One such cross-border project was happening where I stood just east of Agua Prieta. An organization known as Cuenca Los Ojos was using ancient water-harvesting techniques to restore diverse plant life, flowing ponds and creeks, and animal life in ecosystems shared by the United States and Mexico. Around where that discarded border barrier lay were galvanized wire cages, called gabions, on the banks and beds of the wash. The gabions were filled with rocks and went as deep as 18 feet into the ground. At first glance, they had the striking appearance of intricate stone walls. But instead of keeping people out, they were built to be sponges shaped to the contour of the riverbank, slowing the water and replenishing the soil with life, miraculously recharging the water table in a place stricken with a 16-year drought.
Another border wall, indeed, is possible.
It is in these sorts of acts of hands-on “imagination,” in the term of the most preeminent nature writers in the United States, Barry Lopez, that hope is germinating. “Our hope,” he states, “is in each other. . . . We must find ways to break down barriers between ourselves and a reawakened sense of power to do good in the world.”29
As challenging as these times may be, despite the walls, the guns, and all the corruption, a reawakened sense of life, connection, and power is deepening and spreading. The little purple flowers continue to bloom. There are many ways to storm the wall.
TWO
SUSTAINABLE NATIONAL SECURITY: CLIMATE ADAPTATION FOR THE RICH AND POWERFUL
The grave danger is to disown our neighbors. When we do so, we deny their humanity and our own humanity without realizing it . . .
—Pope Francis
In late April 2015, when Kevin Watson of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) spoke at the Defense, National Security, and Climate Change conference in Washington, D.C., he told the story of a climate refugee in a way that I had never heard before: from the perspective of the climate-security business.
The panel that Watson spoke on was titled “Geopolitics, Natural Resource Implications & Extreme Events.” Next to him sat two other panelists, Paul Wagner, an ecologist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and John Englander, an independent consultant for Booz Allen Hamilton, the same top-tier security company that Edward Snowden was working for as a cover for his employment by the National Security Agency. Just before Watson arrived at the podium, Englander had told the audience of a hundred or so conference participants, all sitting at round tables with white tablecloths, “We are about to have catastrophic coastline change. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.”
To illustrate his own presentation, Watson projected images of the space shuttle and an F-35, a single-seat all-weather fighter aircraft manufactured by Lockheed Martin, a four-star sponsor of the conference. “All are dependent on special engineering alloys,” he said. Watson then highlighted the elements needed to make the alloys: chrome, columbium, and titanium that were extracted from mines in South Africa, the Congo, and Zambia. Watson said that the reason he was highlighting Africa was that it’s one area of the world expected to experience “significant climate change effects into the next century.”
Watson then projected images from the fourth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). One image showed Africa divided into five parts: West Africa, Central Africa, North Africa, East Africa, Southern Africa, with bullet points indicating potential climate hazards and disasters in each place. Desertification and droughts dominated many of the regions where the elements required for the alloys were mined. There would be severe impacts on water, on agriculture. “So all of these are going to stress the continent, stress the population,” he said.
Then Watson connected the climate crisis with migration. He said, “If these stressing factors result in increased migration, it will just increase the potential for instability and conflict” both inside and outside of the continent. This could impact the ability maintain local labor conditions necessary to move the elements “critical to the alloys we need to support the system.” In one sentence, Watson effectively insinuated how climate-driven migration crises directly threaten powerful U.S. military-corporate business interests.
To prove his point and underscore that it was already happening, he said: “All you have to do is look at the news every day and you see tragedies associated with illegal migration out of the African Mediterranean, boats full of refugees that are sinking and so forth.”
As Watson spoke, news was still breaking about a rickety three-story boat that had capsized off the Libyan coast while carrying more than 850 people. There were only 28 survivors, one of them a 20-year-old man from Gambia named Ibrahim Mbalo who made a death-defying escape from the sinking ship. As should be anticipated, the predictions for climate disruption in Mbalo’s home country are dire, a place of increasing windstorms, floods, droughts, and sea-level rise that could inundate 8 percent of its land area.1
Watson was speaking during what was to become the deadliest month of 2015, in a year that would register 3,771 known immigration-related deaths in the Mediterranean Sea alone. This was also the year when the extent of people on the move, and the danger and tragedy of their situation, finally dawned on the world. This was the year when the image of Aylan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian boy found face down on a Turkish beach after crossing the Aegean Sea, was widely circulated. At one point 2,000 people per day were attempting the voyage on rubber dinghies. According to the International Organization on Migration, there were more than 18 deaths per 1,000 travelers.2
Although it sounded as though Watson, who spoke with a soft voice, may have personally felt sympathy for the people killed crossing borders and their mourning loved ones, he focused instead on migration as a threat, how it increased conflict. “Just last week there were incidents of violence in Southern Africa,” he said, “because the local residents were concerned that migrants were taking economic opportunities away. . . . Migration definitely creates friction internally and externally.”
As Watson spoke, I noticed that most in the audience had a blank expression. There were government officials, Washington insiders, private industry reps, and representatives from the Army, Navy, and Marines. There were chief scientists from private companies and senior analysts. There were people from the Department of Energy. Watson’s emphasis on the connection between global warming, immigration, and conflict was accepted almost without question. Perception of the migrant threat now goes much deeper than the usual nativist intolerance; driven by escalating climate crises, it is now perceived by corporate America as a threat to a much broader socioeconomic political system and the military financed to protect and perpetuate it.
It might seem counterintuitive that a national security establishment known for its deep-seated conservatism would embrace the notion that human-induced environmental crises are increasingly shaping the future of civilization. This view was shared by at least one attendee in the audience, who spoke up at the end of a later panel titled “Nexus of Water, Energy and Food Impacts on National Security.” He said with full confidence that the panelists were ignoring the “elephant in the room.” The military, he said, was entrenched in climate denial. Awkward looks shot across the room, as if the man had missed the memo. But he was just repeating a commonly held perspective found outside the conference, the dominant narrative that the U.S. government is still debating the science of whether or not catastrophic global warming is real, caused by humans, preventable or not, and that in the meantime we should just keep using cheap fossil fuels and living it up.
This was even more pronounced as President Donald Trump took office. On the very day he was inaugurated on January 20, 2017, the Trump administration’s quiet deletion of all climate change information from the president’s website recalls the Reagan administration’s removal of solar panels from the White House. With Trump, all signs point to a radical shift from Obama-era policies around climate change. Just the appointments of renowned climate skeptic Scott Pruitt and former Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson augur a hotter world and a revved-up fossil fuel economy. Slated to head the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of State, respectively, both arrive at their positions