nations closing themselves off as a

response to fear.

But the point is, people have those those

fears. Now we're in a political atmosphere where fear politics

is demoralizing people, but fear still plays out. And we just

have to be brave enough, as Jim and John have their whole lives,

to say "I just don't accept those boundaries are ephemeral.

They're... they're hurting people more than they're

helping."

Perhaps you think that this is only an issue that

is playing out in the Borderlands, or out in the

desert, that these are just the stories of people adapting to

life in harsh circumstances. But I've come to believe that we

will all need to learn to become Nepantleras – to become border

crossers. We all must learn to transcend these divides between

the human and the more than human, between settler and

Indigenous, between black and white, legal and illegal,

ecological and cultural. And until we can do that, we need to

do what we can to heal the open wounds all around us.

Sanctuary for All Life means that we have to

preserve a viable ecosystem so that human beings and human life

– as well as all life, all species – can not only survive,

but thrive by the end of the 21st century.

That's the wisdom that I've been able to glean

from my time in the desert. Take what you will from it. As Jim

would have said, This is no teaching. But it sure as hell is

a testament.

Goatwalker is produced by myself, Adam Huggins and Mendel

Skulski for Future Ecologies. Ilana Fonariov is the Associate

Producer for the series.

For photos, citations and more information about the people and

events described in the series, visit futureecologies.net.

Before we continue with the credits, I want to extend my

deepest gratitude to everybody who spoke with me for this

series, and to everyone who is working to create a world where

no one is illegal, where all life is sacred, and where

Saguaros grow together with Juniper trees.

In this episode, you heard Dr. Carlos Tarin. Dr. Stacey

Sowards, Dr. Sarah Upton, Gary Paul Naban, Francesca Claverie,

and John Fife. Narration was by Ana Zavala.

I highly recommend you check out any one of Gary's many books. In

this episode, we discussed Mesquite: An Arboreal Love

Affair, and Food From the Radical Center. The Rutledge

Handbook of Ecocultural Identity is available on their website.

And as mentioned previously, both of Jim Corbett's books are

being reprinted. You can order the expanded second edition of

Sanctuary for All Life on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. And if

you'd like to be informed when the new edition of Goatwalking

is available via Kindle Direct Publishing, you can email

goatwalking2021@gmail.com

Music was by Satorian, People with Bodies, Hidden Sky, and

Sunfish Moon Light. The Goatwalker theme is by Ryder

Thomas White, and Sunfish Moon Light.

Special thanks to Teresa Madison, Susan Tollefson, John

Fife, Pat Corbett, Nancy Ferguson, Tom Orum, Gary Paul

Nabhan, Gita Bodner, Amanda Howard and the University of

Arizona, Sadie Couture, Phil Buller, Danny Elmes, Tema

Milstein, Jose Castro-Sotomayor and Susan L. Newman.

Future Ecologies is an independent production supported

by our patrons. To join them go to patreon.com/futureeecologies.

Thank you for supporting us.

This episode and this series was recorded on the traditional

territory of the Tohono O’odham, and produced on the unceded,

shared, and asserted territory of the Penelakut, Hwlitsum,

Lelum Sar Augh Ta Naogh, and other Hul’qumi’num speaking

peoples.

As Mendel said off the top:

That's all for this series, and

As Mendel said off the top:

for this season. Thank you for listening, and stick with us.

As Mendel said off the top:

We'll be back in your ears by the New Year. Take care