Laiken Jordahl
@LaikenJordahl • 24,510 subscribers
Public Lands Forever. Big Bend/NPS alumni now w/ the Center for Biological Diversity.
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Bulldozers have begun tearing up Big Bend National Park just a stone's throw from Santa Elena Canyon. DHS waived every environmental & cultural resource protection. No surveys have been done. We don't even know what kind of cultural history they are destroying. 📷Natalie Newman.
Laiken Jordahl1,203,454 次观看 • 27 天前
BREAKING: Bulldozers are arriving in Big Bend National Park near Santa Elena Canyon to plow through border barriers & roads. The irreversible destruction of Texas' crown jewel national park is unfolding and virtually no national media is paying attention. 📷 Natialie Newman
Laiken Jordahl1,099,436 次观看 • 29 天前
More destruction today in Big Bend. Bulldozers and excavators are being trucked into the wildest corner of Texas, preparing to inflict an irreversible scar on the national park. This absurd project is despised by everyone in West Texas. When will Texas leadership step in?
Laiken Jordahl929,474 次观看 • 26 天前
BREAKING: DHS IS BULLDOZING MARISCAL MOUNTAIN. This is the first truly irreversible damage to Big Bend, plowing over endangered cactus species and carving wounds into our national park that will never heal. DHS: why the FUCK are you building a "patrol & enforcement road" HERE:
Laiken Jordahl505,672 次观看 • 19 天前
I spent my day watching the place I love more than anything in the world be irreversibly destroyed for no reason. There is not a single logical explanation for what DHS and its contractors are doing to Big Bend. It has become perfectly clear: they are using the destruction of this crown jewel national park as a vehicle to transfer billions of taxpayer dollars into the pockets of these politically connected contractors. They are sacrificing our public lands so obscenely rich men who have never once set foot here can get even richer. And if they can do it here in Texas' wildest and most beloved national park, they will do it everywhere. Governor Abbott, Senators Cruz and Cornyn: WHERE ARE YOU?!
Laiken Jordahl464,631 次观看 • 18 天前
BREAKING: DHS contractors are demolishing ancient cottonwoods in Lochiel, Arizona for the border wall. These trees are 200-plus years old—older than the border itself. Protestors are on site. I’m told there has been an arrest. Limited cell service there, awaiting more info.
Laiken Jordahl634,364 次观看 • 1 个月前
By all appearances, these dozers & excavators are headed straight for Big Bend National Park. This massive staging area just popped up north of Terlingua. Orange trucks appear to be Kiewit/SWVC whose contract spans the national park. Destruction is plowing full-steam ahead.
Laiken Jordahl209,320 次观看 • 23 天前
It’s pretty remarkable that DHS — the most rogue agency in the federal government — has backed down, at least for now, from border construction in Big Bend National Park. We mounted such a powerful resistance that the CBP commissioner had to fly to Big Bend to do damage control and pump the brakes on the destruction. That happened because rural Texans and people across the country refused to stand by while the wildest place in Texas was bulldozed. And it’s working — at least for now. Our national parks and public lands are one of the great political unifiers left in America. They are places where we can escape the noise, and feel truly free. Bulldozing Big Bend — much like the attempted public lands sale last summer — was a massive miscalculation by this administration. Because the resistance to this destruction isn’t coming from one political party or one corner of Texas. It’s Texas cowboys, dirtbag river runners, business owners, border sheriffs, national park lovers and people from every walk of life across West Texas. We’re going to keep fighting until the dozers are sent packing for good. Audio from a podcast episode this week from the great Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't. Video footage from Natalie Newman and me.
Laiken Jordahl13,504 次观看 • 1 天前
BREAKING: Bulldozers have arrived, and contractors are setting up a new construction outpost along East River Road in Big Bend National Park, where they plan to plow straight through Hot Springs Canyon in another act of purposeless destruction. This part of the park contains the highest concentration of cultural sites, yet DHS has waived every law protecting cultural and archaeological resources. These billionaire contractors are bulldozing through the wildest part of Texas. Their machines will crush thousands of years of human history if we don't stop them.
Laiken Jordahl75,772 次观看 • 19 天前
ALERT: 30-ft steel border wall bollards are arriving in Big Bend. Staging areas are being cleared, unpermitted groundwater wells are being drilled, survey crews are swarming. All to spend billions to wall off the Rio Grande in a place virtually nobody crosses the border.
Laiken Jordahl197,335 次观看 • 1 个月前
Big crowd today at Santa Elena Canyon. They're protesting DHS's bulldozing of Big Bend National Park for border construction just downstream of here. "No road. No wall. No wire. No way," is echoing off 1500-ft cliffs that make up the border, where it's truly impossible to cross.
