Called the “devils rope” by the indigenous peoples populating the Western Prairies, few inventions served to establish the property ownership economy than barbed wire, and with it, the near extinction of wildlife like the bison, bringing catastrophic consequences for native cultures.
In its modern version, the giant coiled steel concertina wire, known as razor wire because of its deadly spikes, is fast becoming emblematic of the U.S./Mexico borderlands across the nation, maiming, killing and fragmenting the habitat of migratory animals and birds.
Despite acknowledged sensitivity of the habitat in Marron Valley, owned by the city of San Diego for over 100 years, Marines recently tasked with what was surely unpleasant duty began laying concertina wire 30 feet from the border wall, stomping on rare plants and blocking city access to survey the biological impacts.
So potentially lethal is this wire to endangered and threatened habitat in San Diego’s protected open space preserves, the city of San Diego is hauling the departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Navy and Border Patrol into court seeking an injunction to end trespassing on the sensitive lands.
Named specifically in the litigation is former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, a ringleader of the group responsible for the borderlands reign of terror. If you can kill your 14-month-old puppy, why worry about endangered peninsular bighorn sheep, jaguars and low-flying raptors.
Writing in a press release supporting the litigation, the San Diego Sierra Club chapter applauded the city’s unusual step to aggressively defend land protected under agreements with the federal government through the nationally lauded Multiple Species Conservation Plan permitted under the ever-threatened Endangered Species Act.
It was unusual because the city has been criticized over decades for failing to enforce or in some cases even develop management plans for its network of connected habitat preserves as required under those agreements.
The largely successful environmental and housing conservation planning began under the administration of then-Mayor Susan Golding in the mid-1990s. The conservation plan was negotiated among stakeholders that included environmental and recreational groups, housing developers, and property owners, creating networks of preserves connected by wildlife corridors, avoiding the deadly habitat fragmentation of earlier development plans.
The connected-habitat conservation strategy has been especially critical for the survival of the depleted herds of peninsular bighorn sheep that seasonally migrate from eastern San Diego County where they give birth to Mexico in the summer in search of water. It doesn’t take a wildlife biologist to predict the demise of the already listed endangered species without intervention.
Efforts to provide watering holes on the U.S. side of the border appeared to have some success, and hoped for openings in the border wall might have helped. But the addition of the wire could be the proverbial nail in the coffin as wildlife often gets tangled up in the deadly wire or seeks more perilous alternative routes.
Certainly, the Marines tasked with this duty did not sign up to damage a habitat preserve, a job that began in December 2025 after the area was designated part of the 210-mile Otay Valley National Defense area, corralling several protected habitat preserves like the Otay Mountain Wilderness, home to the recently listed mountain lion.
Unlike the extinction of the dinosaurs, most threatened species decline over time, largely the result of shifting environmental conditions. The thinning herds of peninsula bighorn sheep from 1,100 in 1971 to only 400 twenty years later began in the hills of Riverside County where encroaching development sent them south.
Now listed as endangered by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, newly instituted conservation measures including expanding and protecting wildlife corridors have returned the numbers to 1971 levels. Concertina wire snaking through our borderlands threatens to stymie those efforts.
As C.S. Lewis warned us, the surest road to hell is the gradual one. For our threatened habitats along the southern border, the devil’s rope marks the way.
Lisa Ross is a writer and chair of the San Diego Chapter of Sierra Club.
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