| | |  News Around the Republic of Mexico | June 2009 
Restoring Natural Life on the Border
 William Booth & Travis Fox - Washington Post
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| | Meet Valer Austin, a visual artist from New York City who moved to the desert southwest with her husband Josiah, a Dallas investor. | |
Cajon Bonito, Mexico - The directions to the ranch are basically as follows: Leave problems of Ciudad Juarez behind. Cross Chihuahuan Desert. Climb Continental Divide. Hit Sonoran Desert. When you see some of the prettiest country in the west, slow down and watch out for the migrating hummingbirds. The ranch is on the left.
“This is as wild as you can get,” Valer Austin told us at her cattle gate, and she didn’t mean the usual kind of bad wild you could stumble into along the border - but the good wild.
There are bear, antelope, coyote in these borderlands. There are lions and bison. There are 400 species of bees, the rare black hawk and endangered Mexican stoneroller, which is a fish.
In the video, you can meet Valer Austin, a visual artist from New York City who moved to the desert southwest with her husband Josiah, a Dallas investor. The couple bought a ranch in Arizona and a few more in Mexico. She is possessed by the challenge of restoring land degraded by a century of cattle. She’s as tenacious as a strand of barbed wire.
To revive rivers, the Austins and their ranch hands have erected tens of thousands of low rock dams along the creek beds in Mexico, to use the summer rains to bring water to the desert and recreate the wetlands that were once here.
This is a big, unpeopled place. Scientists have found jaguar here, sharing the ground with drug runners carrying AK-47s and bales of weed.
Austin and her fellow ranchers, Mexican and American, along with a coalition of binational environmentalists (cuencalosojos.org) want to protect this vital corridor for migratory animals.
“We’re trying to manage landscapes on both sides of the border as a single corridor, connected,” Austin said. “Our government put a fence right through the habitat.”
Asked what would be better than a fence, Austin said native grasses and restored rivers and flourishing wildlife. It all depends on what you think is most important. “And I think this is the most important place in the world,” she said.
About this Project
The border between United States and Mexico is the land where straight lines blur, and where two national cultures collide and collude. The writer Alan Weisman, author of "La Frontera", called the borderlands "the most dramatic intersection of first and third world realities anywhere on the globe." There is a lot of good on the border, and these days, plenty of bad. The border is a militarized hot zone, where tens of thousands of Mexican soldiers are fighting a vicious drug war against well-armed, rich and powerful drug traffickers, who smuggle across these desert highways 90 percent of the cocaine so voraciously consumed in the United States. On the U.S. side, the federal government is pouring taxpayer money into border, promising to stem the flow of cash and guns heading south, while the border patrol continues its ceaseless cat-and-mouse search for Mexican migrants sneaking north.
We're setting out to drive the borderlands from Ciudad Juarez, across the river from El Paso, to San Diego's sister city Tijuana. Along the way, we're going to tell the stories of overwhelmed small town sheriffs, of drug smugglers and drug czars, of the Mexicans who struggle to survive in dusty villages and the Americans who fear that the drug war is getting way too close for comfort. We're going to talk to cops and mayors, some scientists and singers, and lots of regular folks, too. We've got a map, an ice chest, a video camera, and the laptops. We've got some stories planned but we also would like to hear from you. What do you think about the drug fight along the border, and what it is doing to the people What dots on the map should we make sure to hit Please let us know in the comments section below. You can also join the conversation on Twitter by using the #mexborder hashtag.
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