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

by Sonia Shah

Her research would be, in a way, an elaborate documentation of a species’ death throes, but that’s what a lot of ecology had become in this age of mass extinctions.

On average, terrestrial species were moving nearly twenty kilometers every decade, in a steady march toward the poles. Marine creatures were moving into cooler waters even faster, moving about seventy-five kilometers per decade on average.

While our coming migrations may not proceed fast enough to keep pace with our shifting climate, a growing body of evidence suggests they may be our best shot at preserving biodiversity and resilient human societies.

This stillness at the center of our ideas about the past necessarily casts migrants and migrations as anomalous and disruptive.

Today, more than fifty years later, my parents’ migration remains the central fact of their lives. It’s why they will always long for the perfect mango,

But life is on the move, today as in the past. For centuries, we’ve suppressed the fact of the migration instinct, demonizing it as a harbinger of terror. We’ve constructed a story about our past, our bodies, and the natural world in which migration is the anomaly. It’s an illusion. And once it falls, the entire world shifts.