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The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move
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Critics' Rating Index
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Readers' Rating Index
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Scholars' Citation Index
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Volume of Reviews
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About This Book
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.
Reviews
"For instance, having made the perfectly good assertion that economists have 'long struggled to detect' any negative economic effect of migrants on locals, she makes the overwrought claim that, in a 2015 study, George Borjas, a Harvard economist, 'overturned' a near-consensus on the positive nature of migration."
"An interesting read that deals with a topic that is current and important to all."
"In fascinating passages on mitochondrial DNA and GPS technology, she explains that the vast migrations of plants and birds was pretty much a mystery to scientists until very recently ..."
"Perhaps Shah's more fundamental plea—that migration is normal, that we are all migrants, and that, like nature, migration can be both beautiful and terrifying—will have more traction."
"But hers is a timeless message."
"Shah, a science writer, manages to link questions of migration, race and ecology more fluently than most political or social affairs journalists."
"Shah explores the history of intellectual connections among all these migration phenomena, tackling with compassion and insight a deeply complex and challenging subject ..."
"I found it odd that [Shah] tends to group together many kinds of biological movement that specialists think of as quite different."
"If The Next Great Migration does not resolve such issues, that is because its aim is more to trigger a conceptual shift."
"[Shah's] compulsive investigation into these questions becomes a political history of the human urge to move from one place to another ..."
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