The Next Great Migration
Ratings4
Average rating4.3
15
Ratings4
Average rating4.3
Finalist for the 2021 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award A Library Journal Best Science & Technology Book of 2020 A Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction Book of 2020 2020 Goodreads Choice Award Semifinalist in Science & Technology A prize-winning journalist upends our centuries-long assumptions about migration through science, history, and reporting--predicting its lifesaving power in the face of climate change. The news today is full of stories of dislocated people on the move. Wild species, too, are escaping warming seas and desiccated lands, creeping, swimming, and flying in a mass exodus from their past habitats. News media presents this scrambling of the planet's migration patterns as unprecedented, provoking fears of the spread of disease and conflict and waves of anxiety across the Western world. On both sides of the Atlantic, experts issue alarmed predictions of millions of invading aliens, unstoppable as an advancing tsunami, and countries respond by electing anti-immigration leaders who slam closed borders that were historically porous. But the science and history of migration in animals, plants, and humans tell a different story. Far from being a disruptive behavior to be quelled at any cost, migration is an ancient and lifesaving response to environmental change, a biological imperative as necessary as breathing. Climate changes triggered the first human migrations out of Africa. Falling sea levels allowed our passage across the Bering Sea. Unhampered by barbed wire, migration allowed our ancestors to people the planet, catapulting us into the highest reaches of the Himalayan mountains and the most remote islands of the Pacific, creating and disseminating the biological, cultural, and social diversity that ecosystems and societies depend upon. In other words, migration is not the crisis--it is the solution. Conclusively tracking the history of misinformation from the 18th century through today's anti-immigration policies, The Next Great Migration makes the case for a future in which migration is not a source of fear, but of hope.
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Interesting and Applicable. This is a truly remarkable work that traces the sociological and biological impetuses for and restrictions on migration at levels from the individual through the species. Shah does a superb job of combining history and science to make her case, and even impeaches at least a few organizations currently in the headlines along the way - even while clearly having no way of knowing that she was doing so, as the book was written before they became so prominent more recently. Spanning from the guy that developed the modern taxonomic system through late breaking issues with the Trump Presidency, Shah shows a true depth to her research and builds a largely compelling case. Very much recommended.
In the Acknowledgments at the end Shah briefly alludes to the “reconstruction of [her] ideas about migration and migrants” following a conversation with an MSF director... and that was when things clicked for me: this is a work from a recent convert. A damn fine work, to be sure, but that explains the tone, the structure, the missing counterarguments. The rosy tint. Knowing that bias beforehand would've helped me understand where she was coming from, so I pass it along not as a spoiler but as necessary preparation for the reader.
This is not a book about, as I had expected, the coming climate-related crises[1]; it is much more. Shah packs a lot of history and science into a readable 300 pages, and presents the current best scientific understanding of many migratory species. Including humans. And it's all engaging, interesting, well researched, and uncomfortable. Yes, uncomfortable, even for a diehard open-borders nut like me: Shah argues in chapter 8 that we need to rethink our intolerance of invasive species, and that set me on edge: tamarisk? cane toad? asian carp? No mention. I have to conclude that this part was new-convert fanaticism, NRE if you will. But maybe not – and I need to read more and think more. Shah has made me reexamine some assumptions, and that is the best compliment I can give a book.
[1] I use the term “crises” deliberately, despite her aversion for it (see her Afterword), to refer to the sociopolitical rejection of immigrants by small-minded psychopaths in positions of power. That is: migration is not the crisis; the infliction of suffering is.
