Several kilometers south of the U.S.-Mexico border is a gabion dam commemorating Marcelino Alfaro. A decade ago Alfaro didn’t know what a gabion was.
But on the January morning in 2014 that Alfaro suffered a fatal heart attack, the seventy-something leader of the Ejido 18 de Agosto was inspecting the gabions (rock-filled baskets formed by a mesh of galvanized wire) and trincheras (gathered rock check dams) that were restoring life to the communal land grant he called home.
At the reception following the funeral, while mariachis played Alfaro’s favorite rancheras, family and friends decided to memorialize the beloved Marcelino by building another gabion as part of a plan to revive the ejido (government land grant). Present at the reception was Valer Austin, cofounder, with her husband Josiah, of Cuenca Los Ojos (CLO), which since the early 1980s has been acquiring severely degraded ranches along both sides of U.S.-Mexico border.
Marcelino Alfaro inspects a newly-constructed gabion built by both men and women of the community. Photo Tom Barry.
Tapping their own family wealth and working closely with an array of governmental and nongovernmental groups, together with private landowners on both sides of the border, the Austins and their foundation have successfully fostered an alternative vision of border security. The vision is based on innovative concepts of drylands restoration, water harvesting, and restoration communities and economies. Central to their restoration strategy is the construction of trincheras and gabions. CLO has built more than 40,000 trincheras, 50 large gabion dams (many spanning more than 20 meters), and more than four dozen large earth berms over the past three decades on the 750 square kilometers they are restoring.
“At first, we were alarmed. What little life remained to our community was the water in our wells or the occasional water that ran down the Río San Bernardino,” Alfaro had explained to me in late 2012. “We were convinced that the new ranch owners – Valer and Josiah Austin, along with their Cuenca Los Ojos Foundation – were appropriating what little water remained.”
The cross-border area is where the U.S states of New Mexico and Arizona, and the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora, meet on the international border. This “four-corners” political character perhaps added to the mistrust Alfaro and his community felt. Here, the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Madre Occidental merge in a series of mountainous outcroppings known as the Madrean Sky Islands Archipelago (or simply, the Sky Islands). The Chihuahuan Desert reaches west to meet the Sonoran Desert – two of the four major deserts of the North American West. “If you had to pick one place in the entire continent where the greatest number of surprising plants and animals mingle in proximity to each other, you would do well to stick your pin in this part of the map,” wrote William duBuys in his 2011 book The Great Aridness.
The area’s high-desert topography spans four major biotic systems—all of which have been severely degraded after two centuries of mining, logging, and ranching. CLO owns nearly 200,000 acres of it.
CLO’s Valer Austin next to a gabion on a ranch her organization is working to restore. Gabions collect soil runoff, thereby restoring incised channels while allowing water to seep into land. Photo by Tom Barry.
More than three decades after it began, the CLO cross-border project is attracting international attention as a global model for drylands restoration. CLO’s many achievements in reviving a long-disappeared desert marshland, reversing a two-century process of devastating erosion, and restoring wildlife habitats have turned skeptics in the scientific, governmental, and environmental communities into enthusiasts.
Stopping water from carrying soil down incised channels and washes is essential in this region swept by summer monsoons, when half of the year’s total precipitation can come from just one rain event. As CLO has amply demonstrated, successful drylands restoration depends on strategies and techniques that not only slow the rush of water across the landscape but also facilitate its infiltration into the landscape.
“What must happen is that the land must again become a sponge,” says Valer Austin. Rather than shedding water, she explains, land should soak up the little water that comes its way and then give it back in the form of grasslands, desert wetlands, and perennial streams.
During the final years of his life, Marcelino Alfaro injected hope into the diminishing community of ejidatarios with his belief that Ejido 18 de Agosto could survive. If they joined together to heal the land—then plagued with severely overgrazed rangelands, croplands turned to dust, and deeply incised arroyos threatening to swallow up the village’s center—they could rid themselves of the despair that gripped the impoverished ejido. To memorialize Alfaro, his family, friends, and CLO’s Valer Austin decided on the night of the funeral to build a new gabion dam across one of the most eroded arroyos.
