It Could Happen Here - The Wall and the Wilderness

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

James talks about the ecological disaster that is the border wall and interviews Dr. Christina Aiello about the Peninsular Bighorn ram that was killed by razor wire in the Jacumba mountains. Sources: https://www.usaspending.gov/search?hash=29de9d51905bd175a701b04c24176b46 https://www-jstor-org.sdmesa.idm.oclc.org/stable/3636811?seq=5 https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?contributor_employer=Atkore https://tucson.com/news/local/border/article_a11265b0-17c3-5bed-b50a-72e5d17e1369.html https://www.blm.gov/visit/jacumba-wilderness https://www.usaspending.gov/search?hash=29de9d51905bd175a701b04c24176b46 https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/04/08/2025-05992/determination-pursuant-to-section-102-of-the-illegal-immigration-reform-and-immigrant-responsibility https://www.enr.com/articles/54215-us-settles-border-wall-suit-against-contractor-fisher-sand-gravel https://www.atkore.com/about-us https://desertreport.org/a-border-wall-in-the-jacumba-wilderness-area/ https://gizmodo.com/trumps-border-wall-torn-apart-by-arizona-monsoon-rains-1847535174 https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_70B01C25F00001112_7014_70B01C23D00000010_7014 https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1666138/000166613826000010/atkr-20260429.htm See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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The Improvised Character Comedy Podcast Where each week A new panel of artists discuss their craft Join us for a panel of Eurovision participants And we do a little Halloween Sometimes

Does the Pope dress up He winks on Halloween He gets right up next to the microphone I hear you can almost hear The eyelashes hit each other You never seen Italy so quiet As when the Pope gets up to wink on Halloween.

Listen to Artists on Artists on Artists every Thursday on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 1986, a man named Scott Macklem was killed in broad daylight. Police quickly found their suspect. Prosecutors convicted him. But now, almost 40 years later, I'm re-examining this case. I really didn't believe any of it was real. And I was like, well, they're going to figure out this is not me.

They're going to do their police job. Has the wrong man been in prison this whole time? Listen to Examine the Backfire Effect on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Big Lives, we take a single cultural icon. People like Jane Fonda, George Michael, Little Richard. And we pull apart the story behind the image, discovering forgotten interviews that changed exactly how we see these giants of our culture. We're here for the messy, the brilliant. the human version of our heroes.

I'm Immanuel Jochi. I'm Kai Wright. And this is Big Lives. Listen to Big Lives on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. In February of 2024, celebrated illustrator and children's book author, Petra Mathers, and her husband Michael, mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let them know they had died by suicide. Dear honies, this is goodbye. By the time you get this letter, both Petra and I will be dead.

next stop, Wonderland. Why did they do it? And what did it do to the people they left behind? Listen to Death of an Artist on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The new NFL season is here. And you should be listening to NFL Daily as we march along to Super Bowl 61. It is in the name, NFL Daily. You'll have fresh content in your feed every day all season long.

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Hey, everybody, it's me, Debbie Kumabelle. This season on my podcast who's with me, I speak with Bruce Lee's daughter, Brandon Lee's sister, and my friend, Shannon Lee. Back to your initial point of stewarding my father's legacy and giving my energy to that. You're lending your life to stewarding somebody else's life. Listen to Who's With Me with me with Debbie Kumabelle on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Allzone Media. I was phones. It's a Saturday morning in late June.

The desert a few thousand feet below will hit temperatures above 110 Fahrenheit by noon and everything from the rattlesnakes to the waters in this valley will seek shelter from the punishing sunlight. With some friends and scrambling up a pile of boulders each one the size of a truck to try to reach a valley that's surrounded on three sides by walls formed from these giant balls of granite.

The rocks are like sandpaper with a bit of courage and good shoes you can smear your foot against a vertical rock and gain enough traction to push your body weight up. Then you find the little lip, push your fingers into it until they hurt and pull. Then you smear your foot again,

tell yourself to trust it and keep repeating and tell you're where you want to go. Below us on the valley floor, the hukumba wilderness stretches out into the heat mirage that blends with the horizon. From here it looks barren, rocky and hostile. I've spent a lot of time in those canyons.

I know where there are lush palm oases, where the majestic peninsula bighorn sheep have their lambs, and where we have searched for missing migrants and their remains, and later built the little crosses that dot the canyons now as a way of trying to show kindness for the friends we never got to make. Some have names, many to say disconnoisseur, for the people whose bodies were too quickly returned to nature for them ever to be identified.

