With the writer’s own paintings
The birds
Every year, almost to the day, they leave.
You notice it only if you’ve been paying attention. One morning the sky feels louder, fuller, threaded with motion. Wings cutting clean lines through the air. Small bodies gathering in impossible coordination, as if summoned by something we cannot hear. There is no announcement. No ceremony. Just departure.
They do not hesitate. They do not look back. They lift, because the conditions have changed.
Weeks later; months, sometimes—they return. Or others like them do. The trees refill. The wires grow crowded again. Their arrival is quieter, less spectacular, but just as precise. The timing is never random. The land has softened. The air is kinder. There is enough to eat. Enough to live.
We call this instinct. We call it nature. We call it beautiful.
We teach children about migration as something elegant and necessary. We marvel at the distances covered, the resilience, the inherited knowledge written into muscle and bone. We do not ask the birds for proof. We do not demand justification. We do not accuse them of disruption for responding to scarcity.
We accept, without question, that survival requires movement.
And then, somewhere along the way, we decided this logic should apply only to them.
Migration is not a human right.
It is an Earth right.
The people
Look at the birds. They cross borders without permission or documentation. They leave when the land becomes inhospitable and return when it softens again. They chase warmth, food, safety. No one asks them to justify why they moved. No one demands they prove belonging. No one accuses them of invasion for following the climate. No one builds walls in the sky.
And yet, somehow, humans have convinced themselves that movement is a privilege rather than a condition of life.
The irony is that the very systems that criminalise human migration are built on histories of violent movement: colonial expansion, forced displacement, extraction, settlement. The people who now demand borders once crossed oceans uninvited. The people who preach rootedness uprooted entire populations. Migration, when done by an empire, is called discovery. When done by the dispossessed, it is called a crisis.
There is a long and uncomfortable lineage between borders, land ownership, and conservation. One that rarely makes it into glossy environmental campaigns or Instagram-friendly rewilding narratives. The modern idea of the national park—often romanticised as neutral, benevolent, and protective—was never simply about preserving nature. It was about delineating control.
As environmental sociologists have documented, national parks were instrumental in reinforcing colonial boundaries and colonial power. They were not only products of the colonial enterprise; they actively institutionalised it. By designating certain lands as “protected,” colonial authorities simultaneously declared who did not belong on them. Conservation became a mechanism of exclusion. Nature was separated from the people who lived with it.
In settler societies, the creation of national parks reinforced divisions between subjects and citizens. In former colonies, it meant something more brutal: land alienation, cultural erasure, and often outright genocide. Indigenous people were expelled so that landscapes could be rendered “pristine.” Empty. Safe. Legible to Western fantasies of untouched wilderness.
Authorities once claimed that a park was home to only a small group of Indigenous people while violently expelling thousands of others. The few allowed to remain were not recognised as people with political rights, but as part of the scenery. As wildlife. Conservation began by transforming human lives into background elements.
And this model persists.
The land
Today, conservation projects are no longer led by colonial governments, but by nonprofit executives, academics, corporations, and world leaders. The language has softened. The violence has not. Evictions continue. Persecution continues. Murders continue. Cultures are erased under the banner of biodiversity protection. As world leaders call for more protected areas in response to climate collapse, Indigenous communities are sounding the alarm. This is not protection—it is repetition when the people who have lived harmoniously with the land for generations are not involved in supposed conservation efforts.
The underlying idea remains the same: that land is safest when emptied. That nature thrives best without people. A belief imposed by colonisers onto territories they did not understand. Because the truth is inconvenient: Indigenous communities are the ones who have maintained ecological balance for generations. They carry the knowledge of how to live with land, not over it. The crisis we are facing is not the result of too much human presence—it is the result of a very specific kind of presence.
This raises the fundamental question we keep avoiding: who owns the land? And on what authority?
“The people that built their heaven on your land
Nina simone
are telling you yours is in the sky.”
There is something obscene about being told to wait for salvation elsewhere while your home is taken in the name of preservation. About being displaced for the sake of an ideal that excludes you. About being told that the future of the planet requires your disappearance.
For much of human history, people lived close to land—rural, agricultural, embedded in ecosystems. That changed with industrialisation. By the late nineteenth century, European forests were vanishing, cities were swelling, and a profound anxiety set in. Nature became something distant, romanticised, and urgently missed. In Africa, Europeans could rediscover this fantasy of “pure” nature—provided they removed the people already living there.
What was framed as conservation was often nostalgia in disguise. A longing for landscapes emptied of responsibility. A refusal to acknowledge that nature has always been lived in.
This obsession with landscapes detached from the people who live in them is deeply regressive. It treats countries like theme parks: scenic backdrops to be consumed, photographed, and left behind. Tourism, in this form, is not curiosity—it is extraction. It wants the mountains without the communities, the culture without the inconvenience, the beauty without responsibility. Gentrification operates on the same logic. Locals are priced out so that a place can remain visually “authentic” while becoming socially hollow.
The clearest example is mountaineering culture. Climbers speak of “conquering” peaks as personal achievements, as if altitude were an individual merit rather than a collective labour. These feats are impossible without Sherpas (whose knowledge, bodies, and lives make the ascent viable) yet they are underpaid, under-credited, and treated as logistical details rather than people. The summit photo circulates. The labour disappears. The country becomes a trophy. This is not admiration for land; it is entitlement dressed up as adventure.
Borders operate on the same logic. They are not neutral lines but political decisions that determine who may move and who must stay put, even as the climate shifts beneath their feet. Rising seas do not respect visas. Droughts do not wait for asylum approvals. The planet is already moving. The question is whether we will allow people to move with it.
There is a particular cruelty in asking people to remain “where they belong” when the conditions of survival have been destroyed—often by those issuing the command. Migration is framed as disorder. But forced stillness is unnatural.
“If you don’t believe it, go down to your local karaoke bar on a busy night. Wait until the third hour, when the drunk frat boys and gastropub waitresses with headshots are all done with Backstreet Boys and Alicia Keys and locate the slightly older Asian businessman standing patiently in line for his turn, his face warmly rouged on Crown or Japanese lager, and when he steps up and starts slaying “Country Roads,” try not to laugh, or wink knowingly or clap a little too hard, because by the time he gets to “West Virginia, mountain mama,” you’re going to be singing along, and by the time he’s done, you might understand why a seventy-seven-year-old guy from a tiny island in the Taiwan Strait who’s been in a foreign country for two-thirds of his life can nail a song, note perfect, about wanting to go home.”
charles yu, interior chinatown
Longing for home does not require origin purity. Belonging is not invalidated by movement. Wanting to go home is not a betrayal of where you are—it is an affirmation of what was lost, changed, or made unreachable.
The birds understand this instinctively. They do not moralise movement. They do not romanticise borders. They follow conditions. They respond to imbalance. They survive.
So the question is not who has the right to migrate.
The question is: who decided some lives should remain trapped in collapsing environments while others continue to move freely?
Who will stop the birds?
No one can. And no one should.
The tragedy is not that humans move.
It’s that we built a world that punishes them for doing what life has always required.
There are places that look unchanged until you notice who is standing in them. The same stretch of land can feel vast or intimate depending on the bodies that move through it, the laughter that interrupts the quiet, the familiar weight of a presence beside you. A field at dusk is never just a field. It becomes a pause. A holding of breath. The light softens not because the sun is setting, but because someone is there to witness it with you. Even the horizon feels different when it is shared—when a silhouette cuts into the sky, when a dog runs ahead and then returns, when the land briefly becomes a meeting point rather than a backdrop. The earth does not announce meaning on its own. It waits to be lived in.
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