Yahoo Finance The Next Great Migration by Sonia Shah review – why people wander
Sonia Shah’s last two books Pandemic, published in 2016, and The Fever, published in 2010, introduced her as a storyteller in a novel genre: travel books that went in search of the spread of disease - cholera in the former, malaria in the latter. 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. Her books were also prescient case studies of the way that human progress has been shaped by its love-hate relationship with microbes – how disease has caused empires to rise and fall and economies to stutter and implode.
This book – a wandering narrative about why people wander – is likely to prove equally prophetic in the coming months and years, since it asks two questions that are already shaping our geopolitics: what causes human beings to migrate? And is such mass movement beneficial to more settled communities and nations?
The “next great migration” has been predicted by many – and feared by some – ever since the end of the cold war. The national security expert Robert D Kaplan described it in a 1994 Atlantic magazine article as “the coming anarchy” – the binary superpowers had held borders mostly in check, now people would start to move. “There would likely be 50 million on the move by 2020, experts at the United Nations University projected. Two hundred million by 2050, the environmental security analyst Norman Myers announced. One billion! the NGO Christian Aid projected.” One result of those alarmist predictions had been the populist politics that has emerged with a single purpose in mind: how to make those people stay still. “End freedom of movement!”; “build the wall!”
Shah begins her history with a series of observations that become parables from the natural world. The first concerns the habits and behaviour of the checkerspot butterfly. The checkerspot, most abundant on the west coast of America, is not a powerful creature. It flies very low to the ground and only lives for 10 days. Because of its sensitivity to changes in habitat and environment, it also proved one of the first bellwethers of climate change. A celebrated paper in Nature in 1996 showed that in response to warming temperatures the edges of the population of checkerspots were moving northwards at a rate of 20km per decade. Shah joined the butterfly hunters marking that progress and along the way found evidence that myriad other species are also checking out of familiar territories: Atlantic cod, for example, are moving at a rate of 200km a decade toward the cooler poles.
Shah confesses to a certain kinship with those migrations. Her parents – alone among their siblings – moved from India 50 years ago to fulfil a need for doctors in New York City, in the first wave of legal migration from the subcontinent. That migration instilled in Shah “an acute feeling of being somehow out of place”; despite having been born American, “I didn’t consider myself as being ‘from’ that place, even though I’d borne both of my children there”. For a few years, she and her husband left to live in Australia and became doubly “alien”. These feelings prompted questions in Shah: where did that concept of home originate? And was that a learned or an innate understanding?
Nigel Farage’s efforts to police the English Channel are about as likely to succeed as those of King Canute
Her compulsive investigation into these questions becomes a political history of the human urge to move from one place to another. It begins with the “mitochondrial Eve” identified as the African ancestor of all human societies – the prime mover of a species hardwired to migrate – and ends in the determined and futile efforts of contemporary politicians to deny that instinct in individual refugees with nowhere to go except somewhere else.
Shah identifies the emergence of biological taxonomy, the naming of things, as the historical moment when we decided that nature, which had never stopped moving and evolving, was actually fixed. Carl Linnaeus, “the sex-crazed Swedish taxonomist”, becomes the founding father of a political principle of nativism that can be summed up simply: “We belong here. They belong there.” She shows how this enlightenment control freakery gave rise not only to eugenics and “race science” but also to the underpinnings of fascism. Heinrich Himmler, in addition to masterminding the genocide of millions, issued rules for landscape design: “The head of the Reich central office for ‘Vegetation Mapping’ called the delicate flowering herb Impatiens parviflora a ‘Mongolian invader’ and recommended its extermination.”
Having established this history, Shah unpicks its pernicious effects on contemporary false narratives about immigration and the re-emergence of supremacist racial rhetoric in the political mainstream. It is only two decades since Bill Clinton stood on the White House steps and announced the sequencing of the human genome, which offered incontrovertible proof that we not only have infinitely more in common than that which divides us – “The sequencers had found [that] a paltry 0.1% of the 3bn nucleotides strung together on our strands of DNA differed from any one person to the next” – but that encoded in our DNA was the age-old urge to mix and move about.
Towards the end of this fascinating study, Shah travels to some of the frontlines of the denial of that instinct. She meets the gravediggers of the Greek island of Lesbos, who bury the migrants who wash up on their shores, many of them children, in unmarked graves. She has no easy answers, except to argue that our biology and our history tell us a very different story to our politicians. Nigel Farage’s efforts to police the English Channel are about as likely to succeed as those of King Canute. “Life is on the move, today as in the past,” Shah insists. “For too long, we’ve suppressed the fact of the migration instinct, demonising it as a harbinger of terror. We’ve constructed a story about ourselves, our history, our bodies, and the natural world around us in which migration is the anomaly. It’s an illusion. And once it falls, the entire world shifts.”
• The Next Great Migration: The Story of Movement on a Changing Planet by Sonia Shah is published by Bloomsbury (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
