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.