OCOTILLO — The first time that Edie Harmon got involved in an environmental issue in her newly adopted hometown of Ocotillo, it turned out to be a controversy of binational proportions that took years of litigation to resolve.
It was 1977. She and her husband, James, had just relocated to the outskirts of Ocotillo from El Centro, where an accidental exposure to aerial pesticide spraying convinced the Harmons they’d be better off living far from any agricultural fields.
Within a week of their arrival, their neighbors would enlist them in a fight to prevent the ongoing commercial export of the community’s groundwater to Mexicali.
The episode would come to be known as the “Ocotillo Water War” and would provide Edie Harmon a crash course in community activism.
In the decades that followed, Harmon and her husband would find themselves entrenched in numerous disputes that pitted them against various public officials and commercial interests whose public land use proposals were perceived to be environmentally disastrous by the Harmons.
In the span of that time, and even after her husband’s passing in 2007, Edie Harmon would further hone her knack for research and networking and become something of a go-to advocate for environmental conservation in the county and elsewhere.
“I decided that if I needed to learn something, I could learn something,” said Harmon, a geologist by trade. “All the stuff that I’ve done in Imperial County, I have no background or education for it. I just got involved because people asked me to.”
Her level of involvement is impressive, too. Harmon has been on the frontline of efforts to oppose the Ocotillo Express Wind Farm, the Glamis Gold mining proposal north of Winterhaven, the expansion of U.S. Gypsum’s operations in Plaster City, and the Wind Zero law enforcement/military training facility proposal near Nomirage, to name a few.
Edie Harmon vs. the Border Wall
Now in her 70s, Harmon has hardly let up. These days, some of her biggest concerns are the border barriers that were installed in the Jacumba Wilderness and the Yuha Desert near her home.
Since becoming aware of the projects’ construction in May 2020, Harmon has frequently hiked to the project sites to compile almost monthly and always lengthy reports that are emailed to a variety of federal, state and local officials, as well as her colleagues.
The reports are filled with her observations about the apparent environmental damage associated not only with the border barrier, but also with widespread Border Patrol vehicle use in the federally protected wilderness area. Included are her suggestions for how some of the impacts may be mitigated.
Although she has always been an avid hiker, the opportunity to walk to the international border boundary in the Jacumba Wilderness hadn’t presented itself to Harmon prior to the barrier’s construction.
“As much as I don’t like the idea of the border wall, it’s been a wonderful educational opportunity,” she said in a recent interview.
Lately, her reports have been paused so that she could draft a written response to the remediation plan the Border Patrol El Centro Sector had proposed for its separate construction projects in the Jacumba Wilderness and Yuha Desert.
Harmon’s written response borrowed heavily from her prior reports and at last count totaled a few hundred pages.
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When it became apparent that it would not be completed in time for the end of the remediation plan’s 30-day public comment period, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials granted her an extension.
The remediation plan is meant to address safety, environmental and remediation issues that may have resulted from the Biden Administration’s decision to halt border barrier construction in January 2021.
The El Centro Sector’s proposed remediation activities include, but are not limited to, removal of construction material, installation of small wildlife passages, drainage completion or repair, erosion control, and revegetation of disturbed areas, to name some possibilities.
In July, due diligence had prompted Harmon to visit a staging area in the Yuha Desert adjacent to Mt. Signal Road whose picture was included in the plan. What she discovered there brought her to tears.
Thousands of desert plants that had been salvaged during construction and transplanted within a large, fenced enclosure appeared to be either dead or dying. Her tendency to use pointed language in her reports to federal officials shifted into overdrive following the discovery.
“I guess if you hate the desert and hate desert plants, this disaster might look like some kind of interesting way to kill plants and give someone a job,” she wrote in her written response to the remediation plan, an early draft of which she provided to this newspaper.
“Both the contractor, CBP and the person who made this mess should be so embarrassed that a dozer should have been used to destroy the evidence of wasted efforts.”
The contractor in question was BFBC LLC, an affiliate of Barnard Construction, based in Bozeman, Montana. It was awarded a $569 million contract to replace vehicle and pedestrian barriers in the El Centro and Yuma sectors with U.S. Department of Defense funds.
