On migration, invasive species, and the concept of enough

I am the product of two very different economic-cultural-political migrations of people meeting in Ka'u.  My mother, who is from upstate New York and of Northern European descent (mostly English and Dutch), came to Hawaii as an elementary school teacher.  As the single mother of a mixed race child, she was very consciously searching for a multi-cultural, tolerant place in the United States where she could raise her child.  Here she met my father who is the descendant of people imported by the sugar plantation from the Philippines as agricultural labor.  His parents had worked long and patiently in field and mill to provide college educations to their children.

Of course both of the migrant groups represented in my parents moved into a physical and cultural space of decimation.  The native Hawaiian culture and its people that had existed here for centuries had been nearly destroyed by aggressive economic and political forces that came with European explorers, missionaries, and whalers, and by the Old World epidemic diseases that they carried with them. If the native Hawaiians or other native people had been more suspicious of outsiders could they   prevented some of the destruction visited upon them? Perhaps, but it might have meant succumbing to the worst in themselves - aggression, violence, hate.

Although relatively light compared to the impact of Western culture, the arrival of the Polynesian explorers and settlers with their canoe plants and animals also caused serious environmental impacts and was responsible for the extinction of many species. Even before that, in the time before humans ever found these remote islands, there were earlier species of plants and animals that were over-run by later arrivals.  On a long enough timeline our human self-obsession vanishes in a puff of insignificant smoke.  We're no different than the little fire-ants or purple miconia or coqui frogs that we love to lament and decry and attempt to exterminate.

Today the French are holding the first round of a presidential election in which the issues of cultural and ethnic purity and priority are a defining factor, as they were in the Brexit vote and the rise of Trump.  Who gets to migrate where? Who gets to define what borders? Who gets to live where?  Who makes the decisions and on what criteria?  What is the carrying capacity of an area and who gets to decide that? These are the brutal questions that are being asked at this moment.

On the one hand this brutality is un-necessary at this point in time because with even a slight decrease in wastefulness we can well afford for any of the seven billion humans on this earth to find a place to live away from war and drought.  On the other hand, even if we were to make that slight change in how we do civilization there will come a day when there are flat out too many humans everywhere.  We are a very aggressive invasive species.  We reproduce too easily and we live too long and we consume too much.

We in the US especially have forgotten the concept of Enough that older, less technological cultures, especially those on islands or in arid environments, had to learn.  What is enough - what are the limits?  How do we live and work within those limits?

Instead we always want more.  More money, more stuff, more beauty, more time, more power, more influence, more business, more market-share.  This is not to say that the older cultures were perfect and that we must "go back" to their ways, as if that were even possible.  It is simply to recognize that they do have something to teach about finding the place of enough.

In a sense, the concept of enough is at play in todays election in France in that it is a referendum on migration.  But whether or not we can hold artificial nation-state borders with walls, weaponry and deportations is a brutal, simple-minded and temporary formulation of the concept.  Whatever walls we built on our borders will be built inside ourselves as well.  Whoever we exclude becomes a monster in the dungeon.  Enough should not be about closing doors.  Enough should be about learning to live within the limits of place and planet. That is the long, difficult, perilous journey in which we are all migrants no matter who we are and where we live.

Rosa Brooks, Badass Defense Policy Chick

Little wonder, then, that “the international community” struggles to respond effectively to the challenges posed by “failed” states. From the perspective of an alien observer from another planet, the “international community” of the planet earth would surely appear like a failed state writ large; it has proven consistently unable to control the violence of powerful actors (whether states or non state entities such as terrorist organizations), control environmental catastrophes such as climate change; remedy astronomically large economic inequities between individuals and societies, constrain the devastating scramble to exploit the earth’s dwindling natural resources, or address crises such as global epidemics.
Just as Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq are fractured into numerous competing ethnic and religious groups dominated by warlords and other regional power brokers, the international order still better resembles a Hobbesian struggle for survival than a coherent system of governance. If there is some sense in which all the world’s people constitute a society (and why not insist on that, in this era of globalization and human rights?), it is hard not to conclude that the international community is simply a failed state on a global scale.

Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon (2015)

Rosa Brooks just kinda kicked me in the butt. I have to admit that when I read about the Middle East/North Africa there's a part of me that says: "Well, thank whatever, I don't live there, it's far away, they've been fighting at least since the end of WWI and what can I do?" But Rosa Brooks says: "Wake the hell up, hello? Airplanes? Internet? Global trade networks? It's one world and we just have to deal with that fact whether or not the mere idea of a global government gets your panties in a twist or not."
Being an American rancher, I do know quite a few people, who, although fine individuals on a person to person basis, do get panicky at the mere idea of a global government. And I understand some of their fears: a global government evokes visions of more urbane suit-wearers and "cultural creatives" who don't understand the brute realities of agriculture or the other lowly extractive occupations and who are basically living off the sweat of our brows while making up all the rules and norms (and accumulating all the QE money.) I get it.
But that kind of resentment is short-sighted, to put it nicely.
"It's never to late to be brave." Rosa Brooks again. Brave enough to look straight at the fact that we are one society and have been for some time. And the sooner we act like one society, the less of a failed state we'll make for ourselves and our kids.

It's an excellent book, that I never would have read if I didn't have a completely awesome though tiny (about the size of a shipping container) local library.  Which, right there, is a small, mundane, miraculous example of what a successful society looks like.