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.