I’ve been thinking

 

It started with forests.  Forests, specifically healthy old-growth forests, appear static.  Trees grow.  Trees fall.  New ones take their place.  The undergrowth ebbs and flows with the seasons.  Fire might damage some sections, but over time, the damage heals and the forest regenerates.  Forests are living breathing things, but on the human scale of time, it seems to us they don't change.  The overall composition stays the same.

 

But on a broader scale, forests do change.  Over centuries or millennia, the make-up of the forest might change; the mix of species can evolve.  The entire forest might migrate upslope or down, north or south on a grand scale with changes in climate.  It's just a matter of perspective.  Everything that seems like it never changes actually does, if we consider a wider time-scale than we're used to.  Mountains rise and fall in a hundred million years.  Rivers flow and canyons grow.  Forests, plants, and animals march their way across the planet.  Look at our understanding of the evolution of humans.  They didn't start equally all over the planet.  So far as we know now, our most ancient ancestors appeared in Africa.  They migrated north.  They retreated.  They migrated again.  From these waves of migrations, new species evolved independently in southern Europe and Asia that had never been to Africa.  The migrations continued and modern humans eventually made it across oceans to major islands, and all the way to North America, then south through the Americas until they could go no further.  This happened in fits and starts, in ebbs and flows, over a hundred thousand years.  To any individual observer, at any time in essentially all of human history, it might appear that the status quo, the climate, the mix of plants and animals in the environment, the range of human habitation, never changed; but over a broader scale the change never let up.

 

Everything we know migrates and colonizes.  Plants and animals.  Civilizations.  People and tribes migrated, invaded, withdrew, and returned.  Languages spread and evolved.  Religions spread and evolved.  If we had been present in our current incarnation, observing all these changes over all our history, could we have stopped any of it at any point?  Could we have looked at the world as it was at a moment of time and said "This is just right.  This is the way it should be and should always be."?

 

So here we are today.   We've drawn a line and called it our border.  We stand with arms outstretched, determined to arrest the assault of shifting tectonic plates; the advancement of mountain ranges, rivers, and canyons; the slow-motion migrations of forests, plants, and animals; the movement of any other human, religion, or language.  We are determined.  They shall not pass.

 

Just saying…