Storming the Gates of Paradise (13 page)

In his novella
Heart of Darkness
, Joseph Conrad depicts his Kurtz living with human skulls as ornaments outside the house deep upriver. If the United States is to be pictured as a garden out of which the aliens must be kept, imagine it with skulls and skeletons and mummies, not garden gnomes or pink flamingos, as its lawn ornaments. Along with those death-threat lawn plaques and angels with
flaming swords. A very crowded garden, withal, not crowded with immigrants but with props and weapons to guard the boundaries of empathy and imagination.

The fantasy of the nationalist garden wall emerged in 1998 as Amendment A, a Sierra Club ballot measure, which for a while that spring threatened to fracture the organization and even the environmental movement. The measure stated that restricting immigration was key to protecting the domestic environment. It implied that immigrants were to blame for the deterioration of the environment, as though those huddled masses were rushing out to buy jet skis and ten-acre Colorado ranchettes, as though sheer numbers alone, rather than habits of consumption and corporate practices, were responsible for degradation of the U.S. environment. It reeked of American isolationism—the idea that our garden could be preserved no matter what went on outside its walls, though many ecological issues are transnational: migratory birds, drifting pollutants, changing weather—and it implied that we live in a garden and they do not.

Amendment A was meant to be a kind of garden medallion to be read by politicians as well as potential intruders. It harked back to the unattractive origins of one part of the environmental movement, the Save the Redwoods League. Historian Gray Brechin recently unearthed the organization’s turn-of-the-century origins in a eugenicist linkage of preserving native species with preserving “native”—that is, white Protestant old immigrant—culture and majority. Saving the environment is usually imagined as being inherently moral and apolitical, but neither condition is necessary: think of the greenness of the Nazis postulating their forests as a nationalist landscape and their mountains as an Aryan zone. Hate and suspicion are not uncommon garden crops.

Amendment A was signed by nature romantics rather than central players in the Sierra Club’s environmental work, by the (Canadian) nature writer Farley Mowat, by ecoreactionary Dave Foreman, by neon-sunset-photography superstar Galen Rowell; it was opposed by most of the club’s past and present leadership.
Entertainingly enough, San Francisco’s Political Ecology Group demonstrated that Amendment A had been introduced by people who were themselves largely outsiders to the club, which is to say that the club itself could be imagined as a kind of garden of shared beliefs that had been invaded by hostile raiders seeking to transform its nature. (As one of their tactics, supporters of Amendment A urged members of anti-immigration and population-control groups to join the Sierra Club en masse to vote for the measure.) Fortunately the proposal lost, but it left in its wake this renewed vision of the United States as a garden that could be sequestered from the world. The winning alternate amendment proposed that drawing such lines between nations and people would alienate important allies in the battle over the real issues.

Having been blamed for every other sin under the sun, immigrants were now to be scapegoated for our environmental problems as well. By the time the Sierra Club’s membership had voted down Amendment A, a lot of participants were embittered, and the environmental movement was tarnished in the eyes of many onlookers. The 1990s had seen the rise of the environmental justice movement, which addresses environmental racism—who gets poisoned by dumps and incinerators, among other things—but the mainstream environmental movement is not always so good at the racial politics within its own priorities and assumptions. The very white-collar premise that nature is where you go for recreation belies the possibility that some people toil in nature or on its agricultural edges and would rather do something less rugged on the weekend.

Still, this is a long way from the politics of the anti-immigration activists who attempted an openly hostile takeover of the Sierra Club in the spring of 2004, with three candidates for the March board elections looking to form a majority with some of the more dubious current board members, and with various outside organizations—some clearly racist and white supremacist—encouraging their members to join the club and sway the vote. (That the name of the Sierra Club is half
Spanish, a souvenir of when California was part of Mexico or Spain, recalls a history no one in these debates seems to have examined, or perhaps the exclusionary British term
club
trumps it.) “Without a doubt, the Sierra Club is the subject of a hostile takeover attempt by forces allied with . . . a variety of right-wing extremists. By taking advantage of the welcoming grassroots democratic structure of the Sierra Club, they hope to use the credibility of the Club as a cover to advance their own extremist views,” said the Southern Poverty Law Center in a warning letter.

