The Subsequent Nice Migration: The Magnificence and Terror of Life on the Transfer

Finalist for the 2021 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
A Library Journal Finest Science & Know-how Guide of 2020
A Publishers Weekly Finest Nonfiction Guide of 2020
2020 Goodreads Selection Award Semifinalist in Science & Know-how

A prize-winning journalist upends our centuries-long assumptions about migration by means of science, historical past, and reporting–predicting its lifesaving energy within the face of local weather change.

The information at present is filled with tales of dislocated folks on the transfer. Wild species, too, are escaping warming seas and desiccated lands, creeping, swimming, and flying in a mass exodus from their previous habitats. Information media presents this scrambling of the planet’s migration patterns as unprecedented, upsetting fears of the unfold of illness and battle and waves of hysteria throughout the Western world. On either side of the Atlantic, consultants subject alarmed predictions of thousands and thousands of invading aliens, unstoppable as an advancing tsunami, and nations reply by electing anti-immigration leaders who slam closed borders that had been traditionally porous.

However the science and historical past of migration in animals, vegetation, and people inform a distinct story. Removed from being a disruptive habits to be quelled at any value, migration is an historic and lifesaving response to environmental change, a organic crucial as obligatory as respiratory. Local weather modifications triggered the primary human migrations out of Africa. Falling sea ranges allowed our passage throughout the Bering Sea. Unhampered by barbed wire, migration allowed our ancestors to folks the planet, catapulting us into the very best reaches of the Himalayan mountains and probably the most distant islands of the Pacific, creating and disseminating the organic, cultural, and social range that ecosystems and societies rely upon. In different phrases, migration shouldn’t be the crisis–it is the answer.

Conclusively monitoring the historical past of misinformation from the 18th century by means of at present’s anti-immigration insurance policies, The Subsequent Nice Migration makes the case for a future during which migration shouldn’t be a supply of worry, however of hope.