I reported and helped produce this story for Radiolob, along with Robert Krulwich, Matt Kielty, Pat Walters, Soren Wheeler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, and Sarah Qari, with fact checking from Michelle Harris.
A note about this story: I researched migration for more than a year and half to make this story, and learned so much more than could ever fit into 45 minutes. So, once you’ve listened to it, here’s one more thing.
Cyclical animal movement has been happening on this wobbling, seasonally dynamic planet for at least 2 million years, and probably many many more. And for most of human history (somewhere between 300,000 and 100,000 years), most people were seasonally migratory, until only about 10,000 years ago, when a few people in a few different parts of the world tried living in just one place. We largely live in the world those small groups of people ended up building: one where the majority of people base their lives in a single place, and cyclical yearly movement is somewhat rare.
Many many many people still practice seasonal migration today, but modern colonial states do not seem to like freedom of movement, and enforce its restrictions with devastating, shattering, violence (on humans and on other animals). This violence is only getting more brutal as more people need to move in the face of local and global environmental change, which is itself driven nearly exclusively by exactly the same powerful people who then try to shut down free movement (e.g. powerful governments, extractive industry, etc). So many of the enormous movements of human beings happening on Earth right now are being pushed either directly or indirectly by the actions of just a few extremely powerful people, as atmospheric and oceanic change sink islands, cause droughts (which sometimes lead to wars), expand deserts, and more.
The ancient-ness of animal and human migration, and humans’ ancient (and continuing) connections to migratory creatures, suggest to me and to others that something about the way many of us live now (have lived for hundreds of years, have been attempting to force as many people as possible to live) — carving the world into pieces “owned” by individuals and corporations and states, and killing or imprisoning anything or anyone that tries to move between them, or make use of spaces they don’t “own” — is fundamentally broken and wrong, contradictory to the deep processes of the living planet itself, and ultimately as ecologically unsustainable as burning fossil fuels or depleting the soil or clear-cutting the Amazon or decimating biodiversity or filling the oceans with microplastics.
So many of us have forgotten that the movement of stuff by moving beings is precisely the thing that sustains our sedentary lives. We delude ourselves into thinking we want to be isolated, protected individuals, separated from other people and other places, policing the boundaries of our territory — when in fact we (and the world) are always already relying on flows of stuff and animals and people from elsewhere to live. The creatures just passing through a place change and nourish it in their wake. Like plants that depend on birds and insects for pollination and seed dispersal, we wouldn’t be able to sit still without the support of creatures and forces who don’t. There is no such thing as a closed system.
This is not my idea. it goes deep in human traditions of thinking about our place in the community of living and non-living things. Settler-colonialism violently imposed (and continues to enforce) what is basically a European style of enclosure, land-ownership, and brutal border enforcement on the rest of the world — and so it’s absolutely crucial we (whoever “we” is here) listen closely, not only to migratory animals themselves, but also to the Indigenous peoples who’ve known all along how much motion matters to the world.
There’s a reason European and American scientists took so ridiculously long to understand even the first thing about animal migration: they refused to believe they had anything to learn from people in other places, who could have told them exactly what had happened to their vanishing birds — if they’d just asked. Instead, a stork skewered in the neck by a spear, and then 24 more, had to miraculously survive the journey back to Europe to convince them — only then did the idea that these “European” birds could just as easily be called “African” birds finally make it through the thick skull of Science.
And that same racist, blinkered imagination — and greedy bloodlust — led them to overfishing and overhunting and overgrazing everywhere they went, to damming rivers and building roads and fences and walls and cities that sever ancient movement paths, to blocking and killing off so many of the migratory bison and salmon and other creatures, both unthinkingly and deliberately in order to starve and commit genocide on the people who’d lived with and depended on them for thousands of years, and who know how indispensable they are.
Indigenous peoples have arrived at their knowledge and relations with the other animals in the places they live through literal millenia of trial and error — science is only now starting to catch up to what many Indigenous peoples have known for generations, and while it’s very cool to see the amazing results of new data-gathering efforts and technologies, we need to be very careful to avoid casting scientists as saviors. Indigenous people are the ones doing the real work to keep the connected world whole.
People have always felt that creatures who go where we can’t follow, and then come back, have something important to tell us when they return. Whether they’re carrying souvenirs of their journeys on or inside their bodies, recording the history of the world, reacting to and predicting subtle changes in earth systems, or evolving abilities and sensitivities we can hardly imagine, migrating animals have always had special access to whatever is beyond our perception. And humans everywhere have known this as long as we’ve been human: telling stories about migratory animals as messengers from other worlds, boundary-crossing shapeshifters and life-bringers, gods, carriers of deep knowledge, and maybe even guides to new places. If powerful humans force migration to stop (as they/we seem hellbent on doing) — beyond cutting off its vital role as a planetary circulatory system — we’ll lose all of that too.
The ancient I experience I had just the other day — looking up from the stoop of my apartment building in Chicago at the sound of a fluttering string of chattering sandhill cranes 700 feet above me, passing overhead on their way to the Gulf Coast from Siberia as they’ve been doing for eons, and feeling my stupid little settler life touched by the enormous size of what I was seeing and hearing, by all those people I’ll never meet who’ve also heard that strange chatter all along the way in all those different states and countries and landscapes, who may have been listening and watching for thousands of years — will no longer be possible.
Migration is crashing into everything we are putting in its way (and by “we” I mean we who have access to power), like someone thumping on a glass window again and again, trying to get our attention, begging us to listen, trying to tell us something. I don’t know what we do with that message (I don’t even know exactly who the “we” is here). People much smarter than me are thinking hard about it, and have ideas.
It will include big huge world-shaking things, like abolishing all borders, ending state-corporate-individual ownership of space, restoring Indigenous sovereignty and land stewardship, giving up harmful forms of sedentism and enclosure and property, remembering and celebrating and acting on our own history (and present) as a migratory species, and the Earth as a planet of movement. It’s not necessarily true that our ancestors who chose to stop moving made the inevitable choice. No matter what happens in the next hundred years, we’ll be forced to give up certain parts of the way we live now, to choose what we’re willing to sacrifice — so maybe it’s worth giving up this modern habit of rooting unshakably in place, stealing and claiming and holding territory at all costs, if the alternative is violence and disintegration and depletion and stagnation. And maybe, beyond its social and ecological effects, motion is a way of living that changes our brains for the better, attunes us to the subtle contours of the world, ties us to communities and histories of movement, feeds some hardwired knack for surfing the planet’s waves instead of hunkering down and enduring them.
And it will also include subtler things, like sheltering and cherishing refugees and travelers and strangers of all species, sharing knowledge and collaborating across real and imaginary boundaries to protect the beings who move to sustain our stillness, who show us how connected we are to one another and to the more-than-human world, who knit the globe together in ways we’ve known forever and in ways we don’t yet know.