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

"I believe that the migration challenge, the movement of people and species, is the most pertinent environmental challenge of the next several decades. And it’s upon us right now. There are all kinds of demographic ways of parsing this question, but the number of migrants in the world is somewhere between one in eight and one in 12, depending on what kind of statistics you’re looking at, and how you want to define what migration is. That’s a challenging issue, but migration also exists within countries and can be the result of an environmental catastrophe of one kind or another. Recently, in North America, you can see what happens when there are hurricanes or wildfires. People lose their homes and they have to go somewhere else. Wildlife is massively disrupted. This is only going to get worse. Then there are the political dislocations, the dislocations of gentrification, which mean that lots of people are displaced. These are not always people from communities of color, but often, and not always poor people, but often. It could be anybody at all, who is suddenly forced to move for one reason or another. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s very hard for folks, certainly in Europe and the United States, to understand the full dimension of what migration means not only in human history and cultural history, but also ecologically speaking, because everything’s on the move all the time. It’s very important for people to think about new species and new people that are coming into their communities, and what they do about it, how they accept it, and how they find a place in their hearts to share what they have with people who have been dispossessed, or species that are forced to leave their environment. Sonia Shah’s book, The Next Great Migration is a fantastic overview of exactly these questions. She looks at the ecological and cultural challenges. She talks about a lot of the contemporary issues, but also goes back over several hundred years of Western history and explains how population restrictions and even a lot of ecological theory is racially biased. That affects the way we look at everything from the migration of people and species to so-called invasive species. Her book is great. It investigates these interconnected challenges. It’s very well written. It’s learned. The Next Great Migration is a must read, because if we’re thinking about environmental learning, this is the issue that’s going to be on everybody’s plate. I have a slideshow that begins with a photograph of human-built walls around the world. It’s pretty staggering, from the US-Mexico border, to barbed wire in Eastern Europe, to the Great Wall of China. These walls are meant to keep people out. They never ultimately work, because people and species alike always find a way through them yet they still wreak serious disruptions. The very idea of a wall is so anti-ecological. In fact, the whole notion of borders and boundaries is anti-ecological, because most borders and boundaries have to do with property rights and property ownership or imperial issues of one kind or another. We need a reconceptualization of what borders and boundaries mean, which I also cover in my book, To Know the World , because talking about environmental learning, we need to perceive borders and boundaries differently than we do if we’re going to solve any of these problems."

"Sonia Shah is a journalist who seems to be about five years ahead of the rest of us. A few years ago, she wrote a book about pandemics and presaged the moment that we are living in right now. This book does a little bit of the same thing. It’s a big book that asks us to rethink the way that we understand movement and fixity. Lots of people have written about the idea that the history of humanity is a history of migration. Over thousands of years and most of our history as species, humans have moved. We were hunter gatherers that were not fixed in place. The idea that we are place-based, that we are identified based on where we are born, is a new one. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But what Shah does really well in this book is make the case that we should look at the animal and plant worlds in the same way. She argues that our ideas of things like ‘invasive’ species or ‘native’ species are shaped by the same incorrect ideas of fixity that we imagine in the history of humanity. A lot of that is based on our presentism. We live the world in a 75-year chunk and so we see what feels like fixity. During our lifetimes, things do not change that much, so we tend to think things have always been in these places and with these configurations. Shah asks us to take a step back and take a longer view of human history, as well as plants and animals. It is a history of movement, not fixity."