How tribal leaders and conservationists are trying to stop the Trump border wall
Dianna M. Náñez
The latest attempt to stymie President Donald Trump’s planned border wall has united Tohono O’odham tribal members and conservation groups in an international plea to protect jaguar, pronghorn and other endangered species along the Arizona-Mexico border.
The Center for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace Mexico and the Tohono O’odham tribe in Sonora, Mexico, filed a joint petition on Tuesday with the UNESCO World Heritage Committee. The petition asks that the El Pinacate and Gran Desierto de Altar Biosphere Reserve, a World Heritage Site in Mexico, be granted “in danger” status.
The group said Trump’s proposed 30-foot wall would prevent endangered wildlife migration across the border, threatening the species’ genetic reproduction and survival. A wall, the group said, would splinter habitats and restrict animals’ ability to search for food and water in the desert during droughts.
The reserve sits on an estimated 2,700 square miles in the dormant volcanic Pinacate Shield and the vast sand dunes of the Gran Altar Desert. The reserve includes plants and wildlife that can only be found in the deserts of northwestern Sonora and southwestern Arizona.
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Protection sought for sacred land
Jose Martin Garcia Lewis, governor general of the O’odham tribe in Sonora, Mexico, told The Arizona Republic that he is appalled by what he called Trump’s hypocrisy, criticizing the president for ignoring the tribe’s sacred land and sites while seeking publicity for recognizing the value of cultural and religious sites he visited during his trip to the Middle East.
“He visited very highly respected traditional holy places,” he said. “Why does he not conserve our sacred religious and cultural grounds, like the Pinacate, that we have held very dear to us for all these centuries?
“Why does he want to build a wall through our church? What’s the difference between our holy places and those he saw during his visit in other countries?”
Garcia Lewis said the wall would destroy his tribe’s way of life and their land.
“It will deny our shared cultural and religious practice in the Pinacate: our Salt Ceremony and Pilgrimage, our collection of medicinal plants, visitation to burial sites and sacred cave sites, and plant life. It will, under international law, illegally sever our communications with and access to the Tohono O’odham Nation in Arizona,” Garcia Lewis said in a news release.
The Tohono O'odham Nation stretches across 2.7 million acres in Arizona and Mexico, with 2,000 of its estimated 34,000 members living in Sonora. A wall would cut across about 75 miles of tribal lands on the border.
In an emailed statement, Edward Manuel, chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation, said that neither the nation’s executive office nor its Legislative Council has received a copy of the petition. However, Manuel reiterated the Nation’s disapproval of the border wall.
“The Tohono O’odham Nation’s adamant opposition to the proposed border wall has been made clear in repeated statements by its elected leaders and in multiple official Resolutions passed by the Tohono O’odham Legislative Council,” he said.
“These Resolutions memorialize how a fortified wall would split the Tohono O'odham traditional lands in half, and the devastating impacts it would have on our people’s religious and cultural practices and daily lives. In addition, the proposed wall would have disastrous effects on the environment, endangered species and migratory animals.”
Sarah Uhlemann, of the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity, wrote the petition. She said the coalition hopes to prevent construction of the wall along the reserve or at least force the Trump administration to consider alternative border security options that would not threaten El Pinacate.
“Under the treaty, the (World Heritage) Committee can designate a site as in danger, and that is what our petition is asking,” she said. “That means that it is threatened by something, anything from climate change to war in Syria with ISIS bombing cultural sites like the Parthenon. In our case, with El Pinacate, that threat is from Trump’s wall.”
Uhlemann said the petition is unusual in that typically, petitioning groups target the government in the country where the site is located. But their plea targets the Trump administration’s actions on the U.S. border and their effect on the site located in Mexico.
Sense of urgency
The only U.S.-based site on the in-danger list is Everglades National Park. The coalition hopes the World Heritage Committee would consider the urgency of the petition and take up their request at its summer meeting.
"We reject the idea of building a wall that separates the two nations and their peoples, and a wall’s impact on border ecosystems could be disastrous,” said Gustavo Ampugnani, executive director of Greenpeace Mexico.
El Pinacate and Gran Desierto de Altar Biosphere Reserve is among the estimated 1,000 natural and cultural sites on the World Heritage List. World Heritage Sites are internationally recognized for their natural and/or cultural significance to humanity.
El Pinacate and Gran Desierto de Altar has an elite designation as a biosphere reserve, which is recognized for having the connected functions of protecting cultural diversity, fostering sustainable economic and human development and facilitating environmental education, research or training.
The list includes the world’s most revered sites, including the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone and the Everglades national parks in the U.S.; the Pyramids of Egypt, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, Galapagos Islands in Ecuador, the Taj Mahal in India and the Acropolis in Greece.
The list has grown each year since an international treaty adopted by UNESCO in 1972 sought to identify, protect and preserve cultural and natural heritage sites that are endangered by social and economic conditions.
The treaty protects cultural heritage, including monuments, buildings and archaeological sites. Natural heritage sites include physical and biological formations, habitats of threatened species of animals and plants and areas of “outstanding universal value from the point of view of science, conservation or natural beauty.”
The treaty states that “the deterioration or disappearance of any item of the cultural or natural heritage constitutes a harmful impoverishment of the heritage of all the nations of the world.”
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