The desert waste little, and everything that dies out here quickly becomes part of the things that live out here. That's how life thrives in a place where many assume it couldn't. After more than a decade scrambling around these rocks and getting choy of spines in places you'd never think they'd end up, I love the desert. It's magical to me, and the vastness and the sense of smallness keep bringing me out here, just like they take me out to the ocean west of here where I like to free dive. These vast, wild places where I don't belong

challenge me to watch the plants and animals that do belong here and learn from them so I can feel a little safer in their environment and share their home. Americans haven't always loved deserts. These days we live in an era of desert chic. America's great desert cities and towns, Tucson, Las Vegas, Joshua Tree, Martha and Santa Fe, to name just a few, offer Instagramable vistas and the opportunity for folks who don't know which end of a cow the milk comes out from to wear cowboy boots and bolo ties. But it wasn't always this way.

Europeans first entered California from the desert side, little over the horizon to the east of where I'm standing, where Melchior Diaz crossed to Colorado, quote, where he found the country very sandy, windy, and filled with large and high sandbags. Shortly thereafter, Diaz would throw his lance at a greyhound that was chasing his sheep, end up impaled on the rear of his lance and his groin

and sustained injuries that would cause his death three weeks later. His progress from outside humor to what is now Baja California has long been something of a source of fascination for me. The location of his grave isn't well known, but a lot of research I've read a very old newspaper leaves me to believe it's likely in the hills above the dry lagoon, so to west of San Felipe. I've crossed that lagoon on a bike,

an experience of vastness of the flats, and a frustration of slogging slowly through thick sand in hot temperatures. Unfortunately, Diaz's expedition some 500 years ago, was part of the colonization of this region. And not all the colonizers at that time or later managed to fatally stab themselves in the dig. More so pity. Diasa's expedition was the first of many, and it began 500 years of colonialism and genocide here. That colonial thrust continued into the 19th century,

when this part of Alta, California, became part of the United States, and a line was drawn across this beautiful desert with scant regard for the mountains, oases, and the big horn sheep, who have been here far longer than the border. For a long time, it was just a line. It didn't change much in these valleys. People still crossed to go to church or see their families. A few years ago, my friends and I found some cattle that had wandered over. And the weld sheep crossed around here over a year to survive the heat of the summer in Baja and to have the lambs on the north side of what is now the border. Over time, some folks stakes mining claims out here, where I'm standing wasn't that far from a silica deposit.

and I always find cool quartz crystals out there. But they didn't really manage to develop those claims in a way that fundamentally changed these valleys. To the south of the border in Mexico, there were huge windmills. And for most of the valley, until very recently, they were really the only signs of colonialism and capitalism had made it this far. I've spent a lot of time in this area. I was camping out here when the third precinct burned in Minneapolis. I came out to the desert again six years later after CBP killed Alex Preti the day I left Minneapolis.

Just a few miles away, my friends and I fared and sheltered and cared for thousands of people when the Biden administration corralled them in the desert without supplying food, water or shelter. I found peace here, and I've seen terrible pain and suffering here. And throughout that time, I've developed a special reverence for the desert and the challenges and the opportunities it gives me. Our desert here is perhaps not the desert you think of when you think of desert. There aren't saguaros here. And in the popular perception of the desert, they dominate the landscape, as they do over the western horizon in the parts of the Sonoran Desert that include the magnificent organ-pipe cactus National Monument and the Tornor Autumn's land.

Here we have Choya, Ossetio, and arrowweed, and rocks, tons of rocks. European Americans have long associated the desert with nothingless. The desert, to the unfamiliar, seems deserted. It plays a role in the Bible and the Quran for that matter, and it's not cast at a thriving ecosystem where the beautiful ability of life to adapt and overcome is on full display. Perhaps that's why it took longer for the United States to protect its desert landscapes. It wasn't until the 20th century, and often the latter half of it, that they gain the protections afforded by the national parks and wilderness designations that some parts of the desert now hold. Like other Capital W wilderness areas in the United States, the Hacumbah

Wilderness is covered by the provisions of the 1964 Wilderness Act. This act, and a discussion around it, forms many of your perceptions of wilderness and what it means. If I'd had an AI read this, or just a lazy journalist, you'd have almost certainly heard the adjectives, untouched or pristine used in front of the word wilderness. They use constantly to describe places where, according to this construct, people have not been. This isn't true of the Hukumba Wilderness, and it isn't true anywhere in the United States. Just like every inch of this country, the Hacumbah Wilderness is native land. and in this case it's Kumi Island

and these canyons I've seen pottery that has been there far, far longer than the United States has. This area only became the USA under Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. There are pieces of art on the rocks in some of those canyons that are as beautiful as they are ancient and next to them are Morteurs where people sat and ground acorns. The wilderness is far from untouched.

