The Next Great Migration
The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move
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4.8 • 11 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
From headlines about refugees fleeing poverty and violence to stories of animals impacted by climate change, the concept of migration has been on our minds a lot. For many, the idea breeds fears of chaos and collapse. But journalist Sonia Shah shows us how migration actually works, drawing from both history and science and challenging many of our assumptions along the way. Shah explains that large-scale migrations have been biology’s go-to solution for changing landscapes and disastrous circumstances for millennia. (In fact, Shah argues that it was climate change that caused the earliest humans to leave Africa and populate the rest of the globe.) We love how Shah uses hard data to quell many of our concerns about epic migrations—such as the fact that one percent of migratory species displace native species and proceed to flourish alongside them. The Next Great Migration is a reminder that mass migrations have been instrumental in ensuring the survival of the human race in the past, which means they’ll probably be key to our future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Science journalist Shah (Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond) delivers a masterful survey of migration in both nature and humanity, countering some long-held misconceptions. The biggest of these is the notion that "migration is the anomaly" to a settled existence in one place; in fact, Shah conclusively shows, life has always been "on the move," as demonstrated in recent decades by new technological tools. DNA analyses indicate widespread human migration goes back further than previously thought for instance, humans first arrived in Tibet 62,000, not 15,000, years ago. Likewise, real-time tracking of animals using GPS has revealed more extensive migration routes than scientists expected Arctic terns "logged 70,900-kilometer migrations, nearly twice as long as previous estimates." In addition to the "scale and complexity of both human and wild movements around the planet," Shah discusses how a faked nature documentary popularized the myth of mass lemming suicides (thus implying the "appropriate conclusion to the migratory act death"), and how early geneticists' assertion that "people who lived on different continents were biologically foreign to one another" encouraged racism. This is a valuable treatise on how humanity can "reclaim our history of migration" and adopt a more pan-global perspective.
