I am watching the fall migration pattern of red-tailed hawks across the North American continent. Small yellow circles on a lightly shaded map bobble through time and space, moving south as the seasons progress. Midsummer sees a handful of yellow avatars, symbolic hawks, just beyond the northwestern span of the Chugach Mountains in Alaska. July slips into August into September and October, and the bobbles slip down as far south as La Paz in Baja, Mexico City, almost to Guatemala. The Audubon Society’s Bird Migration Explorer—a beautifully interactive compendium of research on bird migration across the globe—visualizes the migration patterns of hundreds of species of birds. Some turkey vultures spend summers in the northwest mountain ranges, then seem to drop, all at once, tumbling down the lines of flight along the Rocky Mountains and Sierras down through Mexico and Panama, to Venezuela and the top of Colombia in September, October, and November. Snow geese perform elegant, elongated swoops across North America. I toggle between species, delighting in a visualized show of their migration that seems to be—from my computer’s-eye view—giddy, free, pleasing in its easy slide.
Paying attention to these simulated (and of course, simplified) patterns of migration soothes the anxiety I feel about the costs of staying in one place. Perhaps nature can help us to remember the primacy of movement, its accord with natural, and not national, boundaries.
No movement is untouched by anxiety. Red-tailed hawks, turkey vultures, snow geese, mammals—the blue whales and gray whales and humpbacks—may cue in to the tilting of the earth on its axis toward a lengthening day, changes in air or ocean temperature, the presence of predators to determine when to move south or north. And their movement is rarely unimpeded. Coastal modifications, power lines, wind turbines, roads all challenge migration. They are fixed in place, structures that moving animals must move around.
The Human Animal
A quarterly column from local fiction writer and lawyer Endria Richardson on the intersection of people and nature in the Bay Area. Find the rest of her columns here.
And then there are ideological obstacles to movement. For human migrations, laws and policies act with the force of nature—dictating when and how and for how long humans can travel, rest, make a home in any particular place. Underlying these laws may be the anxiety that a place must be protected—stabilized—for those deemed to belong. Different administrations respond to these anxieties differently. In part to manage the disturbance that houselessness might cause to those who do live in more or less permanent houses, the Supreme Court in 2024 decided Grants Pass v. Johnson, clearing the way for cities like San Francisco and Oakland to arrest and incarcerate people who have no fixed address recognized by the state. This year, the Trump administration passed Executive Order No. 14160, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” The order radically misreads the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship clause—ratified in 1868 to overturn Dred Scott v. Sandford, the 1857 Supreme Court ruling that denied citizenship to enslaved people and their descendants in the United States—to deny citizenship to children of some immigrant parents. Decisions such as these are historically human, too—it is human to seek to protect borders, hoard resources, and attempt to create through cruelty what may feel like a safe harbor to some.
But halting movement requires force and resources too, stokes fear, and raises anxiety. Philosopher Thomas Nail describes “the primacy of movement,” a theory of movement that does not seek any ultimate cause, that proposes that movement simply is. Thinking about movement in this way, Nail argues, might fundamentally shift Western philosophy’s assumptions about the human and natural worlds, in which “immaterial and unmoving entities like mind, spirit, essence, form and God were seen as superior to material and moving processes like nature, bodies, weather, and animals.” Nail links ideological systems like patriarchy, racism, and ecocide to a worldview that values that which is immobile over that which moves freely.
To be mobile—not rooted by nation or property—according to Western philosophy, is to be closer to nature, the moving whales, the flying birds, the changing weather. To block a border, a route, a place to sleep, is, among other things, an attempt to assert a hierarchy of beings: ranking those who don’t need to move above those who do.
Sign up today!
The question I ask myself constantly these days is what can I do—in the face of the seemingly endless violence humans will invoke to halt a changing sense of place. But what if we embraced the primacy of movement—not just of things, living and nonliving, but of ideas of place, of life itself? That all things have a will to move. Perhaps it is a place to start. To know that a house, an ecosystem, a country, its borders, are as fleet as a red bird against the sky, dipping, gone.