It's a place where people have lived and thrived for millennia before changes in the climate and circumstances or their persecution and genocide by various colonizers cause them to move their residences somewhere else. Wilderness, like all our constructs, is a socially constructed thing. People in their discussions and debates around wilderness created the concept of wilderness. They have associated it with being untouched or devoid a people

and this is never true. It's an attitude peculiar to the colonizer who does not see indigenous people as people perhaps or indigenous history as history. This is a special place for me, because people and animals have lived side by side here for 10th of thousands of years. For the most part, what has been absent is capitalism in the state. And that makes it special. Only now we're fucking trashing it. The long loading times. The glitchy video calls. That's your house asking for better internet.

Switch to Bell Pure Fiber, Canada's most reliable internet awarded by Open Signal from $75. month. Price guaranteed for two years on a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for more details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Hi, this is Kylie Breakman. Angela Geratana. Jeremy Colhane. Patrick McDonald. And we're the hosts of the Artists on Artists on Artists on Artists Podcast. The improvised character comedy podcast where each week a new panel of artists discuss their craft. Join us for a panel of wellness influencers. What I try to do is faux journal. I don't know.

Have you guys heard of faux journaling? Yeah, it's reading. It's called reading. So we don't like to use that word anymore. Okay. A panel of New Yorker cartoonists. Have you guys done Terry Gross's Peloton class? No!

I've been dying too. I'm so sorry. I'm seeing a reading of Sadako in the thousand paper cranes by Audra McDonald's at the Wonderland Bookstore on 14. That's crazy. I went to the Wonderland Bookstore yesterday, and I heard Nora Jones do a reading of Zero Dark Thirteen. No way.

You have to come to the last bookstore, though. Kim Cottrell is reading the guitar tabs of yesterday. A panel of Eurovision participants. And we do a little Halloween sometimes. Does the Pope dress up? He winks on Halloween. It's right up next to the microphone. I hear you can almost hear the eyelashes hit each other.

You never seen Italy so quiet as when the Pope gets up to wink on Halloween. Listen to artists on artists on artists on the IHeard radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Josie Duffy Rice. I'm a journalist who covers the criminal legal system. And over my career, I've heard account after account of prosecutorial misconduct, story after story of injustice. But I've never heard a story quite like this.

The more I kept reading that stuff, I thought, man, there's more red flags that just kept coming up over and over. We'll hypnotize him to strengthen that memory. So he went into a good france. I really didn't believe any of it was real. And I was like, well, they're going to figure out this is not me. They're going to do their police job. Listen to Examine the Backfire Effect on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Britt Coleman. And I'm Trevor Sycamma. Have you ever watched a game and wondered what really made the difference? beyond the final score. That's exactly why we created NFL pro. Got a man wide open. Seahawks! Every week, we use exclusive next-gen stats insights and NFL content

to break down the biggest stories, matchups, and moments from around the league. We go beyond the box score to uncover the numbers, the tendencies, and details that help explain what actually happened on the field. Fires it out in the flat to Barclay, who beats one man, spins past another, leaps over at third,

And don't worry, this isn't just a show for stats experts. We use advanced analytics to help tell the story behind the game, turning the numbers into insights that every fan can understand and enjoy. So whether you're a casual fan learning more about football or a hardcore fan who can't get enough analysis, our goal is to help you see the game in a whole new way. If you've ever wanted to know why a playwork, how a matchup was won, or what most fans missed on Sunday,

NFL Pro delivers insights you simply can't get anywhere else. Listen to NFL Pro on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. The new NFL season is here, and you should be listening to NFL Daily as we march along to Super Bowl 61. Last year, we had Mike McDonald, Sam Darnel on the field after the game. But that was last year. If you're a football sicko like me, NFL Daily is your kind of show. It is in the name NFL Daily, fresh content in your feed every day all season long. Matthew Stafford coming off his MVP season.