In the El Centro Sector, a 15-mile barrier was installed to replace vehicle barriers that were located west of Calexico in the Yuha Desert, a federally designated Area of Critical Environmental Concern. Additionally, a little more than three miles of barrier was installed in the remote Skull and Davies valleys of the Jacumba Wilderness.
The contractor’s plan had been to use the salvaged plants, which include ocotillos and cholla cacti, to revegetate areas previously disturbed by construction once the projects were completed, a Customs and Border Patrol spokesperson stated.
“Once CBP begins remediation efforts for the DoD projects, salvaged plants may be used to revegetate temporary construction staging areas in coordination and consultation with local land managers,” CBP said in a written statement.
Although some safety-related work was allowed to continue following the halting of construction, care of the 17,000 plants in the enclosure was passed on to the Bureau of Land Management, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spokesperson said in an email.
The BLM did not respond to a request for comment about whether the plants in the enclosure were currently being maintained.
“It’s a plant cemetery now,” Harmon said.
Lasting Legacy
Harmon’s constant pleading with public officials to adopt better environmental stewardship practices have even earned her some fans from among that group.
See also
Border Patrol El Centro Sector Chief Gregory K. Bovino first met Edie and James Harmon when Bovino was assigned to the sector as a trainee more than 20 years ago. More recently, he joined her for a hike in the wilderness to see firsthand what some of her concerns have been.
“What an asset she is to the community, the border region and wilderness areas,” Bovino said about his and the local sector’s interaction with Harmon on July 13 during an agency-sponsored safety event.
“She knows a lot about those issues because she’s got that institutional knowledge that she’s built over many years.”
As someone who has enjoyed western Imperial County’s desert over the past few decades, San Diego resident Nick Ervin is also an admirer of Harmon’s focus and tenacity. Like Harmon, Ervin has been a strong advocate for the conservation of the region’s wilderness areas.
Both were early supporters of the legislative push that ended with the California Desert Protection Act of 1994, which established federal protection for 9.6 million acres of desert in California, including the wilderness areas near Ocotillo.
“She’s probably the most determined environmental activist that I’ve ever known,” said Ervin in a recent interview. “She’s been a thorn in the side of public officials for decades.”
What has largely made Harmon a standout in local conservation efforts is her knack for accessing arcane public records and compiling lengthy reports that are either submitted for the land use projects’ planning process or litigation.
A native of Attleboro, Mass., Harmon had first visited the Imperial Valley in 1974 to do research as a San Diego State University graduate student. Her plans at the time were to graduate and become a university professor in Botswana, Africa, an area she developed a fondness for after having taught secondary school biology and art as a member of the Peace Corps.
Those plans shifted when she met her future husband, James, a political science professor at San Diego State University-Imperial Valley. Shortly after marrying and moving together to Ocotillo, they organized the Ocotillo Water League, which opposed the pumping of Ocotillo’s groundwater for sale in Mexicali.
The practice dated back to 1959 and was sanctioned by officials at the county, state and federal level, according to an article titled “The Ocotillo Water War and the U.S.-Mexico ‘Salinity Crisis’: An Examination of Transitivity and Scale in Environmental Justice” that appeared in the spring 2014 edition of the Journal of the Southwest.
In the face of community’s growing opposition, the county moved to restrict the commercial groundwater sales and then sue the operator of the well, who in turn would countersue the county in federal court. Ultimately, the courts found that the county had the right to limit the sale of water solely for use in the county, the journal article stated.
“Although it was the county’s zoning enforcement rights that ultimately prevailed in court, it was the Ocotillo residents who for years had kept the issue squarely before county officials,” the article’s authors wrote.
As for Harmon’s role in that pivotal struggle, she said she felt compelled to act because of county officials’ tendency to “be pretty apathetic or turn a blind eye” to what she perceives are projects’ adverse impacts on community resources.
“If you think something is really wrong, even if you don’t know then, you have to figure out enough of it to challenge it,” she said. “Ordinary people can make a difference if they’re determined.”
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