Laiken Jordahl
@LaikenJordahl • 24,904 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 Jordahl1,207,776 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
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 Jordahl1,100,741 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
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 Jordahl933,562 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
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 Jordahl506,937 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
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 Jordahl635,074 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
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 Jordahl466,698 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
Just brutal to see. DHS contractors just plowed through the last of the four ancient cottonwood trees in Arizona--a tree older than the border itself--to make way for a double border wall through critical jaguar habitat. A dozen protestors were arrested today trying to stop this travesty.
Laiken Jordahl66,721 Aufrufe • vor 13 Tagen
Texas is installing a “floating wall” across the Rio Grande with netting intended to snag & drown border-crossers. River currents will trap debris in the nets & alter river flows. People & wildlife will drown. This is Gov Abbott’s deadly abomination…
Laiken Jordahl4,516,621 Aufrufe • vor 3 Jahren
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 Jordahl2,923,277 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren
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 Jordahl209,879 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
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 Jordahl197,437 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
Texas has installed the first 1000 feet of its absurd “floating wall.” This looks easy to scale at such low water levels. But it’s underwater netting will ensnare fish, turtles & aquatic birds & intends to trap and drown migrants as a deadly “deterrent.”
Laiken Jordahl1,324,881 Aufrufe • vor 3 Jahren
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 Jordahl76,314 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
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 Jordahl77,826 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
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 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren
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 Jordahl129,639 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
Gov. Abbott is destroying the Rio Grande for a fearmongering photo-op. Miles of deadly razor-wire have been deployed to ensnare & impale border crossers. Bobcats, bear, mule deer & other wildlife will also be cut off from their main source of water.
Laiken Jordahl857,854 Aufrufe • vor 3 Jahren
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 Jordahl61,876 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
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 Jordahl90,183 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
BREAKING: new video captures rare jaguar roaming the sky islands of southern Arizona. We checked this camera trap in an undisclosed location yesterday. Just weeks earlier, this cat was moving through the same slopes. We must protect wildlife connectivity in the borderlands so jaguars can continue their recovery in the American Southwest.
Laiken Jordahl117,737 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten