The California Beach Town Awash in Poop
August 17, 2024 at 02:20AMTijuana has grown exponentially over the last century, outpacing its sewage infrastructure; waste overflow and spillage from Mexico into California has been a problem for decades. In this well-reported feature for The New Republic, Rowan Moore Gerety takes us inside the sewage crisis at the US-Mexico border, affecting beaches and coastal towns across San Diego County and making residents extremely ill. As Gerety reports, US officials cannot simply look away with pinched noses, or hope that a wall could keep a neighboring country’s excrement out: “You can draw the border as a line on a map, but you still have to deal with the world on the other side.”
Earth is home to hundreds of border-spanning watersheds, and versions of this struggle exist all over the planet: where the Ganges carries untreated effluent and industrial runoff from India into the lowland farms and coastal swamps of Bangladesh; along the Zambezi, the Mekong, the Danube. One merciful quality of the Tijuana River is that it’s not longer, limiting the scope of the conflict to two metro areas in two countries, as opposed to, say, the 11 nations whose disputes span the 4,000-mile course of the Nile.
Nearly wherever you look, border politics in the United States is animated by a persistent myth: that with enough money and willpower, you could eventually seal off the countries from one another, like apartments that share a 1,954-mile wall. One way to describe decades of militarization on the border is that it serves to make Mexico invisible to residents of the United States. The same might be said of cross-border industrial development: porous to money and airplane parts, hardened to everything else. Straddling one of the busiest land crossings in the world, the Tijuana River offers a stubborn rebuttal, a reminder that both sides of the border constitute a single place. Once the poop is in the water, no amount of barbed wire can get it out.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/08/16/the-california-beach-town-awash-in-poop/
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