Protecting the Last Grandmother Cottonwood: A Podcast with Kate Scott

A vivid depiction of what has been happening during the last eight weeks of resistance of border wall construction in Arizona’s San Raphael Valley. It took several attempts to get this podcast interview with Kate Scott, cofounder and director of the Madrean Archipelago Wildlife Center. On one of the attempts, the people gathered in Lochiel, Arizona, to protect the one remaining cottonwood tree on the U.S.-Mexico border were dealing with a low-flying Customs and Border Protection helicopter that shook the treetop where a person precariously sat, as the group has been doing in rotation now for two weeks. On July 27, an excavator from the contractor Fisher Sand & Gravel killed three other ancient cottonwoods, who they say were obstructing border wall construction. Another podcast attempt was thwarted by a ferocious hailstorm, a staple of the rainy southern Arizona monsoon season. In other words, Kate is in it, in one of the biggest battles of our time, with the weather, with a multi-billion dollar Homeland Security force. People have been gathering at Lochiel since June 23, approximately eight weeks ago, when they got word that CBP was coming for the cottonwoods located in the Roosevelt Reservation, a 60-foot buffer zone from the international boundary inland owned by the U.S. federal government. In this podcast, Kate goes into detail about all of this: the double border wall construction, the contractors, the destruction, the overall resistance, and what they plan to do going forward. We get stories of communion in what Kate calls the grandmother trees. And at the end, Kate reads a moving poem by nine-year-old Aurelia Neils Bugbee who insists that “our love will bring down this wall!” To supplement this podcast, we recommend that you check out this article by John Washington at LOOKOUT that came out this week.