The three candidates were Frank Morris, David Pimentel, and Richard Lamm. A former Colorado governor, Lamm is a longtime board member of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which receives funding from the pro-eugenics and “race betterment” Pioneer Fund. Lamm, who has apparently spent little time in Switzerland, has said, “America is increasingly becoming, day by day, a bilingual country, yet there is not a bilingual country in the world that lives in peace with itself.” He once projected a fantasy near future in which “the rash of firebombings throughout the Southwest and the three-month siege of downtown San Diego in 1998 were all led by second-generation Hispanics, the children of immigrants.” He spoke in 1984 about the elderly having a “duty to die,” and he believes in rationing medical care. The garden is the pretty metaphor employed by anti-immigration activists; the more ferociously paranoid imagination of characters like Lamm picture the nation instead as a lifeboat with limited supplies, which is why you have to clobber the fingers of those swimmers clinging to the boat. Only perhaps it was their boat, but the fact of their being tossed in the ocean had been obliterated; or perhaps they are the ones who row and bail and keep the boat going. Nevertheless, their fingers were being clobbered.

The vision of a homogenous place overrun by disruptive, destructive outsiders is a better picture of the Sierra Club under siege than the United States in relation to immigration. Outside groups such as the National Immigration Alert List encouraged their members to join the club to force it to endorse an issue it had rejected six
years before and so perhaps permanently warp its identity and image. Further, most candidates for a seat on the club’s board are active longtime members, but the three outsiders seemed to have become members specifically to stage the nonprofit equivalent of a hostile corporate takeover. This was underscored by their filing, and then petulantly dropping, a lawsuit against the club, various club personnel, and three other board candidates (including veteran club activist Phil Berry and civil rights activist Morris Dees, who had called attention to their links to racist groups).

Thirteen past presidents of the Sierra Club came out in opposition to the coup; eleven of them issued a statement that included these remarks: “These outsiders’ desire is to capture the majority of seats so as to move their personal agenda, without regard to the wishes or knowledge of the members and supporters of the Sierra Club, and to use the funds and other resources of the Club to those ends. . . . We believe that the crisis facing the Club is real and can well be fatal, destroying the vision of John Muir, and the work and contributions of hundreds of thousands of volunteer activists who have built this organization.” (Of course, John Muir was a racist, too—he said some pretty astounding things about Native Americans—but that’s another story, and era.)

A lot of leftists have already written off the 112-year-old Sierra Club, and though I’ve occasionally thought that its slogan could be that of Earth First!—“No compromise in the defense of Mother Earth”—without the “No,” it remains what it has been for so many decades: the flagship of the environmental movement, dealing with everything from clear-cutting and global warming to endangered species and water pollution. Discrediting it would drain credit and potency away from much of the movement. And it seems that the goal of these anti-immigration activists has little or nothing to do with the protection of the environment. After all, the links between immigration and environmental trouble are sketchy at best.

During the 1990s, the border was always talked about as though it were a tangible landform, a divinely ordained difference. I grew up with a clear picture of the
Iron Curtain, too, since it was spoken of as though it were as coherent an artifact as the Berlin Wall. But the Berlin Wall was made of concrete, while the Iron Curtain was not made out of metal, despite the vision I’d had of a continental Cyclone fence. Like the U.S.-Mexican border, it was a political idea enforced by a variety of structures, technologies, and people with guns.

The spring of Amendment A, I actually spent several days on the border, or rather in the place where the border is supposed to be: along the lower canyons of the Rio Grande, where the left bank is named Texas and the right bank is Chihuahua. The river, which divides nothing at all on its long run through New Mexico, has been an international boundary since the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the U.S. territorial war on Mexico 150 years ago and transferred a million square miles of Mexico to this country. Yet rivers are capricious, and this one has a habit of throwing out oxbows that put some bewildered farmers and their land in a new country. So in the 1960s, the border was designated as the deepest part of the river during the years of the survey, regardless of where the river should go afterward. Which means that the phantom river of thirty years ago is now the international border—not the most solid object for nationalism to rest upon. After all those years of fiery rhetoric about the border, it was strange to float down the place it was supposed to be and find nothing but water, rock, and prickly pears. The possibility that the Border didn’t exist was a stunning one.

