There's video going around this week out of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, and it shows exactly what you'd expect: a big saguaro lying on its side in the dirt during wall construction, crews working the ground around it. KJZZ's Fronteras Desk has the story. The short version is that heavy equipment is clearing a swath through some of the prettiest, meanest desert in Arizona to put steel in the ground.

A big saguaro doesn't grow back on anybody's timeline. Those arms people drive down from Phoenix to photograph took the better part of a century to get there, and anybody who tells you a replacement planting settles the account hasn't watched a piece of country change over generations. In my line of work you learn the difference between ground that heals and ground that doesn't. Slow-growing desert is in the second category.

Organ Pipe is not tame country. It's cactus you can't grab, heat that will kill you in June if you're stupid, and a monument whose southern boundary is the border itself. That stretch of line ran heavy smuggling traffic for a long time, and the people who lived and worked around it will tell you the desert didn't come out of that unmarked. Trash, cut fence, cut line, worn-out paths. The environmental crowd likes to pretend that traffic was invisible. It wasn't. Nobody shot video of it for the evening news either.

So I'll say what I always say when this fight comes up. The wall going in down there matters. The traffic that owned that stretch of monument at night is getting squeezed, and the folks who live within a short drive of it are the ones who benefit. That's a water line staying intact and a fence staying up. I'll take that trade and sleep fine.

But I'm not going to pretend the cactus doesn't matter, because it does. You've watched brush take grass, watched what happens when a place gets used hard, and you know you don't get it back by planting something and calling it even. The crews are supposed to salvage vegetation and replant what they can, and some of that's happening. Whether a transplanted saguaro thrives depends on how well the crew does the job, and a monument is betting old growth on it either way.

What I have no patience for is the crowd that never said a word while smugglers shredded that same desert, then discovers a deep spiritual connection to saguaros the moment a wall crew shows up. Where were you when the load trucks were running through there? A wall crew cuts a defined swath and moves on. Unchecked smuggling traffic was a wound that never closed. If you're going to grieve the desert, grieve all of it, including the part your politics let happen.

The cactus is down. The wall is going up. Both facts are true, and a man who's spent his life fixing what other people break knows you can hold both without lying about either.