As we approach the US election, Dr Charlotte Veal from the School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape reflects on the humanitarian and environmental consequences of the US and Mexico ‘border problem’.
Contents:
- The ‘border problem’?
- Border tensions
- Border fluidity
- An ecological border
- An international crisis
- Border futures?
The ‘border problem’?
As the race for the White House reaches its conclusion, questions over the current and future management of the US-Mexico border are once again front and centre of public debate.
Both Democrats and Republicans have been asked to clarify their position on the ‘border problem’ and to offer a solution. Rhetoric of ‘security’, and imaginaries affiliated with a ‘thickening’ or not, of the southern border in the form of wire, fences, and boots on the ground under Operation Lone Star1 are politically contentious and socially divisive. Border-building incites political, policy, and ethical questions over nationalism, migration, binational cooperation, humanitarianism, and cultural identity.
Border tensions
During field research on the El Paso-Juarez ‘borderscape’ since 20202,3,4, I have witnessed these tensions first-hand. They play out in the heightened visibility of border agents on the ground and in the sky and in endless media accounts of mass ‘surges’ and illicit substance interceptions5.
They also emerge in the ordinary everyday commutes of border resident ts, in the city’s liberal attitude toward an asylum processing system in turmoil and a rapidly evolving humanitarian disaster.
My swift crossings over the El Paso del Norte Bridge have stood in stark contrast to asylum seekers, forced to wait hours in the 40-degree Texan sun for processing. Their experiences are of in-betweenness: trapped between the push factors of violence, poverty, and climate change, and a nation determined to prevent their admission.
Thousands of miles away in Washington, increased border personnel, bipartisan policies, mass deportations, and clampdowns on human smugglers, are debated.
A fenced-off walkway near the USA-Mexico border. Credit: Veal 2023
Border fluidity
Despite efforts to fix and separate, scholars at the Association for Borderland Studies Conference in San Antonio earlier this year argued for examining borders as always fluid and porous.
What landscape scholars add is the recognition of complexity and co-dependencies. People find legal or covert, ordinary and extraordinary ways to bypass checkpoints for work, family, education, and leisure.
The same is not true of multispecies communities.
Through a ‘landscape-scale perspective’, landscape planners and managers demonstrate the interconnectivity of US-Mexico ecologies or eco-regions that exceed arbitrary lines pencilled onto the map, such as the Chihuahua Desert, Southern Texas Plains, and Rio Grande Watershed67. Concertina wire and eight-meter fences demarcate Anthropocentric territory but also divide once dynamic interconnected habitats.
An ecological border
La Línea Imaginaria (2022) by artist Karla García, bears visible the detrimental impacts on environmental strategies and conservation efforts.
Blasting and off-road military vehicles damage sensitive desert flora and fauna. Barriers fragment landscapes at vast scales, disrupting migration routes, constraining hunting grounds, and reducing gene pools of species like the mountain lion, black bear, Sonoran pronghorn, jaguar, and desert tortoise.
Meanwhile, climate change continues to deliver on its promise to bring more severe and prolonged periods of extreme heat, compounding issues and rendering these fragile ecosystems less resilient.
An international crisis
Questions about managing the borderscape for people and nature are not unique to the US-Mexico border.
Anxieties over terrestrial borders – Russia and Finland, Gaza, Lebanon and Israel, India and Pakistan - have intensified in recent years. The Mediterranean has become the largest border-controlled area globally, with a body count that lives up to its name as the deadliest global migration route8.
These are trans-national, trans-boundary challenges that require a landscape-scale perspective and approach to planning and management; one that takes seriously multidisciplinary perspectives to foster ‘just’ and sustainable humanitarian border practices. And one that is astute to the entanglement between social justice and injustices that are ecological, multispecies, and climatic.
The beginning of the walkway by the USA-Mexico border. Credit: Veal 2023
Border futures?
Building public knowledge of borders, their fluid ecological and social histories, and of the interconnected challenges they pose, is part of addressing this challenge. It necessitates enhanced understanding, underpinned by tolerance and compassion, as well as careful policies and practices that are more than lip service to a ‘humanitarian border management strategy’.
Landscape discourses and approaches offer a lens into thinking about bilateral cooperation and conviviality. Careful approaches are arguably ‘the right thing’ to do, and furthermore are vital for survival, as post-humanist writers have argued. Human, multispecies, and environmental justice depends on co-dependence.
Landscape frameworks foreground systems thinking. The approach examines how component parts, such as soil, plants, animals, humans, infrastructure, and water, are best understood in relationship rather than isolation.
Transformation to the borderscape will have effects and ramifications that are immediate and tangible but also delayed and invisible. Systems thinking embraces complexity and interactions across scales from the micro to the macro, communities that are human and more-than-human, and temporalities that exceed human-centric ways of recording and documenting change over time.
After all, in a time of crisis, we are all of us connected.
Acknowledgements
Research benefited from financial support from Newcastle University, including HASS Bid-Preparation Grant, The School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Research Grant, The Landscape Collaboratory Travel Grant, and a Performance Research Network bursary.
You might also like:
- find out more about Dr Charlotte Veal, Senior Lecturer in Landscape, Degree Programme Director MSc Advanced Landscape Planning and Management at Newcastle University
- explore the work done by Newcastle University’s Centre for Landscape
- read about The Landscape Collaboratory
- find out more about the Advanced Landscape Planning and Management MSc at Newcastle University
References
1 Texas.Gov. 2024. Operation Lone Star. Available at: Operation Lone Star | Office of the Texas Governor | Greg Abbott
2 Veal, C., 2023. Opening Up Endings: Action Performance Practice. GeoHumanities, 9(1), pp.191-210.
3 Veal, C. 2024a. Bodies, Mobility, Politics: On Choreography and Security at the El Paso-Juarez Border. Available at: ABS Conference 2024 | Association for Borderlands Studies (absborderlands.org)
4 Veal, C. 2024b. On Choreography, Security and the El Paso-Juarez Borderscape. Available at: PROGRAM - PECSRL Conference 2024 - Main page (umcs.pl)
5 Sky News. 2023. Migrants surge at US border. Available at: Migrant surge at US border pushes Texas city to 'breaking point' | US News | Sky News
6 EPA.Gov. 2024. Border 2025: United States - Mexico Environmental Program. Available at: Border 2025: United States - Mexico Environmental Program (epa.gov)
7 Lamm, H., Ramirez, D. and Ren, J., 2014. Introduction to Environmental Sustainability Issues in the South Texas–Mexico Border Region. Environmental Sustainability Issues in the South Texas–Mexico Border Region, pp.1-10.8 BBC. 2024. 60 migrants die in dinghy in Mediterranean. Available at 60 migrants die in dinghy in Mediterranean, survivors say - BBC News
9 García. K. 2022. La Línea Imaginaria. Available at: Karla Garcia, La Línea Imaginaria: Art at the border wall – Scalawag (scalawagmagazine.org)