The Herald - The Herald Magazine
A thought-provoking perspective on migration, says David Pratt
THE NEXT GREAT MIGRATION: THE STORY OF MOVEMENT ON A CHANGING PLANET Sonia Shah
ABloomsbury, £14.99
T this time of year I’d normally be in Spain, a place called Tarifa to be exact. It’s the most southerly point in Europe, a place where two continents meet, with Europe and Africa separated by just a few miles of sea.
Because of this it’s a transitory place. I’m no ornithologist, but over many years on my hikes along the coast I’ve watched the splendour of vast numbers of bird species on their migratory routes moving to and fro from Africa.
Increasingly, I’ve also come across abandoned rubber dinghies and other small boats on remote beaches or run aground on the rugged coastline which marks the precise nautical point where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Atlantic. These makeshift vessels are reminders of the refugees and migrants that have made the perilous crossing from the North African shores of Morocco in yet another stage on a journey to Europe that might already have taken them across swathes of sub-Saharan Africa.
This Andalusian coastline that I’ve hiked for almost two decades is a microcosm of the themes that run through Sonia Shah’s latest book The Next Great Migration: The Story of Movement on a Changing Planet. I must confess that on first picking it up, I did so with some trepidation. Would it be a jargon- filled account blunted by impenetrable scientific research and endless demographic statistics, I wondered? Alternatively, it could turn out to be some idealistic paean by a writer simply rapt by the vast spectacle of people on the move. Any misgivings were quickly dispelled, for this is a book that captivates on many levels.
Part travel journal, part reportage, part investigative journalism, it’s a work impeccably researched but heartfelt and driven by eloquent descriptive storytelling. These myriad components all serve to make the book’s core argument that migration, far from being a problem, is in fact the solution to the crises that confront so many species today, not least humankind.
For the author, an American investigative journalist, “migration is a force of nature, rooted in human biology and history, along with that of the scores of other wild species with whom we share this changing planet.” In explaining it this away, Shah takes the reader on a fascinating kaleidoscopic historical and geographical journey.
From the southern Californian habitat of the checkerspot butterfly to the high Himalaya and its shifting forests, to the teeming refugee and migrant camps on the Greek island of Lesbos, the eyewitness accounts and interviews from these locations are the work of an accomplished journalist.
This diversity and juxtaposition of insights into many aspects of migration are both the book’s greatest strengths and occasionally a weakness. I say weakness only because of the odd moment of uncomfortable jarring in certain comparisons between human migration and that of other species. Can there really be parallels between the infinitesimal territorial relocation of the checkerspot butterfly and, say, Syrian refugees? But then again both are stories of adaptability and the necessity of mobility as a means of surviving in threatening environments.
Over the course of the book’s 10 chapters and conclusion, some readers might at times find this scattergun sweep that draws from the natural, scientific and geopolitical realm slightly disorientating. Some nitpickers might argue, too, that it occasionally takes the reader too far off course. But such shortcomings are minor irritations and more than compensated for by the way Shah convincingly pulls these disparate ends together to reveal how migration and movement are as much a necessity to existence as breathing. In this respect there are echoes here of Bruce Chatwin’s wonderful homage to nomadism and wanderlust, The Songlines.
But Shah’s account, while acknowledging the near “spiritual” need for humans to be on the move and the