Our teenage son volunteered at a local nature center every summer. One of the activities the counselors in training participated in was pulling up Purple Loosestrife. It is an considered invasive species that thrives along Michigan's lakesides.
So, I was shocked to read that Canadian researchers concluded "there is certainly no evidence that purple loosestrife 'kills wetlands' or 'creates biological deserts'!"
Investigative journalist Sonia Shah's book The Next Great Migration is filled with such iconoclastic insights, smashing prevalent notions contending that ecosystems were meant to be unchanging, pristine, and unadulterated.
Instead, she systematically argues that no place on Earth has remained untouched by the migration of species. Including human migration.
Shah takes readers through the entire history of the migration of species and the ideas humans have held about migration. Bad science and ingrained beliefs have lead to false assumptions that impact the political landscape to this very day. Most disturbing is the rise of Eugenics and categorization of human groups to justify our fearful reaction to newcomers.
Building walls, Shah contends, cannot stop or solve the reality of migrating human populations. She writes, "Over the long history of life on earth, its (migrations) benefits have outweighed its costs." Embracing migrants can be a solution to the problems we face.
Shah's book was an engrossing read that shed light on how we 'got to here'.
I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.
from the publisher:
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.The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move
by Sonia Shah
Bloomsbury Publishing
Pub Date June 2, 2020
ISBN: 9781635571974
hardcover $28.00 (USD)
