The Next Great Migration summary

Born in 1707 to a poor family in southern Sweden, Carl Linnaeus wanted to understand the order of all things that God had created. He thus established a two-name classification system for every living species. This system, which we still use today, sorts animals and plants into their respective categories.

Take our own Latin name as an example – homo sapiens. The first word denotes the species’ general category – in this case, homo, which is Latin for “man.” The second word denotes the species’ specific characteristic – in this case, sapiens, which is Latin for “wise.” 

Imagine New York City at the beginning of the twentieth century. Immigrants and natives blended into what was called “the melting pot” of cultures. 

In fact, a poem by Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus,” was cast on a plaque to welcome immigrants to the United States. It sits at the Statue of Liberty’s feet and its most memorable line is, “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . .”.

The early twentieth century saw US borders begin to close to immigrants and minorities that were being persecuted in Europe and Russia. At the same time, “alien” animal and plant species found themselves the target of the same scrutiny. 

The key message here is: Anti-immigration sentiment extended to nature.

In eighteenth-century England, the cleric Thomas Robert Malthus made an extraordinary claim. He suggested that, rather than helping the poor, the government should allow disease and poverty to take their toll on them. Otherwise, he believed, they would cause overpopulation that would lead to more poverty and famine for everyone else.

For centuries, Malthus would influence political thinkers with this pronouncement, with lasting and harmful consequences.

In 2000, President Bill Clinton celebrated the success of the Human Genome Project in a ceremony at the White House. 

By mapping the roughly twenty thousand genes in the human genome, the complete set of human DNA, researchers found that there was barely any genetic difference among members of our species. In fact, they discovered that only 0.1 percent of our DNA differs from any one person to the next. 

In September 2015, there was an image that caused grief around the world: a little Syrian boy, drowned, on a beach in Turkey. It also alerted the world to the scale of a new refugee migration, from war-torn and climate-ravaged countries in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. 

It didn’t take long for this moment of empathy to wear off, however.

In February 2018, Russian cosmonauts attached an antenna to the International Space Station. The antenna’s purpose was to scan the Earth’s surface. It would pick up movement from tags fitted onto hundreds of species on Earth.

This data revealed an intricate network of migration pathways wrapped around the planet – by land, sea, and air.