Binational Parks@250 is a bilingual public humanities storytelling project that narrates the failed pasts, current realities, and potential futures for US-Mexico binational borderlands parks. Combining “science, story, and spirit” (Kimmerer 2013), this dynamic, evolving project uses historical archives, digital mapping tools, museum archives and cartographies, local ecologies, on-the-ground scientific data, conservation stories, oral histories, Indigenous Philosophies, peer-reviewed scholarly research, photographs, and more, to weave together conflicting histories, shared conservation efforts, and connected stories across landscapes to consider potential futures for binational parks projects in the US-Mexico borderlands.
Binational Parks@250 provides historical counterstories to inform present-day debates on border militarization, national security, and border-building at the US-Mexico border in favor of reading borderlands as ecological communities with a history of human and more-than-human relationships and conflict. Ultimately, this project serves as a foundational resource for future binational research projects, collaborations, and environmental actions across borders.
How to tell a story with so much conflict?
The stories of the Border Parks cannot be told through one cohesive narrative. Instead, these are interweaving, connected, conflicted, ambling stories—many times in conflict with one another—that speak to conflicts and connections that arise in shared environments, over public, Indigenous, and private lands, and within human and more-than-human relationships.
This is perhaps a larger story of parks in general—their goals, their histories, their violence, their access (or lack thereof), and their very purpose in both culture and nature. It is also a comparative story—how parks differ in meaning across the Americas. This is a larger story where culture meets nature, science meets the humanities, and humans continue to acknowledge their place in larger ecological stories beyond themselves.
The project involves both on-the-ground, place-based research and archival study to weave together these conflicting and connected stories of the binational border park proposals as part of a reckoning with the past mistakes of “America’s Best Idea” and a movement toward what might be thought of as a vital move towards both human and landscape connectivity.
Our ambitious hope is to bridge present-day binational conservation efforts with past attempts at building US-Mexico international parks—bringing historical, cross cultural perspectives on conservation, collaboration, and the very definition of a “park” to the forefront of this project.
As part of a larger project that narrates the past-present-futures of US-Canada and US-Mexico borderlands parks and transnational conservation histories and challenges, this project makes the case for considering “America’s Best Idea” as an international effort for public land protection, species conservation, and international collaboration and connectivity across borders at a time when these connections are needed more urgently than ever. Though a project of this magnitude is most likely not possible in the near future (or in many of our lifetimes), our ambitious hope is to at least start thinking in this way.
By compiling and gathering together all the necessary archives, stories, and complicated pieces of this story, we hope that future generations are able to consider more imaginative, hopeful, and sustainable options for the US-Mexico borderlands—and have some ambitious “best ideas” of their own.
This project is and never will be truly finished. Conservation projects, parks, human culture, and civic-minded societies—like environments—are in constant, dynamic, interactive change.
So is this project.
On the 250th birthday of the United States, it is time to reckon with the forgotten pasts, present-day struggles, and future potentials for “America’s Best Idea”—and remember that in the face of climate change, the longevity and ecological future of our “best idea” depends on transnational collaboration, cooperation, conservation, and sustained connectivity among neighbors in the Americas.
This project is a potential “best idea” across the Americas.
It is time to reconsider the feasibility of US-Mexico binational parks, particularly in an age of widespread climate change, border build-up, and binational conservation challenges of the present day.
We hope we have your help and input. Please visit our moderated Visitor’s Log to share your own best ideas, stories, and civic-minded commentary. We would love to hear from you!