Marcelino Alfaro said well levels stopped dropping and the Río San Bernardino flows even during dry months thanks to CLO’s water-harvesting and land-restoration practices. Photo by Tom Barry.
Because of CLO’s land restoration work on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, a cross-border wetlands area has reemerged, a transboundary river is now flowing year round for the first time in many decades, and desert flora and fauna are abundant across formerly eroded landscapes.
CLO stands at the forefront of this new vision of cross-border environmentalism. It is a vision of land restoration that Mexican ejidatarios, U.S. ranchers, and government agencies on both sides of the border are now making their own.
Tom Barry, senior policy analyst at the Center for International Policy, is the author of numerous books, including three on land-use and agriculture in Mexico and Central America. He is the author of the monograph, “Transborder Drylands Restoration: Vision and Reality After Three Decades of Innovative Partnerships on the U.S.-Mexico Border,” published by S.A.P.I.EN.S, online at: http://sapiens.revues.org/1553. Barry is currently writing a book on the water crisis and climate change in the TransBorder West.
Tom Barry
December 9, 2014 at 7:29pmJoaquin,
From my repeated visits to CLO restoration work on both sides of the border, it is clear that you are right in contending that “hard structures”, as you describe them, cannot alone restore a vast arid and semi-arid landscape. CLO would also readily acknowledge this.
But these erosion control structures are the necessary first step to restore surface and groundwater necessary for the type of large-scale restoration work that CLO is doing. While CLO may not be using the Vetiver system — which seems at first glance better suited to small-scale projects with existing water sources — Valer Austin and her colleagues are also actively experimenting with what you might call “soft” restoration projects, including cultivation of native grasses and (more important) the harvesting of native grass seeds, letting the land heal by removing cattle from now-barren desert landscapes, and cultivating pollinator plants — all during a prolonged drought and on arid lands and riparian areas that have been severely over two centuries. Water is running again, hard structures are not only filling in deeply incised channels (as wide as 30 meters and often as deep as 15 meters) but also creating new riparian habitats and turning them green with trees, grasses, and shrubs– without active planting. This is truly a large-scale land restoration project, and especially inspiring because happening in such harsh conditions. What is especially admirable (and a key to CLO’s success) is that it is not wedded to any particular methodology or system but rather is eclectic while also eager to have their work evaluated by researchers, scientists, and government agencies. Given that there are few examples of large-scale drylands restoration, they are learning what works and what doesn’t. This recognition that there is much to learn and you learn by your mistakes, plus their determination to work with others to share their three decades experience is a model that others working to restore dryland landscapes should consider emulating. I recommend a visit. And about Valer’s comment regarding the importance of restoring land so it acts as a sponge, I also recommend their video “Harvest Rain” in both Spanish and English, at:http://www.cuencalosojos.org/harvest-rain-cuenca-los-ojos.php
Thanks for the comment. Y gracias por el trabajo que hacen ustedes. Tan importante y impresionante.
O Hablutzel
December 9, 2014 at 6:17pmHave seen oodles of gabion failures over time in the desert Southwest, which ends up creating more erosion, etc… glad to see these working for now (but all wire gabions eventually fail, wire rusts and breaks then leaves an ugly mess in the channel along with extra bedload).
Some great work is being done that can treat entire reaches of channels, often for the cost of a single gabion, using local rocks and sticks mostly in well designed structures that do not fail in catastrophic flood events (they ‘fly under the radar’ due to smaller size). See the work of Bill Zeedyk and Van Clothier (book: Let the Water do the Work) as well as Craig Sponholtz (watershedartisan.com)… most inspiring and cost-effective stuff!
