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Still Thirty-seven: Geographies of Survival
Oil on linen & board
15″ x 12″ x 1/2″
2012
Ricardo F. Morín
November 2025
Oakland Park, Florida
Author’s Note
This essay examines how human groups respond to instability when the conditions that once sustained them begin to fail. Its focus is not on specific crises, events, or regions, but on the structural pressures that compel populations either to relocate or to defend their ground. I approach the subject without moral interpretation and without attributing virtue or fault to the choices communities make under duress. The aim is simply to describe the grammars of behavior that arise when survival becomes uncertain and to trace how identity, claims to legitimacy, and patterns of continuity reorganize themselves under those pressures. The essay does not propose solutions or anticipate outcomes; it observes the patterns that emerge when stability dissolves and the land itself ceases to offer guarantees.
Abstract
Geographies of Survival explores two fundamental responses to instability: migration and entrenchment. When climate disruption, scarcity, or civic breakdown exceed a community’s capacity to endure, populations seek stability either through movement or through defending their position. Migration reorganizes identity through adaptation to new conditions; entrenchment intensifies identity to preserve continuity in place. These responses arise from the same pressures and function as parallel strategies for survival rather than opposing moral positions. The essay examines how claims to legitimacy, patterns of identification, and the search for continuity are reshaped by these pressures, and how the friction between movement and resistance reflects structural forces rather than cultural incompatibility. Its purpose is to illuminate the conditions under which these survival grammars emerge and the ways they transform the meaning of land, stability, and collective life.
1
Migration is often described as the movement of people from one place to another, but this description obscures the deeper forces at work. Migration is not merely geography in motion; it is also the expression of a survival grammar that becomes visible whenever a community faces conditions it can no longer absorb. Climate shifts, failing economies, collapsing states, and persisting insecurities create pressures that exceed the capacity of existing structures. Under these pressures, a population confronts a choice so fundamental that it precedes ideology: to move or to entrench.
2
These are not parallel options. They are opposing responses built from the same materials—fear, instability, and the search for continuity. Migration seeks stability by relocating; entrenchment seeks stability by confronting the agents of instability directly. Neither response is superior. Neither is voluntary. Both emerge from conditions that compress judgment, narrow possibility, and force communities to defend themselves against forces too large to negotiate.
3
Migration begins when a group concludes that the geography that sustained it can no longer guarantee survival. The land fails, or institutions collapse, or the future narrows. Movement becomes the only remaining form of protection. Yet movement does not dissolve identity—it reorganizes it. A migrating population must redefine its internal coherence in relation to unfamiliar surroundings. Identity becomes adaptive not by preference but by necessity. Adaptation is not reinvention; it is survival.
4
Entrenchment moves in the opposite direction. When a group chooses to remain in place, it must defend what movement would surrender: territory, memory, continuity, and the stability that comes from rootedness. Entrenchment therefore intensifies identification rather than loosening it. Boundaries become rigid. Narratives harden. Conflict becomes a strategy rather than an interruption. A community that fights to remain where it is must believe that displacement would erase it. Confrontation becomes a method of preservation.
5
Cultural confrontation arises most sharply when a migrating population settles on land that another group interprets as an extension of its own continuity. To the migrant community, the land represents safety, possibility, or relief from pressures that made departure unavoidable. To the entrenched community, the same land represents memory, inheritance, and the boundary that protects its historical coherence. Each group sees the other as the agent of potential erasure: migrants perceive exclusion and hostility; entrenched populations perceive encroachment and loss. Conflict escalates not because either group seeks domination, but because each interprets survival through a different grammar—adaptation for one, preservation for the other.
6
Policies adopted in countries such as Denmark and the United Kingdom illustrate how entrenched societies respond when migration is perceived as a threat. For many asylum seekers, these deterrent measures narrow the distance between the pressures that forced them to leave and the pressures they encounter upon arrival, a condition that makes stability difficult to distinguish from exclusion. Governments frequently defend entrenched policies by arguing that the resources needed to support asylum seekers are limited, and that extending those resources further would risk weakening existing systems of welfare, housing, and public order.
7
These responses of movement and entrenchment seem incompatible, yet they describe a single reality: populations under pressure behave according to the survival strategies available to them, not according to idealized accounts of culture or volition. When migrants and entrenched populations come into contact, each sees the other through the lens of its own pressures. Migrants see protection; the entrenched see threat. Migrants carry adaptation; the entrenched carry defense. Each posture misreads the other because each is responding to different forms of danger.
8
Climate change intensifies these divergent responses, not by determining them but by tightening the conditions under which communities must choose. Climate does not produce conflict by itself; it alters the margins within which stability is possible. Regions once predictable become irregular; resources once continuous become intermittent. As these margins narrow, some populations interpret movement as the only viable safeguard, while others interpret remaining in place as the only defensible continuity. The same pressure exposes different vulnerabilities, and each community responds according to its own history, capacity, and thresholds of endurance—rather than to climate alone.
9
The friction between these grammars—movement and entrenchment—should not be mistaken for a clash of civilizations. It is a collision between two interpretations of threat. One group treats survival as relocation; the other treats survival as resistance. Both postures emerge from instability; both use identity as a tool shaped by circumstance rather than as a fixed inheritance. Identity becomes an instrument of continuity, shaped by conditions that leave little room for negotiation or reflection.
10
The world often interprets these collisions through moral, ideological, or geopolitical frames, but such interpretations obscure the deeper movement: instability reorganizes identity faster than identity reorganizes the world. When geography shifts, populations adapt. When populations adapt, meanings shift. Collective life becomes contested not because cultures are inherently antagonistic, but because survival pressures force groups into patterns they would not otherwise choose.
11
If there is a universal character to the present century, it is this: the pressures that produce migration are the same pressures that produce conflict among those who refuse to migrate. To understand one without the other is to misunderstand both. Movement and entrenchment are not opposites but consequences—expressions of the structural instability that now shapes every region, every culture, every claim to continuity.
12
The question that follows is neither predictive nor ideological. It is simply the next step in the logic of this analysis: What forms of stability become possible when migration and entrenchment are understood not as opposing moral positions but as parallel responses to the same changing world? The answer is not yet visible, but the conditions that will shape it already are.
Tags: adaptation, climate pressure, collective behavior, conflict structures, continuity, entrenchment, geography, Identity, instability, migration, structural forces, survival strategies
Observations On Perception 
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