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The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move
by
50/99
Critics' Rating Index
48/99
Readers' Rating Index
91/99
Scholars' Citation Index
98/99
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
"a masterful survey of migration in both nature and humanity, countering some long-held misconceptions ..."
"He is an academic outlier."
"That literature of track and trace, part detective story, part reportage, took Shah to remote corners of the world and to distant grid references of history."
"Mass movement and the stories we tell about it, despite walls or other barriers, climate change, ignorant xenophobic, and anti-migrant policies, all have much to tell us about our human and biological nature ..."
"She tells gut-wrenching stories of struggling families on the move, and presents evidence that migrants are generally healthier and less apt to commit violent crimes than are the residents of the country they move to ..."
"an incisive examination of migration ..."
"It will present a thoughtful challenge to many readers."
"Or to the myth of altruistic lemmings leaping into the sea to their deaths?"
"She describes extraordinary migrations...all centuries before humans crossed the seas."
"Her closing chapter is a grim litany of migrant deaths and the detention of immigrant children."
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