Shah spoke to us about both of her books from home in the midst of the COVID-19 lockdown.ĬAROLYN KELLOGG: What was your approach when you began working on The Next Great Migration ? And she also tromps around looking for butterflies in California, visits a migrant camp in Greece, and checks out Hawaii’s koa tree to explore how populations move.
The book exposes the ugly racism embedded in generations of scientific revolutions up to the 1970s, which helps explain some of the prejudice directed at immigrants today. She traces how seeds travel across oceans, how birds fly across continents, and how people were able to travel between remote Pacific islands before Europeans got there with their sextants and sailing ships. She takes us through how rapidly the attitudes toward immigration in America can shift - 800,000 people passed through Ellis Island in 1921 and fewer than 100,000 in 1929 - and also explains her own family’s immigrant history from India to the United States. The beauty of Shah’s account is that she makes competing philosophies of 250 years ago as clear as GPS.
That goes back to Carl Linnaeus, the 18th-Century Swede who developed the two-word Latin taxonomy we use for all plants and creatures (think Homo sapiens).
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