The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move

by Sonia Shah

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781635571974
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	06/02/2020
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	702,157
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Sonia Shah is a science journalist and the prize-winning author of Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the New York Public Library Award for Excellence in Journalism. She has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many others. Her TED talk, “Three Reasons We Still Haven't Gotten Rid of Malaria,” has been viewed by more than one million people around the world. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Table of Contents

1 Exodus 1

2 Panic 32

3 Linnaeus's Loathsome Harlotry 63

4 The Deadly Hybrid 94

5 The Suicidal Zombie Migrant 128

6 Malthus's Hideous Blasphemy 154

7 Homo migratio 189

8 The Wild Alien 219

9 The Migrant Formula 252

10 The Wall 284

Coda: Safe Passage 310

Acknowledgments 319

References 322

Notes 330

Index 374

Editorial Reviews

★ 05/18/2020

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. Agent: Charlotte Sheedy, Charlotte Sheedy Literary. (June)

Publishers Weekly

04/01/2020

Following the inception of a sedentary world philosophy that arose in the 18th century, Shah's book tracks how this worldview served to inform future movements from eugenics to anti-immigration policies to conservationism. However, Shah shows that, owing to recent scientific findings and advances in technology, this worldview is increasingly being called into question. Rather, it is becoming clearer that migration and movement are vastly more important, all-encompassing, and central to the lives of all living beings on Earth than previously known. The conclusions and assumptions that this change of focus presents may serve to redefine many types of current movements as well as historical and current events. Meticulously researched, yet highly readable, this work presents a nuanced counterargument to the idea of a static world where each being belongs to a certain place. Instead, using examples from insects to plants to humans, migration is considered a phenomenon that has been and will continue to be practiced by all earthly beings VERDICT. An interesting read that deals with a topic that is current and important to all. It will present a thoughtful challenge to many readers.—Laura Hiatt, Fort Collins, CO

Library Journal

★ 2020-03-19
Science journalist Shah looks at the biology and human ecology of migration, a topic overladen these days with all sorts of political shadings.

The child of Indian immigrants, Shah—author of the excellent and ever more timely bookPandemic(2016)—returns with an incisive examination of migration, which she considers a phenomenon both biological and cultural. Many bird species, for example, travel great distances in annual migrations, and a delicate butterfly species with which the author opens her narrative exhibits “a consistent pattern of movement across half of North America.” We have been taught to view such movement as potentially perilous: Invading species arrive, we think, and immediately disturb pristine ecosystems. Even Shah admits that “the idea of migration as a disruptive force has fueled my own work as a journalist.” Yet nothing could be more natural than animals moving in response to changes in environmental conditions. As the author shows, only a tiny fraction of relocated species displace others, an act that is consistent with Darwinian theories of natural selection. “Condemning newcomers as inevitably disruptive,” she writes, pointedly, “blames them for all transgressions committed by 1 percent or less of their members.” When it comes to humans, she writes, the topic becomes more fraught. In a time when humans are increasingly on the move, whether because of political or economic displacement or because their homes are becoming uninhabitable thanks to climate change, politicians such as Donald Trump are using the tiny number of problem-makers, real or potential, to keep the vast majority of law-abiding would-be citizens from making their homes in new lands. This ignores millennia of human movement from one place to the next. Even though “over the long history of life on earth, [migration’s] benefits have outweighed its costs,” nationalists still create xenophobic, incoherent policies, agreeing only that strangers are to be despised.

A scientifically sophisticated, well-considered contribution to the literature of movement and environmental change. (b/w maps)

Kirkus Reviews

A dazzlingly original picture of our relentlessly mobile species' NAOMI KLEIN-'Fascinating . . . Likely to prove prophetic in the coming months and years' OBSERVER-'A dazzling tour through 300 years of scientific history' PROSPECT-

From the Publisher