Wildlife and the Wall | WILDxRED

We are going to build the wall. It will be a real war, a real war. Are you ready? Are you ready? This is the Rio Grande; that is Mexico; that is the United States; Texas; and that is Mother Nature's wall. It's pretty great. The Rio Grande starts at Colorado, flows through New Mexico, and becomes the US-Mexico border when it enters Texas.

A border wall already exists along the river in urban areas. As for the rest, it is some of the most inhospitable terrain in the southwest. On both sides of the border, there are national parks, state parks, wildlife areas, and historic ranches that go back for centuries. This region is like the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem of the Chihuahua Desert and the last true wilderness left in the state of Texas.

Desert bighorn sheep went extinct in this region, but they've been reintroduced and once again battle for breeding rights along both sides of the Rio Grande. The physical border wall would block them from the Rio Grande, the only reliable water source, along with everything else that depends on the river for water for survival. Black bears were also killed out in West Texas. Then, about 25 years ago, a female came out of the Malins in Mexico, crossed the Rio Grande, and had cubs at Big Bend National Park.

The bears are back now, about 40 of them. The border wall would isolate them genetically and prohibit future dispersals for them and other important species. I wish that everybody who wanted to build an actual physical wall could come and see this place first, because I think if they came, saw it, and realized what the wall was going through and what it would do, it would have a profound impact on their way to think.

The Chihuahuan Desert has landscapes and an array of life that rivals Yellowstone, who’s Sydney in the Serengeti, but its rewilding efforts, the research, and the conservation work here have just begun. In the center, it's the Rio Grande River, a border for us but the heartbeat for this ecosystem. A flowing, changing desert oasis, the lifeline during drought.

We're gonna build the wall, folks. We're gonna build that wall! It will go up so fast, your head will spin, and you'll say, you know, he meant it!