On a dazzling darts from Matthew Stafford. Big time trades that shake up the NFL. A.J. Brown is loose. And of course, those Seahawks trying to run it back and win another Lombardi trophy. The Seahawks win Super Bowl 60. They are bringing the Lombardy back to the United. the Northwest. If it's happening on a football field, NFL Daily will cover it. Listen to NFL Daily on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

The World Cup is over, but if you caught the soccer bug and aren't sure what to do now, check out our podcast, Big Kick Energy. I'm Cameron Dicker, the kicker from the Los Angeles Chargers, most accurate kicker in NFL history, but I was raised on the soccer pitches of Shanghai. And I'm here with Timmy Tillman, L-A-F-C star, grew up in the academies of Germany, and now the bright lights of major league soccer. So, we know a little something about kicking balls. Maybe you're new to the game, or you're ready to take your passion to the next level. Each week we'll tackle things like, who's winning the Premier League this year?

Playing like a number 10, do you know what that means? Then we go over to France. Ligoon. Liga. Liga. He knows more. He's better than me. What do you think is harder?

Scoring a penalty kick or scoring a field goal? He's in the NFL, and I'm like, just a big fact I do. That's crazy. Join us each week for a quick chat with your soccer-loving bros about the best sport in the world. Soccer, just don't tell my coaches I said that. Listen to Big Kick Energy on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You're not incurable. You're not broken. You're having a normal human experience, and we have a solution for that.

And that solution is our show Free Therapy. I'm Ben. And I'm Kevin. And we think everyone could use a little bit of therapy, including us. Absolutely. That's why each week we sit down with a different therapist to talk about the things we're all dealing with. If you're trying to get rid of anxiety, you're actually fueling more anxiety. We talk to some of the leading therapists in the country about all of life's headaches, work, family dynamics, and of course, dating and relationships.

Everyone chooses a different set of problems, challenges, flaws. You have to figure out which set of problems you're willing to work with. So listen to free therapy with Ben and Kevin on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Because therapy is expensive, but our podcast is free. The Humber Wilderness is a federal wilderness. That means that under the 1964 Wilderness Act, no mechanized travel is permitted,

which is why you'll so often find my friends and I out here in our hiking boots, even in the heat of the summer, treading through the rocks to leave water so that we don't have to tread through the rocks and carry any more crosses out here. Representative Mike Lee, who will be a recurring villain in this podcast, introduced legislation last year that would allow for the paving of roads in wilderness areas, citing the need for border security. Agree many people who care about public lands were up in arms.

This would forever change the character of our wilderness and destroy it for future generations, they said. They weren't wrong. Roads do change landscapes forever. What they were wrong about was thinking that this was preventable and that it hadn't already happened. In fact, as I look down on the Hukumba Wilderness from the top of the Hacumba Mountains, I can see plenty of roads. These roads were built with less fanfare, with less of Mike Lee's bullshit, and with less loud congressional opposition. In the first Trump administration, they cut roads through desert,

where plants and animals had eaked out an existence at a difficult place through a millennia of adaption. They dragged tires across the tenacious desert plants, and they came with rollers and graders and scrapers, and destroyed the places that had, thanks mostly to their own. remoteness, but also to legal protections, been spared the worst ravages of capitalism and the state until now. They're doing it again, right now, as you listen to this, through canyons where big horn sheep and kummiya art and people have been able to exist without the destruction and exploitation of the state that has diminished so many of our beautiful places. Now that destruction is coming,

in the form of a caterpillar D8 dozer. About half a dozen of them actually, perched up on the hillside, deep in the Hocumbull wilderness. They drove out there on a road. It's 40 feet wide, and according to the Sierra Club, it's been surfaced with a polymer called soil tank to reduce dust. A plastic pipe carries water for concrete, and they've cut and leveled a pad for their vehicles so large that you can see it on satellite imagery from space.

All of this valley is a cultural resource. All of it holds Kumai belongings, and countless centuries of evidence that people lived and thrived here long before the border came. All of that is lost because some politicians who've never been here destroyed it so they could pander to those xenophobic voters, whipped up into a frenzy of hatred by the right-wing media that knows hate keeps people online longer and fills their coffers.

