The next great migration: the story of movement on a changing planet
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BOOK REVIEW
The next great migration: the story of movement on a changing planet Sonia Shah: Bloomsbury, London, 2020, 388 pp, $18.59, ISBN 978-1526626646 Gad Perry
Received: 30 June 2020 / Accepted: 12 July 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
In early 2020, when Covid-19 started dominating the world’s attention, a colleague recommended a book on pandemics by Shah (2016). It was eerily prescient, given current events and the repeated claim that nobody could have predicted them. Moreover, it also was a good read. When another book from Ms. Shah, a prize-winning investigative journalist, was announced, I rushed to pre-order it. Unfortunately, it turned out to be disappointing. The next great migration begins with the author in southern California, looking for Euphydyas editha butterflies. At the start of the first chapter, Shah tells the story of the decline and climate-related range shifts of this butterfly, which Parmesan (1996) made famous in the climate-change literature. (As an aside, it is not always clear to me what sources this book relies on. There is a references section and numbered, chapterby-chapter notes, but these do not correspond to explicit referrals in the text.) By page 7, however, Shah turns to her main topic, human migrations and bias against migrants. This, of course, is also a timely topic in the United States and elsewhere, and Shah devotes most of the book to citing scientists and others who claimed human migration would lead to various disasters, then exposing the errors and intentional G. Perry (&) Department of Natural Resource Management, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX 79409, USA e-mail: [email protected]
manipulations that often underlie such admonitions and the suffering that follows. Occasionally, though, she returns to biological and conservation issues (both butterfly and Dr. Parmesan appear again later in the book, for example). Bias, racism, and intolerance of human migration is the main topic of the book, but biologists both dead and living are often dragged into the fray. The father of taxonomy gives his name to Chap. 3, ‘‘Linnaeus’s loathsome harlotry.’’ Much of the chapter is given to deriding globe-travelling Europeans of the 1700s for claiming to have met and for displaying in their museums ‘‘women touted as mermaids, Hottentots, and troglodytes’’ (p. 68–69). Unlike Buffon, presented as his ‘‘rival,’’ Linnaeus would not accept dispersal as a major explanation for modern distributions. Rather than stick to the question of whether dispersal is important or not, as she effectively does later, Shah takes an ad-hominem approach and paints Linnaeus as a sex-obsessed failure and sometimes-fraud who refused ‘‘to admit that Europeans shared kinship with the foreigners they considered primitive and savage and possibly biologically alien’’ (p. 72). Linnaeus is accused of dividing humanity into different species, though his text actually names them as subspecies. This is an important distinction. Human population growth is th
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