Advocate turns field notes about U.S.-Mexico border wall construction into poetry in 'Borderlings'

By day, Russ McSpadden works as Southwest conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity.

But McSpadden is also a poet, and he’s recently published a collection called “Borderlings,” inspired by the field notes he takes as he observes the ecological impacts of U.S.-Mexico border wall construction on plants and wildlife.

The Show spoke to him recently about the collection, and began by having him read an excerpt from the book.

Full conversation

RUSS MCSPADDEN: We count six of the 500 species of solitary bees
known to this transboundary valley
a xeric empyrean of impossible bee diversity

I organize myself by the strange winged beasts and forget myself
in this slow counting, heat and delicacy
inside a heavy scalding divinity

Sometimes I can only love all things.
My son asks about the size of the bees' hearts, the softness
of their bones
the color of their blood, and where have they come from
to be with us in such a hurry.

The mountains to the east of Slaughter
are exploding as bodies for wall construction

First, the blast siren, then the lift

of Peloncillo Mountain offal, the shadow of the stone as old
as earth—old all

mica opaque and afraid at last.

Guadalupe Canyon is unsettled immortality is lifted green-black
full of basalt and rock-like and want for life.
falling is burnt powder into this holy place of grief and control

SAM DINGMAN: Thank you for reading that. There are so many phrases in there that really stuck with me.

One of them in particular was "inside a heavy scalding divinity," which for me kind of spoke to the intensity of harm and the intensity of beauty that you seem to associate the border and the wall and the lands and biologies around it with.

MCSPADDEN: I have trail cameras along most of the mountain ranges that cross the U.S.-Mexico border, the Sky Island Mountains. And I see just, an incredible array of wildlife.

And at the same time, I'm often staring at a mountain being blasted for border wall construction or a spring system that houses, is home to a half-dozen endangered species that's being put on life support system because border wall construction requires so much groundwater pumping on site that it kills the artesian system.

DINGMAN: Just a quote from another one of the poems where you're watching your son run through the creosote fields. You say, "the stringy muscles of his legs cross dry green arroyos into crunching brown-yellow footholds of dead Mexican sunflowers."

MCSPADDEN: You know, to me, the two most beautiful things in my life are my son and the landscapes of the borderlands, the landscapes of northern Mexico and southern Arizona. And I think a lot of what I'm thinking about, my field notes are like, what is he inheriting?

DINGMAN: Yes. Well, and that ties into another larger organizing idea that I know you're working with here, which is I'm going to say the English translation, and I'll ask you to say the German one. But it's an English translation of a German word. In English, it translates to wall sickness.

MCSPADDEN: You know, one of the first geopolitical events that I really took notice of in the news, I must have been maybe 10 or 11, was the fall of the Berlin Wall. And everyone in my house was very excited by this. And, you know, on TV, it was this incredible moment to behold, even with, you know, being ignorant to anything about the facts of the matter. But I could see, you know, a large boisterous crowd pulling down a wall.

Somehow, you know, decades later, I find myself, living near another, border wall. Someone brought up to me this German concept, Mauerkrankheit — wall sickness— which was, you know, really coined by this East German psychiatrist, Dietfried Müller-Hegemann. And, you know, he was observing increased rates of mental health issues by people that lived near the Berlin Wall.

And it was like very, in some ways, liberating to have a word for this, feeling that was like waiting my shoulders down, almost a feeling of anxiety and claustrophobia.

DINGMAN: Yeah, that makes me think about what you were just saying about your son and how, you know, there's your experience of ... working in and around the border and the wall. And then there's this open question of what you're passing along to him and how he's going to experience and whether the wall sickness will be part of that.

MCSPADDEN: Yeah, I wonder about that as well. You know, he's grown up in and around the border. He's, you know, fellow classmates that he's grown up with in elementary school have, you know, their parents have been sent away or taken by ICE in the past. And so this is part of the world that he lives in.

Amazingly, he was present when we defeated a wall, when former governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey, built shipping containers across the San Rafael Valley. You know, we filed lawsuits and a group of grassroots activists camped in front of the bulldozers there. And my son was there as they were pulling them out.

They actually, we were able to get those border walls eventually removed. And, media reports said it was the first time an international barrier had been removed since the Berlin Wall. I tried to shelter him as much as possible, but also I think it's important that he knows where he lives. And he does love these landscapes. We camp in these landscapes often. And so, yeah, it might be very hard on him. And I do worry about that.

DINGMAN: One of the things that strikes me that you're also writing about is not just the extraordinary amount of natural beauty, but the fact that this beauty endures.

MCSPADDEN: You know, I'm very hopeful, you know, based on the Berlin Wall experience. We were able to look at the expressions of the people on television, which was like just so cathartic. I had no idea why they were tearing this wall down, but I could feel it with such great joy with them.

You know, and I recall really specifically on the east side of the wall was this really austere, just pure concrete wall with guards. And on the west side of the wall was, you know, all this colorful graffiti as the wall was coming down.

And it really reminds me, I spend a lot of time working in northern Mexico on environmental issues. And as soon as I cross, you know, the U.S. side has this very austere wall. And then when you cross into Mexico, that side is painted with flowers and memorials to families, and, butterflies and, graffiti and beautiful art all over it. And it just reminds me of this. very similar situation.

DINGMAN: Yes, well, and I think this gets back to one of the things that for me, your book evokes all of the paradoxical emotions that one feels when you spend time close to the border wall.

You write about the bees so much, and the bees, of course, can flip back and forth across the border. with no consequence whatsoever. And yet for humans, it's a totally different story.

MCSPADDEN: Yeah, that's correct. But only to add that those bees rely on a very ancient spring system, a very fragile spring system that sits just north of the border, which has been partially destroyed by groundwater pumping for border wall construction.

And so there's just a whole slew of issues that, you know, really can't be covered in one book of poetry, but to understand the ramifications of this are really huge.