But those talk show hosts, and most of the people voting for this, have never been out here, and I'll never know or care about what we lost. So let's talk about what we lost. If you've ever driven east from San Diego to our century, you probably looked over your right shoulder as you passed a desert few tower, and wondered what it's like in the vast landscape to yourself. The terrain out here looks like God threw boulders into plaster, the same way we threw pebbles at the stucco wall of the house I grew up in,

to create what I'm told was a very fashionable exterior in the 1980s. To your south, it's a valley aptly named Valley of the Moon. I've seen horses there that run across the border as if it's not there, because it isn't to them. Valley of the Moon's a good name. The landscape looks nothing. shore to fluna. I've scrambled through the rocks and cacti out there to drop water, encamped there to escape cell signals and enjoy the desert as the sun comes up.

I've seen all manner of surprising animals in that valley among the granite boulders. Snakes, of course, travel the valley floor. Cattle used to cross from Mexico to the USA until my friends heard of them back. Turkey vultures circle on the thermals rising up from the ground, which frequently hits triple-digit temperatures in the summer. On the western edge of the valley, a pot-bellied pig called Gustava lived for months on the north. north side of the border wall, when Mexican National Guard soldiers fed her, standing in another country as they did, passing scraps through the border wall. Eventually, she went to live on a pig sanctuary. No, really she did. Like I've checked, we found a real pig sanctuary. Nothing I've seen in the valley

compares to the grace and majesty of the big horn sheep, though. They're magnificent animals who dance across the rocks with a sure-footedness that reminds me they belong there and I don't. For centuries, these sheep have crossed from what is now California into what is now Baja-Kalphazana. California, having their lambs in the mountains to the north and then travelling south with them to access water all summer. This summer, St. Frant and I set off into the valley to drop water, in that water drop I opened to show with some audio of. Unlike the sheep, we sweated, grunted and squeezed our way through the rock piles, hiking for six hours and covering a little less at five miles, with a heavy packs full of water, water for us and more water for others.

I've not been back that far since 2024. In 2020, it served at a major thoroughfare for migrant stuff at the end of Title 42. Since then, traffic has slowed and we've been able to clean up much of the mess that comes with thousands of people are forced to walk across the desert. The valley is beautiful again. And with the 2023 Migrant Transit,

just one of the many stories these rocks could tell if they talked. On this drop, though, we're going to tell a sadder story. The story of what happens when you try to draw a line in the sand with razor wire. That wire now stretched across the valley, not at the border but near it. It seems the wire was laid wherever the DOD thought it might be easiest, effectively seeding hundreds of yards to Mexico

in some places. In the evening sun, you can see it glinting across hillsides, down through the valley and off into the desert. In that wire, deep inside a small side canyon, we found what we'd come to see, the decayed remains of a bighorn ram. The other voice you'll hear here is my friend James Cordero, who was leading this water drum.

We just walked out. up on the carcass, it's very burly terrain. This is definitely a big horn sheep country. Yeah. Here there's a bunch of bones scattered. Oh yeah, no animals really got to this thing. Yeah. Nothing lasts long in the desert, man.

Nothing goes to waste. Oh, the smell. Yeah. Smell of death, yeah. So I got caught and then just died. That's what we think, yeah. And then got eaten down. Yeah, the horns really got.

Worn down quick. I maybe he hadn't ignored on the man to try and get, they were bones, and they were trying to get the marrow. Well, seeing how much they're even like bleached and dried and cracked. Could have been here for a while. Oh, right when the Constantine wire came up. Yeah. I bet.

Because due that time, that was what, when they were putting it up here, like January, February. That's the time when they moved through. Yeah, that's when they're going south. Yeah. Yeah. As we've seen in different canyons, like outside of, uh, uh, Eagle Valley, 80s, going south in the wintertime for sure. So, yeah, definitely.

He's tangled. He's really rolled around to try and get out. Right. He's pulled a lot of that wire into like a V down here. And actually, this is an area where they don't have, but they do. I thought they didn't have a top wire, but they do. It's just, it's all fucking tangled.

Damn, dude. What a shame. They're such amazing animals. The long loading times. The glitchy video calls. That's your house. asking for better internet. Switch to Bell Pure Fiber,

Canada's most reliable internet awarded by Open Signal from $75 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for more details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Hi, this is Kylie Breakman.

Angel Geratana. Jeremy Colhane. Patrick MacDonald. And we're the hosts of the Artists on Artists on Artists Podcast. The Improvised Character Comedy Podcast where each week a new panel of artists discuss their craft. Join us for a panel of wellness influencers. What I try to do is faux journal. I don't know.

