Our Natural World: Big Bend in the Crosshairs

At the end of 1987 and the beginning of 1988, Tom and I went on a short camping trip to Big Bend National Park. I fully appreciated the beauty of the place even as I worried about encountering spiny cacti if I had to plunge out of the tent at night to vomit, for I was in the first months of my first pregnancy. Fortunately, I made it through the trip without having to make such a hasty exit.

I've been thinking of that trip recently in light of what the Trump administration is doing to our protected natural places. President Trump, obsessed with immigrants, especially with those crossing our southern border, whether legally or illegally, put in motion during his first administration the building of a wall through once sancrosanct and protected natural areas. That construction continues in this, his second administration. Environmental issues are disregarded, natural pathways of wildlife disrupted, native flora destroyed. 

Big Bend National Park is now a target. While construction seems to have been halted for a bit in response to public outcry, we can't be assured that the pause will be permanent.  The Trump administration has demonstrated that it is willing to defy legal constraints on its actions. 

Our camp in the foothills of Nugent Mountain, Big Bend

 

Our natural treasures are under attack. 

Our camp at Paint Gap, Big Bend

 

Clearing has already begun in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Pima County, Arizona. According to the Center for Biological Research, the clearing is in preparation for building a second wall to run parallel to the already-existing 30-foot wall. Endangered species at a nearby spring are threatened as well as native flora found only in these wild, protected places. The government has closed roads to vehicle and pedestrian traffic, an action that defies public transparency.  Staff for the Center for Biological Diversity had to hike for miles to investigate and document the damage done to an area that is part of the historical homeland of the Hia C-ed O'odham and the Tohono O'odham.  

In April, wall construction workers plowed a 50-foot-wide swathe through an ancient fish-shaped geoglyph in Arizona's Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. 

Those who take care of our public lands have also been affected by the Trump administration's bad governance. The National Park Service has lost about a quarter of its permanent workforce. Money that would be going to pay Park Service employees, to maintain visitor centers, trails, and camping sites, to protect native flora and fauna is being rerouted to the President's vanity projects, such as the botched $16 million "repair" to the Reflecting Pool, the White House ballroom, the changes to the White House grounds and the National Mall. The money funneled to such projects has ballooned from $7.5 million in 2024 to $423 million in 2026.

Public outcry to these actions should be more widespread. The bipartisan response to construction in Big Bend is a model, for environmentalists, local land owners, local sheriffs and judges have all voiced their objections. Their arguments against the wall construction are supported by the fact that the rugged terrain of Big Bend already acts as a fairly effective barrier to migrant incursion, with only about 1% of border crossings. But our national interests go beyond illegal immigration and should include maintaining for future generations the biodiversity of public lands, their archeological artifacts, their cultural significance to settlers--ancient and more recent- who also were once immigrants to this continent. 

View from summit of Lost Mine Trail

View from Lost Mine Trail

  

Sotol Vista Overlook

Memories are made in places such as this.

Lessons Learned about Self-Monitoring?

On Saturday of this past weekend, my husband, son, and I traveled to Franklin, Louisiana, to attend the Franklin Black Bear and Birding Festival. On the banks of Bayou Teche,venders had set up booths of local products and crafts, various conservation groups had prepared displays and games for children in a nearby warehouse, and musicians were scheduled to play for a street dance. We took a pontoon ride into the Bayou Teche Wildlife Refuge managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It was a beautiful day, clear and cool, and on the trip up a canal dug over one hundred years ago for logging, we saw several alligators sunning on the banks as well as several species of egrets. The particular area of the refuge near Franklin that we boated into is closed to motorized vehicles from September 1st to April 15th. That area had just been opened for motorized vehicles, and the gate was open, as the picture at left illustrates.

As we motored slowly down the canal, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife employee steering the boat and directing the tour mentioned that there were no old-growth trees here because the area had been intensively logged at the turn of the last century--that is, from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century. Historical records indicate that from 1890 to 1935, timber companies removed virtually all of the cypress from Louisiana; any old growth remaining was few and far between. The trees one sees now are ones that have regenerated since then. The canal we were traveling on was also left over from the timber industry's work. Canals were dug in the swamps in order to get to the trees and then to drag the trees to waterways where they could be then be floated to timber mills. If you pull up a Google Earth map of Lake Maurepas and Lake Pontchartrain, you can still see straight canals radiating out from the places where cypress had been harvested, dragged into the canals by pullboats, and "cribbed up into booms and pushed like barges" to mills.  [Frank B. Williams: Cypress Lumber King, by Anna C. Burns]

Timber industry supporters today complain about the restrictions on harvesting the cypress that has regenerated since 1935 when Louisiana was just about completely stripped of cypress. But the past history of just about any industry that pulled its resources from the natural world--or just about any industry, for that matter--indicates that industries are unable to monitor themselves. It doesn't matter if it's an industry that harvests the resources of the natural world or the banking conglomerates that sell derivatives.  Management and employees live high on the proceeds until they have exhausted the resources that provide those proceeds--or until the financial enterprise threatens to go bankrupt and take the country down with it and is bailed out by the government. Frank Williams "celebrated his fiftieth year in the lumber business by distributing $100,000 in bonuses among his employees" [Burns]. A few short years later, the cypress industry had exhausted its resources. Other timber industries began liquidating their assets in the 1910s, but the company that Frank Williams established managed to branch out into oil and real estate and thus operates to this day.

In 2006, Goldman Sachs paid "its employees a total of $16.5 billion in compensation," bonuses that, if distributed evenly, would mean "$623,418 for every" one of its 26,467 employees. ["The Goldman Sachs Premium," by DealBook, 18 December 2006] By 2008, it was clear that Goldman Sachs and other financial industries had almost brought the U.S.--and the world--to financial disaster. Millions of Americans have yet to recover. But taxpayers bailed out the financial industry, and those "titans" got to keep their bonuses.

But have we learned this lesson: that industries must be vigilantly regulated for the health,  safety, and welfare of not only ordinary people but the planet? It seems that a lot of us haven't. More on that in another post.

More on the logging of cypress in Louisiana:
Jacobs, David. "Logging Off." Baton Rouge Business Report. BusinessReport.com. 10 September 2007. http://www.businessreport.com/news/2007/sep/10/logging

Cypress Logging in Louisiana, circa 1925 (Part 1 of 2)   YouTube. Archival footage provided by Krantz Recovered Woods, Austin, TX. http://youtu.be/HF3-0NISvs4

Cypress Logging in Louisiana, circa 1925 (Part 2 of 2). YouTube. Archival footage provided by Krantz Recovered Woods, Austin, TX. http://youtu.be/FxSP08zJ5tE