What Border Security Threat?
Drones and
Fences Won’t Secure Us
Against
TransBorder Water Future Threat
It has long been said that topography doesn’t recognize border
lines. Certainly, the transborder spread of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts
cannot be denied. No matter how high nationalist fevers rise or how obstructive
new border security infrastructure may be, the same deserts occupy both sides
of the border.
Still, the border wall and fortified ports-of-entry tend to
diminish consciousness about the shared environment. What is more, the border
fortifications do obstruct traditional wildlife corridors -- making the border
quite real, for the first time, for deer, mountain lions and antelopes, for
example. Although border infrastructure may scar the crossborder landscape with
roads and ditches, the topography on one side remains a close reflection of the
other side. The border has a greater impact on water flows, as each border
state and nation fights to channel and retain water, rather than allowing it to
flow across state and national borders. Governance mechanisms such as the
International Boundary and Water Commission and inter-state accords manage
these conflicts and demands, thereby underscoring how political geography has
altered the traditional patterns of transborder surface water flows.
New U.S. initiatives associated with immigration reform proposals
aim to seal the U.S.-Mexico border with more hulking fences, high-tech
surveillance, sensors, and drones -- all to “secure the border” against a
dramatically diminishing flow (lowest in four decades) of south-north
immigrants, and costing at least $30 billion in additional border security
funding.
Generally unnoticed in this border security buildup is the rapid
onset of a new transborder security threat. Not immigrants, not terrorists, not
drugs, not spillover violence. Rather frightening changes in the deserts, in
the mountain flora, in the surface water flows, in the falling levels of
reservoirs, and in the disappearing aquifers and underground water basins.
This is not a south-north threat to security but one that shares
common ground -- the vast transborder aridlands that include, on the U.S side,
Colorado, New Mexico, West Texas, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and southern California.
On the Mexico side of the border, Durango, Chihuahua, western Coahuila, Sonora,
Baja California Sur, and Baja California Norte face the same transborder
threat.
Decades ago close observers presciently predicted (notably Marc
Reisner in Cadillac Desert published in 1986 -- or more than a century
before by explorer John Wesley Powell) that the region’s reckless development
was not sustainable -- given limited and nonrenewable water resources. In large
part, the water crises reverberating throughout the Transborder West were
threatening the models of economic development and human settlement in the
region prior to the ever-more apparent scourges of climate change.
Clearly, any thoughtful observer could see that Phoenix, Las
Vegas, Tucson, Juárez, Hermosillo, Chihuahua City, and many other urban surges
are not sustainable -- whether observed in 1980 or in 2013. These and other
desert cities were not extensions of natural oases but artificial creations
dependent for their survival on imported water and unsustainable exploitation
of groundwater reserves.
Climate change has accelerated and compounded the looming threat
of over-allocated water flows and rapidly depleting underground accumulation of
largely fossil water. In the last couple of decades, drought cycles have become
more intense and longer lasting. Rising temperatures linked to human-caused
climate change also mean that accumulated water is evaporating more quickly and
that the transpiration patterns developed by regional flora over the millennia
no longer guarantee survival for ecosystems in prolonged periods of drought.