Defend Wilderness along the southern border

The desert ecosystems of the southern border region are biological hotspots with tremendous biodiversity, providing habitat to over 1,500 native animal and plant species—many of which are threatened or endangered.

Five designated Wilderness areas are also found along the U.S. border with Mexico—the Cabeza Prieta, Jacumba, Organ Pipe Cactus, Otay Mountain, and Pajarita.

Unfortunately, a bill introduced in the U.S. House this past September—the “Flash Act” (H.R. 9678)—would amend the Wilderness Act to allow more destructive activities within Wilderness areas along the southern border, and threatens public lands and wildlife habitat throughout the region.

That’s why Wilderness Watch joined 40 organizations dedicated to environmental protection, civil and human rights, tribal government, and community support, to express our significant concerns about H.R. 9678 in a letter to Congress.

Now we need your help to keep Wilderness areas along the southern border wild. Please write your U.S. House Rep to express your own concerns with H.R. 9678.

Specifically, Section 102 of H.R. 9678 purports to amend the Wilderness Act for search and rescue operations and to conduct patrols on horseback and on foot, but the Wilderness Act already provides for these activities.

In reality, section 102 of H.R. 9678 would essentially eliminate Wilderness on the southern border by amending the Wilderness Act so it doesn't apply to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Troublingly, the bill would allow otherwise prohibited activities in Wilderness for the purported purpose of "securing international land borders" for up to 10 miles away from the border, including:

• Constructing and maintaining roads and other structures that the bill calls "physical barriers" (i.e., walls);
• Allowing "tactical infrastructure and technology," which is a broad and undefined term, as well as motorized equipment;
• Allowing motor vehicles and motorboats for access to structures, installations, and roads and aircraft to fly through the airspace above Wilderness and to land and take-off in Wilderness; and
• Allowing "access" to the structures, installations, and roads, including those permitted above, via motor vehicles and motorboats.

Section 103 of H.R. 9678 would even deputize states to place "movable, temporary" structures on public lands, including in Wilderness, requiring states to merely notify the federal government of this action. This section allows these temporary structures to persist in Wilderness—and on all federal public land—for a year, with low hurdles designed to easily authorize their continued existence into the future.

We have no illusions that protecting the border is easy, but it needs to be done without destroying our nation’s natural heritage of Wilderness and wildlife. It’s important to keep in mind that there is already a buffer zone between designated Wilderness and the southern border, and it’s within that buffer that the activities contemplated in the FLASH Act, if they are necessary at all, need to occur.

Clearly these types of structures and motorized, quasi-military style activities have no place the Cabeza Prieta, Jacumba, Organ Pipe Cactus, Otay Mountain, and Pajarita Wildernesses!

Please write your U.S. House Rep today to keep Wilderness along the southern border wild!