From the beginning of this project, the gallery that has
enticed me the most has been the Money Gallery. For a start it’s the quietist –
many people are so enchanted by the live amphibians and reptiles that they
don’t notice there’s anything beyond. Even better, the way through was blocked
during most of the project due to building work, so you had to know which back
stairs to go up. It’s also one of the least interpreted galleries, which in
tandem with the quiet makes it a good space for meditation.
But it’s more than that. Right from the beginning I sensed
that you couldn’t think about migration without thinking about money, although
this was so much a gut feeling that I’ve struggling to find the rational bones
of it.
Certainly from the earliest history of our species, people
have travelled to to find the things they need or to exchange things. That much
is obvious. None of our ancestors found food or water or shelter by staying in
one spot. But there must have been a time when they began to farm and build and
store when they began to travel less.
From the start there was someone who filled their knapsack
and crossed the mountains – or filled the barrels that filled their boat and
crossed the sea. Who knows what proportions of need, greed or curiosity
motivated them, but it seems something as fundamental to our human species as
the Deaths Head Moth making its journey North from Southern
Europe each year.
So from being a people who moved around, we become a species
where just some of us move around. Just as we become a species in which just
some of us build, and just some of us farm, and just some of us raise children.
But those people that move round are fulfilling that function for all of us.
They’re bringing us things we need, they’re selling what we’ve got a surplus
of, and they’re sharing information about the world.
Now of course we’ve divided the labour even more. There are
a dozen other groups of people that move the stuff we sell and buy, and even
more that share the information round. So we all get to be a little more still
and everything comes to us. And the people that travel come to sell us their
labour rather than their goods. But is there really that much difference. The
beans we buy from Kenya
aren’t just beans. They are the labour of the people that planted and nourished
them, picked them and flew them to us. Our phones are the often cheap labour of
the people who mined for minerals and assembled them (and I’m a bit sketchy
about the rest to be honest!).
The second part of this argument comes from a different
gallery. I spent some time speaking with Phil the entomology co-ordinator
talking about insect migration. There are a lot of butterflies and moths which
used to just visit us seasonally – but which now stay here all year round and
breed here – because our climate is getting warmer.
Is this a problem I ask? Do they compete with our native
species, many of whom are under threat? Is there anything we do about this? I’m
a Botanist by trade. I know about Oxford Ragword and Japanese knotweed. Phil
pointed out that by and large our efforts to control insect species backfire on
us. Pesticides usually end up killing or damaging the insects we don’t want to
damage. Biological control hasn’t turned out to be as clever as we thought
either – think how cane toads, introduced to kill insects that fed on the sugar
cane have become a pest themselves in Australia
and the Caribbean .
And of course it makes perfect sense. If we want to stop
this happening we have to deal with global warming. If we want to protect our
native insects we have to look after their habitats.
You probably don’t need me to draw the line back to human
migration. Human beings have always moved around. Now many of us don’t, it’s
money that moves as our proxy. Underlying those movements of people, desperate
of hopeful, is the movement of money around the globe. Yes, it’s because of war
too, but peel back the grotesque veneer of war and someone’s being impoverished
and someone’s being enriched.
Building walls and dragging people kicking and screaming
onto aircraft are as pointless and self-defeating as introducing cane
toads. If you want to balance out
migration, you have to balance out global financial inequality. And funnily
enough as you do so, you’ll probably do help balance out the carbon dioxide
level and save a few polar bears into the bargain.