Tom Barry
December 10, 2014 at 3:49pmThe “Induced Meandering” concept of drylands land restoration of Zeedyk and Van Clothier has made valuable contributions but seems best suited to small-scale erosion control and tends to ignore positive examples of erosion control structures. See, for example, latest work of USGS on work of CLO and others along the Arizona-Sonora border:
New Publication Describes Restoration Potential of Rock Gabion Dams in the US-Mexico Border: USGS scientists announce the publication of their report on the effects of gabions (wire baskets filled with rocks used as dams) on vegetation using a remote-sensing analysis over a 27-year period, coupled with field data spanning 12 years. Results portray a decline in vegetation where there were no gabions and an increase around them, despite ongoing drought. We found that NDVI demonstrates a strong response to precipitation in areas where gabions are built, suggesting their harvest of rainfall. Field data corroborate reestablished riparian biomass at gabions. The paper is published in Ecological Engineering and can be accessed at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925857414002213
Other important research to be reviewed before making sweeping conclusions about the success of erosion control in large-scale land restoration are the following scientific studies:
DeLong, S. & W. Henderson (2012). Can erosion control structures in large dryland arroyo channels lead to resilient riparian and cienega restoration? Observations from LiDAR, monitoring and modeling at Rancho San Bernardino, Sonora, MX (#EP23C-0825). Poster presented at the American Geophysical Union (AGU), Fall meeting, San Francisco, California. http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2012/eposters/eposter/ep23c-0825/.
Gass, L., L.M. Norman, M.L. Villarreal, C. Tolle, M. Coe & P. Jamwal (2013, April). A test of methods to measure vegetation change adjacent to gabions in Sonora, Mexico using Landsat imagery. Poster presented at the Santa Cruz River Research Days, 15-16 April 2013, Tucson, Arizona. Retrieved from http://www.sonoraninstitute.org/images/stories/pdfs/Presentations/SCRResearchDays/2013/scrrd2013_gass_poster.pdf
Henderson, W.M. & S. DeLong (2012, December). Evaluating dryland ecological and river restoration using repeat LiDAR and hydrological monitoring (#EP31C-0831). Paper presented at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall meeting, 3-7 December 2012, San Francisco, California.
Norman, L. M., Villarreal, M. L., Pulliam, H. R., Minckley, R., Gass, L., Tolle, C., & Coe, M. (2014). Remote sensing analysis of riparian vegetation response to desert marsh restoration in the Mexican Highlands. Ecological Engineering, 70C, 241–254. doi:10.1016/j.ecoleng.2014.05.012.
Yes, gabions do fail when not properly constructed and not sufficiently considering water flow patterns, as some have on Rancho San Bernardino. But Landsat imagery and the many examples of completely back-filled gabions (see photo in this posting of Austin next to disappearing gabion) at Rancho San Bernardino show oodles of successful erosion-control and land restoration on a large scale. “Induced Meandering” certainly works in many arroyos like the ones on my own land in southwestern New Mexico. But using “local rocks and sticks” may not applicable to restoring deeply incised channels that are 20 or more meters wide and 15 meters deep — which is the challenge that CLO is confronting — and overcoming.
Joaquin Boehnert
December 9, 2014 at 3:35amVery interesting article from this semi-arid region along the US-Mexican Border! These natural conditions are similar to other semi-arid region in Africa, Latin America, etc… My question here is if the hard structure of gabions filled with stones alone can do the job to restore degrades lands under these conditions? An interesting statement in the article is “What must happen is that land must again become a sponge” from Valer Austin.
This is much better done in a combination between hard structures, like gabions and soft green system, like for example the Vetiver System – http://www.vetiver.org. Examples in Africa from Ethiopia to South-Africa show that this is possible. Here in Peru we are using the Vetiver System along the semi-arid coastline for soil and water conservation, land restoration, treatment of grey domestic water, etc.. More information you can find from the above mentioned web-site and in Spanish from http://www.vetiverperu.org -.
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