Have you guys heard of faux journaling? Yeah, it's reading. It's called reading. So we don't like to use that word anymore. Okay. A panel of New Yorker cartoonists. Have you guys done Terry Gross's Peloton class? No!

I've been dying too. I'm so sorry. I'm seeing a reading of Sadako and the Thousand-Paper Cranes by Audra McDonald's at the Wonderland Bookstore on 14. That's crazy. I went to the Wonderland Bookstore yesterday, and I heard Nora Jones do a reading of Zero Dark 30. No way.

You have to come to the last bookstore, though. Kim Cottrell is reading the guitar tabs of yesterday. A panel of Eurovision participants. And we do a little Halloween sometimes. Does the Pope dress up? He winks on Halloween. He gets right up next to the microphone. I hear you can almost hear the eyelashes hit each other.

You never seen Italy so quiet. as when the Pope gets up to wink on Halloween. Listen to Artists on Artists on Artists on Artists on Artists on the IHeard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Josie Duffy Rice. I'm a journalist who covers the criminal legal system. And over my career, I've heard account after account of prosecutorial misconduct, story after story of injustice. But I've never heard a story quite like this. The more I kept reading that stuff, I'm not.

I thought, man, there's more red flags that just kept coming up over and over. We'll hypnotize him to strengthen that memory. So he went into a good france. I really didn't believe any of it was real. And I was like, well, they're going to figure out this is not me. They're going to do their police job. Listen to Examine the Backfire Effect on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Brett Coleman.

And I'm Trevor Sikima. Have you ever watched a game and wondered what really made the difference beyond the final score? That's exactly why we created NFL Prox. Got a man wide open. Every week, we use exclusive next-gen stats insights and NFL content to break down the biggest stories, matchups, and moments from around the league. We go beyond the box score to uncover the numbers, the tendencies, and details that help explain what actually happened on the field.

Fires it out the flat to Barclays. who beats one man, spins past another, leaps over a third. And don't worry, this isn't just a show for stats experts. We use advanced analytics to help tell the story behind the game, turning the numbers into insights that every fan can understand and enjoy. So whether you're a casual fan learning more about football or a hardcore fan who can't get enough analysis, our goal is to help you see the game in a whole new way.

If you've ever wanted to know why a play work, how a matchup was won, or what most fans missed on Sunday. NFL Pro delivers insights you simply can't get anywhere else. Listen to NFL Pro on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. The new NFL season is here, and you should be listening to NFL Daily as we march along to Super Bowl 61. Last year, we had Mike McDonald, Sam Darnold on the field after the game. But that was last year. If you're a football sicko like me, NFL Day.

Daily is your kind of show. It is in the name NFL Daily, fresh content in your feed every day all season long. Matthew Stafford coming off his MVP season. On a dazzling darts from Matthew Stafford. Big time trades that shake up the NFL. A.J. Brown is loose. And of course, those Seahawks trying to run it back and win another Lombardi trophy. The Seahawks win Super Bowl 60. They are bringing. bringing the Lombardi back to the northwest. If it's happening on a football field, NFL Daily will cover it.

Listen to NFL Daily on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. The World Cup is over, but if you caught the soccer bug and aren't sure what to do now, check out our podcast, Big Kick Energy. I'm Cameron Dicker, the kicker from the Los Angeles Chargers, most accurate kicker in NFL history, but I was raised on the soccer pitches of Shanghai.

And I'm here with Timmy Tillman, L-AFC star, grew up in the academies of Germany and now under the bright lights of Major League Soccer. So, we know a little something about kicking balls. Maybe you're new to the game or you're ready to take your passion

to the next level. Each week we'll tackle things like who's winning the Premier League this year. Playing like a number 10, do you know what that means? Then we go over to France. Ligoon. Liga.

Liga. He knows more. He's better than me. What do you think is harder? Scoring a penalty kick or scoring a field goal? He's in the NFL and I'm like, just a big fact. I do enough.

That's crazy. Join us each week for a quick chat with your soccer-loving bros about the best sport in the world. Soccer. Just don't tell my coaches I said that. Listen to Big Kick Energy on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You're not incurable. You're not broken. You're having a normal human experience, and we have a solution for that.

And that solution is our show Free Therapy. I'm Ben. And I'm Kevin. And we think everyone could use a little bit of therapy, including us. Absolutely. That's why each week we sit down with a different therapist to talk about the things we're all dealing with. If you're trying to get rid of anxiety, you're actually fueling more anxiety. We talk to some of the leading therapists in the country about all of life's headaches, work, family dynamics, and of course, dating and, of course, dating and relationships. Everyone chooses a different set of problems, challenges, flaws. You have to figure out which set of problems you're willing to work with.

