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

by Sonia Shah

The creatures I’ve come to see are equally unassuming. Euphydryas editha, aka Edith’s checkerspot butterflies, are so slight and unobtrusive that they would be barely detectable in any amateurish photograph

We amble slowly into the hills, Strahm occasionally dropping to hands and knees to inspect some low-growing grasses for hidden butterflies and turn over a few leaves in search of caterpillars.

lands and waters in sync with the changing climate. 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

Even the most seemingly immobile wild species were on the move. Coral polyps, which over decades form the branching thickets and sprawling nubby plates of the world’s coral reefs, may seem the picture of stately immobility. They

Dhauladhar mountain range, with its eighteen-thousand-foot peaks, looms over the precariously perched village of McLeodganj, nestled on a forested ridge nearly seven thousand feet up in the foothills of the Himalayas.

We move, nevertheless. More people live outside their countries of birth today than at any time before. The reasons vary. Between 2008 and 2014,10 floods, storms, earthquakes, and the like sent 26 million people into motion each year. Violence and persecution in unstable societies stir other journeys. In 2015 over 15 million people were forced to flee their countries, more than at any time since the Second World War.

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.

The next great migration is upon us. The trouble is, from the earliest years of childhood, we are taught that plants, animals, and people belong in certain places. It’s why we call the goose the “Canada” goose, the maple the “Japanese” maple. It’s why we use the camel to represent the Middle East and the kangaroo to stand for Australia.

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

Scientific ideas that cast migration as a form of disorder were not obscure theoretical concerns confined to esoteric academic journals. They were widely disseminated in popular culture. They influenced the closing of the U.S. borders in the early twentieth century, inspired the fascist dreams of Nazis, and provided the theoretical ballast for today’s generation of anti-immigration lobbyists and policy makers.

The idea of migration as a disruptive force has fueled my own work as a journalist. For years I reported and wrote about the damage caused by biota on the move.

Jainism

one day insurgent militants from the Taliban movement captured and brutally murdered one of Haqyar’s colleagues. Terrified that he’d be next, Haqyar and his wife quickly found a buyer for their house, selling it in two days for a quarter of what they’d paid for it. They packed up their things, including several of Haqyar’s German-language textbooks, which they’d need when they arrived in Germany, rounded up their four children, and left. They traveled over the mountains into Pakistan, then into Iran. There hadn’t been any time to obtain official documents.

But on Panama’s far eastern edge, near the border with Colombia, the roads abruptly end.

Thickset thirty-year-old Jean-Pierre was one. He delivers his sharp, critical observations about human behavior, in French, Spanish, and Kreyol, in a low, bitter growl. He trained as an accountant in Venezuela, but his identity, first and foremost, is as a socialist and a writer, and he sports the de rigueur goatee that proves it. He arrived at the edge of the Darién with his wife and seven-year-old son a few years ago, gathering with about one hundred other migrants at the port town of Turbo, Colombia.

the line that separates the United States from Mexico, the most-crossed international border in the world.

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.

The world seemed immeasurably safer without two superpowers loudly threatening nuclear holocaust.

Kaplan wrote, masses of desperate, impoverished people would be forced to migrate into overburdened cities. With no great power regimes to prop up weak states, the tumult caused by migrants would result in social breakdown and “criminal anarchy.”

A new era of migration, he wrote, would create “the core foreign-policy challenge from which most others will ultimately emanate.”

There’d 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.

The idea of migration as a national security threat seeped into the public’s attention and incorporated itself into the world’s foremost international security organizations.

A Facebook-organized “Day of Rage” against the Syrian leader Dr. Bashar al-Assad had fizzled, failing to draw much of a crowd.

teenagers carried the can of red paint to the local school and brushed its contents into a three-word warning dripping from the wall: “Your turn, doctor.”

The boys’ small act of resistance ended up sparking one of the most brutal civil wars in recent history.

The war in Syria unleashed a mass exodus.12

Named after the Latin for “middle,” medius, and “land,” terra, the Mediterranean Sea is squeezed in between land masses, with Europe to its north, Africa to its south, and Asia to its east. It’s a peculiarly accessible body of water, thousands of miles long but just a few miles wide at its narrowest point.

As antimigrant politicians climbed into power, reinforcing the urgency and necessity of the antimigrant policies they touted became a political necessity.

That spring the German Interior Ministry released a report22 showing that the country had experienced 402,000 excess crimes since admitting its latest wave of migrants, a breathtaking statistic featured prominently in newspaper reports around the world.

