2,000 Miles in the Borderlands: The Making of a RAVE, Part One

From a hundred yards away, standing on San Diego’s bright Pacific sand, the wall looks innocuous. I can see past it to Tijuana’s bullfighting stadium and its hilltops crowned with a dense crop of white houses, and its people, a nation away, walking this same beach I stand upon.

Distance tempers the impact of all things—it’s no wonder people a thousand miles away from the border are little concerned with the U.S. building walls along it.

As I walk closer, the wall gradually begins to loom, until I’m standing directly beneath 15 feet of steel uprights and the city on the other side disappears entirely. The only hints of its existence are the hands reaching through spaces in steel to embrace family and friends on the U.S. side, and the sound of a mariachi trio just audible above the churning surf.

I have come here to photograph Pastor John Fanestil, who plans to preside over a communion ceremony with United States and Mexican citizens, through the wall. Fanestil is risking a hefty fine or even imprisonment in doing this, because the border at what was designated “Friendship Park” in the 1970s is now restricted to border patrol use. Fanestil plans on going ahead with his service anyway.

“I would like anyone who wishes to step forward and take some bread, and then say hello or extend a hand to someone on the other side,” Fanestil says to the small crowd that has gathered with him.

People begin to step forward on the U.S. side.

From where I stand, I can’t see people on the Mexican side, but several fingers appear through the thick steel mesh that makes up the wall here. The people on the other side stand just a few feet from me, but all I can make out are their shadows.

The power that this wall symbolizes is palpable, and the moment weighty.

Border patrol agents sitting in their trucks on the beach are watching, but they make no move toward Fanestil. He performs his ceremony without incident. And so begins day one of a 25-day expedition along the border of the United States and Mexico.

Altogether, 12 photographers will join me on this trip, which will take us almost 2,000 miles to the east, where the Rio Grande, and thus the U.S.–Mexico border, is swallowed by the sea at the Gulf of Mexico. I have organized this excursion with the International League of Conservation Photographers under a program it calls Rapid Assessment Visual Expedition, or RAVE. RAVEs are meant to raise awareness for conservation of threatened locations around the world. Previous RAVEs have addressed primate hunting, encroachment on protected areas, and oil and gas mining.

The threat along the U.S.–Mexican border is strange and complex, one that is all tossed up with immigration, drug smuggling, violence, demand for cheap labor, economic inequality, poverty, human rights and many other issues. But we will be focusing primarily on the environmental issues related to the wall and border policy.

San Diego is a good place to start. Here the wall is built right into the Pacific Ocean, and border patrol has been working for more than a decade to build taller and thicker walls and increase enforcement, which has ultimately not solved the problem for San Diego. Major construction of border infrastructure continues. Over the past few days, we have visited Smugglers Gulch, a valley not far from Friendship Park, where the Department of Homeland Security is moving thousands of tons of earth from somewhere else and depositing it in the gulch, to literally fill in a valley so the border wall will have a straighter trajectory.

We have also visited the Tijuana River Estuary near the border in San Diego. This Wetlands of International Importance (as designated by the Ramsar treaty) hums with the audible breath of millions of small invertebrates that live in the tidal marsh and feed many thousands of birds, both resident and migrating. But scientists worry that runoff from the massive Smugglers Gulch project will smother the estuary in silt and destroy the fragile balance that exists here. We have also visited the Otay Mountain Wilderness, just east of San Diego, which has recently been sliced through with roads created for the purpose of giving construction crews access to the border in order to build more wall...

In addition to creating problems in San Diego, tightening of the border here has created big problems elsewhere. As the border in this city was tightened, people traveling from the south looking for work in the U.S. started to rely on routes through remote places. In addition to causing many migrant deaths, this shifting of traffic has taken a toll on both wildlife and ecosystems of the Southwest. Places that were once quiet natural havens have become militarized zones, overrun by vehicles, trash and roads built to carry border patrol vehicles to the newest crossing point for human traffic.