Building Bridges

Over the past two weeks, in perfectly timed theater ahead of the mid-term elections, a fleet of trucks have been dragging in massive shipping containers and placing them along a remote, 10-mile stretch of the Coronado National Monument in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert. The double-stacked containers are supposed to fill gaps in the US-Mexico border wall. Arizona Governor Doug Ducey ordered their installation in response to what he calls “inaction” by the Biden Administration to stop undocumented migrants entering from Mexico.
 
The stunt has led to a legal face-off between Ducey and the feds. From an environmental standpoint, the makeshift wall damages public land and jeopardizes wildlife. It blocks a key corridor for endangered jaguars and ocelots and other migratory species. But in addition to that, as Robin Silver, co-founder of the Center for Biological Diversity told The Intercept: “It’s designed purely to foment or promote more fearfulness among Ducey’s racist followers so more of them will show up and vote because they’re afraid of the invasion from the south by brown people.”
 
The whole fracas has had me thinking about walls, in both physical and metaphysical terms, and of how relatively easy they are to build compared to bridges. As with many environmental organizations, we at Earth Island are engaged in a long racial reckoning process, as we seek to create a more equitable and inclusive organization. For the past several months, staff and leadership have met in an earnest attempt at this reckoning, and let me tell you, we are running up against walls all the time.  Walls each of us have created to protect ourselves from things we fear — failure, pain, criticism, othering… the list is long.

Some of us are now finally at a stage where we are learning to come out from behind those walls. That work is hard enough alone. But to then build bridges across our differences? That is going to be so much more difficult, especially if we allow fear to rule. In the months ahead, I hope we have progress to report. For now, I can say there is a process, if not progress.
 
More broadly, I’m wondering if this is not the challenge of our times — for all of us, Ducey and his ilk included. How can we break down all these walls and build bridges instead?

Maureen Nandini Mitra

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