“For all his cynicism, Bowden’s response to this crisis was never a desire to strengthen the border, but rather to destroy it. ‘There aren’t any Mexican stars or American stars,’ he once said in a radio profile, as he hiked with the correspondent through the Buenos Aires wildlife refuge in southern Arizona, a popular route for migrants sneaking into the United States. ‘It’s like a great biological unity with a meat cleaver of law cutting it in half.’ His work was an attempt to heal this cleavage, and to remind us how our hunger, pollution, and violence connected us all, especially in the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts, where nature was a stingy mother and death ruled over everything. ‘We are becoming more and more aware that our civilization destroys the foundations that support it by devouring the earth and the things of the earth,’ he wrote in Blue Desert. ‘But we don’t have the courage to back away, to stop, to restrain ourselves. I know I don’t.’