So listen to free therapy with Ben and Kevin on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Because therapy is expensive, but our podcast is free! Henry David Thoreau once wrote, When I consider that the nobler animal have been exterminated here, the cougar, the panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf bear, moose, deer, the beaver, the turkey, and so forth and so forth, I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed and as it were a masculated country. His study of the environment, he realised, was not capable of understanding it in its full extent because those who had come before him had been so myopic as to destroy much of nature

in order to try and force it into compliance with capital. Quote, I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring. For instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and then to my chagrin, I hear of it. that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and the grandest passages, and mutilated in so many places. I should not like to think that some demigod had come before me. I picked out some of the best of the stars. I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth. I think about that a lot, especially out here where light

pollution means I can see the sky without the stars that capitalism stole from us. I think about where the future generations will get to feel small and in awe out here, like I do when I sleep in my bivisack under the stars, and listen for the footsteps of the desert animals in the night time, and wake up before dawn to see them enjoying the valley in the brief moments of cool at the end of the night before the day begins with baking intensity, and the valley clears and appears to the inexpert eye to be empty. To find out more about the lives of these sheep and what the loss of one of them meant. I spoke to Dr. Christina Ayello, who found that first big horn and who works as a wildlife biologist. My name is Dr. Christina Ayello. I'm a wildlife biologist with a nonprofit called Wildlands Network.

First, I wanted to know just how many of these sheep there are. When we see them, it's often a handful of sheep, or a fleeting glimpse if they bounce their way through terrain. I wouldn't want to approach without a rope and harness. So in the U.S., at least, the number sits at about 750, throughout that entire mountain range. And that's been up from their lowest point when they were listed. So I think they had dropped down to about 300 was the estimate. So it was about a third of what they think that mountain range supported back in like the 1970s. So they saw pretty serious decline.

And I mean, the good news is that they're on the rebound. And a lot of the conservation efforts on the U.S. side have increased. their numbers. These efforts, ironically, were funded by some of the same entities that paid for the wire that killed this ram. So the state listed them first in about 1970s under the California Endangered Species Act, but then the federal government listed them under the Endangered Species Act as endangered for that particular subpopulation in the Peninsula mountain ranges.

So with that came more protections to that habitat, so it slowed some of the losses that were happening, you know, increased money and resources to do some concerted conservation efforts. So a captive breeding program formed based in the Palm Springs area. There's a nonprofit group that has a captive population and introduced a number of Bitcoin sheep into the kind of the northern peninsula ranges. And then from that effort, kind of a population expansion happened up in the northern end of the range as more habitat was protected. And it kind of trickled down into the southern part of their range. I want to talk about the ESA soon, because that too is in danger.

But let's get back to the sheep and what the wall is going to mean for them. There's a particular population that we refer to as the Hacumba subgroup, and they pretty much make use of the entire Hacumba Mountains and would move back and forth across the border pretty regularly. I would say that there's a pretty distinct shift with the seasons from non-summer to summer when water needs increase because there are more permanent and reliable water sources on the Mexico side. So we tend to see this group, almost all of them in Mexico in the summer. But then throughout the rest of the year, females tend to breed in the U.S.,

but the males are generally going back and forth all the time. These are the sheep I've seen in desert. and for as long as there has been a border, there hasn't been one for them. They live in areas so rugged and remote the very few people cross there. And building is incredibly difficult. So they've been able to travel north and south, despite decades of politicians posturing us tough on the border. But now the line on the map has become a line in the desert,

a line drawn in razor wire and blood. There's so many different impacts at so many different levels. So I'm going to kind of break it down. First from an individual animal's perspective. I mean, Bitcoin Sheep, they are extremely tied to their environment and the home range that they were born in. We call this philipatry where they tend to not leave their natal range where they were born. And there are benefits to that, especially in a desert landscape, because you learn where the resources are. You start to develop these memorized pathways that you take that are keeping you safe from predators, getting you to the best of,

best resources efficiently, and in this extremely hot, aired landscape that is incredibly important. And so this is a survival strategy for them. So at the individual level, when you suddenly are traveling those pathways and trying to get to those resources, you've used your entire lives. And some of these animals can live 18 years or even 20 years. The females are very long lived. And you suddenly meet a razor wire fence. You're either going to panic because you're,