On February 14, 2017, for example, six people threw rocks, bottles, and sticks at a group of seven Border Patrol agents. Border Patrol officials generously logged that single incident as 126 separate assaults. Their unusual new method entirely accounted for the elevated numbers of assaults on Border Patrol agents they had reported, as an investigation by the immigration reporter Debbie Nathan revealed.

Using more traditional methods of tallying assaults, the statistics showed that Border Patrol agents did not experience the highest assault rate among law enforcement officers. They experienced the lowest.

“Who here knows who Emma Lazarus was?” he asked, referring to the poet who’d written the famous words inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty

The son of an impoverished Lutheran minister and a rector’s daughter, Carl Linnaeus was born in 1707 along the shores of a deep clear lake in southern Sweden, swaddled in a cradle decorated with blooms from his father’s garden.

Arnoldus Montanus, who produced thousand-page illustrated tomes about the world outside Europe, had never even left the continent.

Skin color back then was more like hair color is today, a noticeable but socially meaningless detail.

Later, when he’d be forced to visit Finland—he hadn’t wanted to subject himself to the discomforts of travel—he privately complained that the people there didn’t speak Swedish. “They speak nothing but Finnish,” he noted with disdain.

One of his biographers, Lisbet Koerner, called him a “rude provincial—sentimental, superstitious, and devoid of general culture.”

I did not know scarlet Linnaeus was such a boorish POS.

Linnaeus was a splitter, Buffon was a lumper. His ideas ravaged Linnaean taxonomy.

But Buffon is not remembered today for his prescience. Both he and Linnaeus drew on the conventional wisdom, passed down through philosophers and theologians since medieval times, that all matter and life on earth organized itself hierarchically, in what the ancients called the Great Chain of Being.

Linnaeus had little truck for Buffon’s reliance on migration as an explanation for the distribution of peoples and species. By elevating migratory transformation, Buffon’s theories questioned the permanence of nature and challenged the perfection of the Creator.

For decades, museums and exhibitors displayed Baartman’s body as proof of Linnaeus’s characterization of non-Europeans as biologically alien. Plaster casts of her body, enlarged illustrations, and even a stuffed display of her actual skin appeared in museums and exhibits across the continent, including at the 1937 Paris International Exposition, where tens of millions marveled at her ordinary human body, as if it were somehow distinct from their own. The paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote about his visit to the Musée de l’homme in 1987. He found the jar of preserved genitalia Cuvier had prepared sitting on a shelf in the basement.

Grant’s eugenics committee.

A pro-Nazi publishing company in Germany published Grant’s book in 1925. Adolf Hitler read it while stuck in a Bavarian jail. “The book is my bible,”52 he told Grant in a letter,

Elton wrote up his novel spin on Collett’s findings7 into a scientific paper, which appeared in the British Journal of Experimental Biology in 1924. The paper started out with a fairly neutral description of the phenomenon. “For many years,” Elton explained, “the lemmings have periodically forced themselves upon public attention in southern Norway by migrating down in swarms into the lowland in autumn, and in many cases marching with great speed and determination into the sea, in attempting to swim across which they perish,”

“The phenomenon,” he explained,8 “is analogous to infanticide among human beings … the immediate cause of the migration is overpopulation.”

Biologists discovered manifestations of this secret drive10 for suicidal migration in other species besides lemmings. The University of Michigan zoologist Marston Bates, for example, wrote of “mass suicide” committed by South American butterflies.

(The traditional gardens many kept, the Nazi garden architect Willy Lange lamented, were characteristic of the inferior “south Alpine” race.)

The head of the Reich Central Office for “Vegetation Mapping” called the delicate flowering herb Impatiens parviflora a “Mongolian invader” and recommended its extermination. The Nazis zealously protected wild species considered “native.” Under their regime, killing an eagle was a crime punishable by death.

His 1958 book, The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants, would inform the management of national parks and programs protecting wildlife around the world. It launched a whole new field of inquiry dedicated to documenting the negative impact of species on the move, a field known as “invasion biology,” which would take off in the 1980s. The book would be hailed for decades to come as “one of the central scientific books of our century,”29 as the science writer David Quammen called it in 2000.

White Wilderness infiltrated the public mind for decades before the exposé came out. The scene of the lemming suicide helped make White Wilderness a critically acclaimed hit. In 1959 the film won the Academy Award for best documentary feature. It would be shown in public schools across the country for years, bringing to the masses Elton’s bleak vision of the ecological necessity of migrant deaths.