Laiken Jordahl77,640 次观看 • 21 天前
Since CBP is carving away at Mariscal Mountain in total secrecy, with no analysis or public process, lets set the record straight on exactly what they are doing to Mariscal Mountain in Big Bend National Park. This excerpt is from a report Glenn Smith put together analyzing CBP's current standards for V.5 patrol roads —and what those standards will mean on the ground as they ramp up their permanent destruction of Mariscal Mountain: If CBP persists with plans to build a road up and over Mariscal Mountain, the road has to climb 1,546 feet. The standards cap the grade at 20 percent. Anything over 15 percent must be concrete, poured on site. That would mean a batch plant and water hauled into the desert. If the terrain won’t allow 20 percent grade, the standards let CBP reclassify the segment as a “maintenance road” with up to a 70 percent grade, roughly the pitch of a standard staircase. Such a maintenance road would be permanently closed to the public. But the grade isn’t the hard part. To build a road across a mountainside you dig into the slope. That leaves a wall of rock standing above the roadway. It has to lean back or it comes down on the road. CBP’s standards cap that lean at one foot back for every two feet of height, a fifty percent face. I measured the east flank of Mariscal against USGS elevation data. It reaches sixty percent. When the mountain rises faster than the wall leans back, the wall never reaches the surface. The digging has no end point. It just goes further into the mountain. To hold any of those grades the road needs switchbacks and, in the standards’ own words, “extensive cut-and-fill operations.” That means tons after tons after tons of rock removed. On steep ground the cheapest way to move rock is to push it over the downhill edge, and the further the road climbs the cheaper that gets. Below Mariscal’s rim there is no bench and no catchment. It’s straight down to the Rio Grande. Which leaves two ways to build it. They could line the road with concrete walls on the mountain side, which their own standards call for and which would mean miles of concrete they have never mentioned. Or they could cut the rock nearly vertical where it rises above the road, which exceeds what the standards allow and requires a filed exception. In that limestone the usual way you do it is with explosives, and CBP says it isn't going to blast the mountain. The patrol roads require a permanent, industrial operation within the park. This is something Big Bend National Park has never suffered. And it is an unnecessary because as the park’s rugged country of high canyon walls, dangerous deserts and well-known law enforcement presence have made it the least likely place in the region for suspect border crossings. No, this isn’t about border security. It is a U.S. president trying to turn the Rio Grande into another reflecting pool for his ego. CBP has refused to make its actual plans and specifications public. But the above gives a picture of what its standards could mean for Big Bend National Park.
Laiken Jordahl61,468 次观看 • 18 天前
DHS bulldozed thousands of saguaros & other native cacti to build the border wall. In an effort to deflect from severe public outcry, they transplanted a few and wrote a congratulatory press release calling themselves conservationists. The fate of the transplanted saguaros:
Laiken Jordahl2,922,854 次观看 • 2 年前
Raymond was my supervisor when I worked at Big Bend National Park. His life's work was to protect the wildlife and wilderness lands there. Now, DHS is trying to eminent domain his ranch so they can build "vehicle barriers" above these 200-ft cliffs no car could ever cross.
Laiken Jordahl27,054 次观看 • 13 天前
BREAKING: We're suing the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service over their plan to give away 715 acres of a public wildlife refuge to billionaire corporation Space X. We shouldn't be sacrificing our cherished public lands to subsidize a company owned by the richest man in the world.
Laiken Jordahl129,551 次观看 • 2 个月前
Eleven years ago, I packed my life into the back of my beat-up Honda hatchback and drove into the scorching Chihuahuan Desert — deep into the Big Bend of Texas. I’d just landed my holy grail of a desert dirtbag’s dream job: getting paid (well, barely paid) to explore the winding canyons and towering mountains of Big Bend National Park, and write about it all for the National Park Service. I left Big Bend after my season ended sunburned, exhausted and madly in love. Big Bend showed me how wild and beautiful the borderlands could be. It’s the only place along the U.S.-Mexico border that hasn’t been overrun by militarization, because well, nobody crosses here. It's the last place where you can float down the center channel of the Rio Grande and drift between nations, looking up at the Milky Way in peace. Since then, Big Bend has always been my north star — it's fueled me to fight for a better future across the borderlands and across the desert southwest. Now, federal contractors are coming in to destroy it all. They're ramping up plans to build walls across the region that would cut off access to the Rio Grande, and bulldozers have already carved permanent scars into the national park. We’re fighting like hell to save the wildest place left in the borderlands — and the wildest place left in Texas. It’s a gritty, scrappy and beautiful movement, just like the landscape that’s drawn us all here. We’ve drummed up enough passionate resistance to stop the bulldozers in the national park — at least for now, but that "pause" is about to expire. We’ve got a damn long way to go. What DHS, this administration and the federal contractors profiting from this destruction still don’t seem to understand is that every single person who lives here loves this place more fiercely than they could ever fathom. We won’t back down. Not another foot of wall. Not another road carved through wild country. Not another acre sacrificed to enrich corrupt contractors. Big Bend is everything. And we’re gonna fight like hell to keep it that way.
Laiken Jordahl11,318 次观看 • 6 天前
DHS is preparing to blast canyons & bulldoze roads through thousands of years of human history along the Rio Grande in Big Bend National Park—where virtually nobody is crossing. In Arizona, just a month ago, they destroyed a 1,000-year-old sacred site and faced no consequences.
Laiken Jordahl90,006 次观看 • 2 个月前
Border walls don’t belong in wildlife refuges. Pronghorn like these have migrated freely across the invisible line that’s now called the U.S.-Mexico border for millennia. Now, their habitat is severed in two. This video from the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge in AZ.
Laiken Jordahl788,357 次观看 • 2 年前