suddenly blocked from like this very important resource, you're going to try and get through this barrier and get cut up and tangled, killed in some instances, or if it's the physical wall and the barrier, you are now suddenly blocked. You now have to either turn around, go back where you came from, or you have to travel along this wall until you find an opening. And we've observed all of these reactions on the ground. This is all happened. We've had individuals trapped in the razor wire and killed. We've had individuals come up to the border wall, kind of mill around for a while and turn around, come back the next day, turn around, and just keep coming back until it just finally gave up. We've had individuals hit the wall and travel what is extra exposure to the

elements, which is a non-efficient pathway to try and get around it, where right now they could get around it, but it's pretty soon they're not going to be able to. So as you can imagine, that's going to have a lot of impacts on mortality, stress levels, condition, resource access for individuals. The isolation not only prevents access to water, it can also limit the ability of the population to breed in a healthy way. Over time, you start to see a buildup of, of genes that actually do you more harm than good. You get inbreeding that happens if you just don't have enough individuals and the only individuals to breed with happen to be your cousin.

That's what you're going to end up with. I mean, the animals don't know. Their drive is to breed and they're going to breed with whatever's there. And if it's a related individual, it happens. And so it creates this buildup and a reduction in genetic diversity. And that can cause diseases. It can cause mutations that decrease. reproductive output, and it just makes them overall more susceptible to all the other threats

that are already happening because they also don't have that genetic diversity to kind of adapt with the gradual change in the landscape, to be more resilient to a new disease or to climate change in more arid conditions. Having just seen the bighorn ram and the razor wire myself, I wanted to ask Christina what it was like to find the sheep. We have been also observing bickhorn through radio collars, GPS collars that show their movements kind of at a regular interval.

And I had noticed some individuals kind of showing signs that there might have been a barrier in another part of the Hacumba Mountains that I hadn't actually been to on the ground. So I'd gone out, observed that the concertina wire was up, but observed that it was kind of weaving in it out, of Boulder Piles, really creating this bad situation where if I was an animal, I might see this fence and be like, oh, I could jump over that or, you know, I can get around that. It didn't really

look like this big, rigid barrier. And so I had kind of informed my other wildlife colleagues that this was a situation. I was like, I think this is a bad situation where I just anticipate that an animal's going to try and cross this and they're going to get caught. So that day, when I was on, hiking the Valley and the Moon Trail, I was going out to this region to see if there's any evidence of animals interacting. And sure enough, after the long hike, which is actually quite beautiful, when you start early enough in the day, it's amazing. And I actually was having a great time because it's a little cooler, it's a little higher elevation. But when I got to the section of razor wire that I thought was concerning, I kind of scrambled up and over.

this rock pile because the wire is just like weaving in and out. So it was like at any point in here, there could be a bickhorn stuck in. So I hiked as far as I could manage to get within the constraints of the temperature creeping up in the day. And there was this ram at a low point, not even in the rocks, just so tangled up. The concertina wire was wrapped around its horns, wrapped around its neck, wrapped around its leg. I mean, it was about as tangled as you could get, and clearly the wire had cut into it at multiple points. And it had been there for a while.

I mean, it was already well in decay, desiccated and dried out. The skin was leathery. The spone and skull was exposed, and it just had this, like, horrific expression on its face, just, like, head up towards the sky, clearly wrapped around and had suffered. that was its last moments on earth wrapped in this wire that as I had walked along it

I could have gotten over easily as a human being I think that's what I want to end with this week with the dead ram in the border wall wire and the suffering the border has caused to so many people now being wrought on the wildlife that has lived here long before the border came here next week we'll pick up with more on what the border is doing to our wild places

and let alone what you can do to help If you'd like to email us, you can do it at Natural Causespod at proton.me. I hope if you enjoyed this episode, you'll share it with someone who you think might like it. And if you've enjoyed what we've made so far, be great if you could subscribe. Natural Causes is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Coolzone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for natural causes listed directly in episode description.

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In February of 2024, celebrated illustrator and children's book author Patra Mathers and her husband Michael mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let them know they had died by suicide. Dear honies, this is goodbye. By the time you get to Shletter both Petra and I will be dead. Next stop, Wonderland. Why did they do it? And what did it do to the people they left behind? Listen to Death of an Artist on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Big Lives, we take a single cultural icon.

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