Migration

 

 

What an amazing thing, what birds do.

 

They match their behavior to the ebb and flow of the seasons.  They winter where it’s safe and warm and there is adequate food.  Something triggers when it’s time to head north to breeding grounds with adequate habitat and abundant food for raising families.  Every different kind of bird has its own set of needs, so the perfect places to be, at the perfect times of year, are a little different for each one.  Plenty of overlap, but nature provides a little differently for each, and that has all been worked out by repetition over time, hardwired into their DNA, and it all fits together.

 

That got me to thinking about people.  We know something of the original native North Americans on this continent.  Not all of the many tribes migrated with the seasons, but some certainly did, following that ebb and flow of the seasons and food sources.  A learned migration passed down from generation to generation, but the result is the same, a seasonal migration.

 

And on a grander scale, human history is a history of migration.  The source of all of us likely originated in Africa, living in nomadic bands, following seasonal food and water.  Once these early modern humans started migrating out of Africa, there were multiple waves, over thousands of years, a most profound migration, resulting in human habitation in every ecological niche on the planet.  For essentially the entirety of our human existence, people moved freely, a natural flow in response to the availability of food, shelter, comfort, and their own space.  Specific migration routes are not hardwired in, but the lust to wander might be.  But today, in the last 200 years, the blink of an eye in evolutionary time, now things are different.  We have Nations.  Boundaries.  Borders.  National interests to protect.

 

Two opposing imperatives.  Protect our borders and our national interests in resistance to the natural human flow toward more opportunity.  One is conceptual.  One is instinctual.  Borders are recent.  Migration is ancient.  An unavoidable clash.