Life on the Move: The History of Migrations, Plant, Animal, Human (10 weeks) Zoom
F 2021

Though it is common knowledge that all living things migrate and consensual that biodiversity is a positive outcome of these moves, for centuries most biologists and paleontologists believed that life was sedentary, that every living thing had its permanent niche.  Differences in species were regarded hierarchically, notably in human racial thinking.  It was only with the mapping of the human genome that scientific theories about human differentiation altered.  Popular opinion has not kept pace.  Sonia Shah tracks the outdated scientific ideas about the role of migrants in nature and history and outlines the crisis mentalities that proliferated.  She then illustrates that migration is an ancient and lifesaving response to environmental change, a biological imperative as necessary as breathing.  She also demonstrates that plants and animals migrate over a far greater range than anyone once thought and that migration is not a one-time event for many people.  Her thesis is that unhampered human migration, rather than being a crisis, actually will create and disseminate the biological, cultural, and social diversity that will help solve the world's problems.

1.  Exodus

2.  Panic

3.  Linnaeus's Loathsome Harlotry

4.  The Suicidal Zombie Migrant

5.  The Deadly Hybrid

6.  Malthus's Hideous Blasphemy

7.  Homo migratio

8.  The Wild Alien

9.  The Migrant Formula

10.  The Wall and Coda: Safe Passage  

Sonia Shah, The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move (Bloomsbury, 2020)