As our raft floated downstream, crossing songbirds and cattle seemed indifferent to the idea that the Chihuahuan desert was really two countries. The slow river along the banks of which all this life clustered and bloomed was not a boundary but an oasis where the toxins from American agriculture and Juarez maquiladoras mixed indiscriminately. Not quite a Berlin Wall, even if you’re not a swallow or a cactus wren.

Borders don’t exist in nature. I learned that again in northern Canada, up where British Columbia meets the Northwest Territories. I was traveling by raft again, and the ornithologist with us would get up at dawn to identify, band, and free the songbirds that she caught in her mist nets. She liked to point out that a lot of them wintered in the tropics of Central America, and so conservation efforts needed to be transnational. Canada’s remotest wilderness was not a place apart; it
was intimately tied to the tropics. Weather, toxins, species all move without regard to borders, which is one of the reasons why environmental politics don’t work as nationalist politics. Though on the Rio Grande I was once again with Canadians, who simply didn’t grasp the dangers and resonances of this border.

There were, of course, people to enforce the concept of the border and to profit from it: during my ten-day rafting trip, I saw what appeared to be a drug smuggler, a picturesque old man with a heavily laden burro; was confronted by a Mexican army commandante and his machine-gun–carrying soldiers; and on the last day met an armed Immigration and Naturalization officer who was there to patrol that stretch of river, which even livestock crossed regularly. Like the front yards of Angelenos, the international border is usually just an expanse with a few threats and armed-response guards scattered along it. But the conceptual line running down the river didn’t mark a garden off from the world; the river was instead a different kind of garden, an oasis around which flourished birds and plants that couldn’t have survived elsewhere in the arid desert spreading far in all directions. And birds and seeds and air pollution emigrated across the river without passports; contaminants from upriver agriculture, sewage, and industry flowed down it without visas. Amendment A, it seemed to me there, was wishful thinking, a fantasy that spaces could be truly sequestered, could have happy fates independent of the unhappiness all around. Which is not to deny that environmental devastation and crime are bad things. They are unquestionably bad. The questions are all about the way they are imagined and addressed.

When the Mexican army with their machine guns arrived at Hot Springs Rapid, two of the river guides and several passengers were drinking wine in the hot
spring and hooting out lurid speculations about the guides’ anatomy. The commander and his three stolid Mayan-faced soldiers were first seen by someone napping in a tent, who did little more than hope it was a bad dream; the second to see them went to tell the trip leader in the springs; and I must have been the third. My primitive Spanish regressed further under the circumstances, but I figured that being female, fully dressed, and impressed with the gravity of the situation made me the best person around to take on the job of soothing diplomatic liaison. (The one Spanish speaker in the group was off hunting red-eared slider turtles, unsuccessfully—
“el buscar las tortugas,”
I said, or something to that effect, and my interrogator laughed.) We were camped on the Mexican side of the river, of course, on one of the few spots where a road leads all the way to the river—twelve miles down a long canyon from the nearest ranch. The road was used periodically by people coming to bathe in the springs.

I never ascertained why the Mexican army had arrived—whether we were interrupting their bathing schedule, or whether it had something to do with the old man and the burro we’d seen the day before, who fit the bill for a drug smuggler. It seemed unlikely to be a routine patrol, in this remote place bordered by cliffs. I did ascertain that the commander, who seemed to be in a good if unrelenting mood, preferred
“la costa,—Acapulco y Puerto Vallarta”
to
“el desierto”
and wouldn’t mind being transferred soon. I was just trying to put in a good word for the desert, though I myself live on
“la costa”
as he had seen when he inspected my papers, when the trip leader came along and found out that he didn’t want to stay for a drink.