Arming the Environment, and Colonizing Nature, Territory, and Mobility in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.

In 2009, the U.S National Park Service instituted tours accompanied by armed guards to areas of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, which abuts the U.S.- Mexico boundary in southern Arizona. These areas, like the majority of the park's lands, had been closed to the public since August 2002, following the shooting death of National Park Ranger Kris Eggle-allegedly by drug smugglers from Mexico. The re-opening reflected the U.S. Border Patrol's and National Park Service's "retaking" of parts of the park that had been "lost" to unauthorized migrants and drug traffickers. This article explicates the tours' origins, illustrating how they connect present and past in relation to the making of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument as a territory of "nature." In doing so, the article shows that the militarized tours (which ended in September 2014, with the entire park's re-opening) are the understandable extension of the park's doubly colonial logic-as imperialized/settler-colonized space and as the embodiment of a stark division between humans and nature. Overcoming such violence and facilitating the thriving of humans and other-than-humans in the space of OPCNM requires a reworking of "nature" and territory-as well as of the associated human identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]