How are assumptions around science and migration undermining climate policy?

Award winning author and journalist Sonia Shah talks to Alasdair about her book, The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move. She talks about what we can learn about human migration from wildlife, why climate migration should be seen as an adaptation strategy rather than a coming crisis, and the dangers of elitism in scholarly science.

Further reading: 

• Details about The Next Great Migration and where to buy it, as well as Sonia's other books, can be found here on her website.
• 'First Came the Hurricane, Then Came the Campaign of Terror', by Sonia Shah in The Nation.
• Native Species or Invasive? The Distinction Blurs as the World Warms, by Sonia Shah in Yale School of the Environment
• Climate Change, Forced Migration, and International Law by Jane McAdam
• Climate and Human Migration: Past Experiences, Future Challenges by Robert McLeman.
• 'Follow the science: but whose science, and to where?' by Lauren Sneade on Land and Climate

Find all our latest investigations, features and interviews at www.landclimate.org

Transcript

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Alasdair: 0:06

Hello, and welcome to the Economy, Land and Climate podcast. My name is Alasdair MacEwen and in this episode I spoke to prize winning science author and journalist Sonia Shah about her latest book, The Next Great Migration - The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move.

Sonia: 0:21

Science has enrolled itself in this mystique of well, it's science, it's math, like it's got to be true and everyone will believe me if I publish it in this paper, publish it in this journal. And I understand why that happens, right? Like they did that because that's how you gatekeep, that's how you professionalise, that's how you get authority. You know, every profession tries to do that, in one way or the other.

Alasdair: 0:45

I began by asking Sonia if she could set out the main themes and conclusions of her book.

Sonia: 0:49

The book is trying to present a new vision of migration. We tend to think about migration sort of reflexively as a crisis. You know, so people start moving from one place to another, and the headlines are all about the migrant crisis, the migrant crisis here, the migrant crisis there, it's like these two words just go together, and we don't

look at: 1:15

is it better for those people who are moving that they're moving? Is it life saving for them? Is there absorptive capacity in the societies that they are going into? Would it be better for the societies that they left that they have actually gone? You know, those are all the questions you would want to think about to decide whether a certain migrant flow was sort of a net positive or net negative, but we don't do that we kind of instinctively just say, well, it's a migrant crisis, because people are moving. And what I had learned, in the course of doing other research, is a completely different kind of attitude towards migration among conservation biologists, who were looking at different wild species that were moving in response to climate change. So they're moving in sync with the changing climate, they're moving farther up north, they're moving up higher into the mountains, to stay within, you know, habitat that works for them. That was widely seen among conservation biologists as a really positive thing. You know, it's like, okay, great, like, these things are moving. And so now we're going to be able to, like, retain biodiversity in the future, you know, we should build them bridges, we should build them corridors, you know, we should like, make sure that they can all do this. And of course, not all of them can, but there's just a totally different attitude towards it, where here, you know, with human migration, there's a catastrophic storm hurricane in the Caribbean, for example, and the response of policymakers and the public is we'll close the doors and pull up all the ladders, don't let them come here, you know, don't let them you know, get on planes and arrive in Florida or overrun our cities, don't let them you know, they're at the border in Mexico, don't let them in. So I wanted to kind of explore where that sense about migration comes from. And I kind of track it back to these ideas about nature, and where things and people belong, that go back to sort of Linnaean taxonomy in the 17th century. And this concept that every species and every human population belongs in a certain place, you know, and we can fix them with names as if they're one and the same. So like, you know, you think about kids in the nursery, we teach them like, oh, you know, there's the elephant, it stands in for India. And here's the bear, that stands in for North America and the camel, that means Middle East, you know, it's as if the creature and the place are one and the same thing, which erases all the movement that maybe happened. And now we know, through biogeography and all these other things that well, camels used to be in North America, and actually, they're more common in Australia, and they're not really from the Middle East at all, and they're only used as domestic animals there. The picture is much more complicated, because we've been moving all along. If you look in a larger historical context, wild creatures have been moving from place to place throughout their evolutionary history and so have people you know, we didn't just walk out of Africa and like, land in certain places, and then just stay still for millennia. We're now piecing together through archaeogenetics and these other new technologies and scientific discoveries that are telling us our past was a very complex picture of people moving from place to place. We walked out of Africa, we got to Europe. We walked back to Africa. Some people walked into the Americas and walked back into Europe and then to Asia and then back into the Americas. All of this was happening before the era of modern mobility, before we had airplanes, before we had even steam ships, you know, there [were] people in Asia who got on canoes and just paddled out into the featureless expanse of the ocean. It probably took weeks to settle the Polynesian islands. And now we know from genetics, they didn't do that just once or twice. They do that multiple times. Because there[were] multiple waves that were successful of that migration. But that means there [were] many, many others that were unsuccessful that we don't know about. So this impulse to move in response to change, environmental change is really something that we can embrace as adaptive, you know, as opposed to a crisis that we need to kind of like, close off. So anyway, that's a long summary. But those are some of the ideas I was trying to get out.

Alasdair: 5:51

I mean, I'd like to focus on the climate aspects of the book. You've kind of just said that one of the central themes going through the book is that migration is the norm for wildlife and for humans. And in it also, I think you suggest that with climate change as it is that it's actually going to increase? Can you say a little bit more about that, and in what ways we should be adapting to that?

Sonia: 6:16

There's interesting tensions in how people talk about climate and migration. You know, there's a lot of talk in climate circles about, 'well, if we don't fix climate change, we're gonna have a million climate migrants or climate refugees, and they're all going to flood your country, and it's going to be terrible. So you really should do something about climate change, because you don't want all those African people coming to your country, do you?' There's this alarmist kind of mentality about it. And I understand where that's coming from, you know, because we do need to make the argument like, yes, please do something about climate change, right, like we need to compel people, we need to incentivise people. But I don't think we should use climate migrants as a bludgeon for that, as a fear factor, because it's really just the opposite, that what we want to do is to...the entire planet, the habitability patterns are changing, because of the climate, right? Places are becoming drier, places are becoming wetter, you know, all these different changes means the settlement patterns we made years ago are not going to work anymore, like we need to start moving. And if we want to retain resilience, retain innovation, retain diversity in our societies, then we want to let people move. So what we need to do is the same thing that people are doing in conservation circles, which is build bridges and corridors for humans, and as humans, we don't need a physical bridge so much, we have all that. We need, you know, the paperwork, we need the documents, we need the policies, we need all of that to be put into place so that people can move safely with dignity. And in a somewhat managed fashion, you know, these are things that we could do. This is within our capacity to do, it's part of adapting to climate change and looking at migration as a solution to the problem of rapid climate change, as opposed to, you know, a crisis that's part of the crisis, like the climate crisis is real. Migration is a result of that crisis. But the migration part itself is not the crisis, the migration is actually the solution. That's how we get people to places where they'll be safe, where they can contribute to society. And we know from just looking at our past that migration is really important. It's really important for our economies, for our cultures, for our language, for our education, all these different sectors benefit from migration. That's why we've been doing it all this time. Of course there are costs. But when you think of a behaviour that is so deeply ingrained, that has been such a central part of our past, then we just logically have to see that well, over time, the benefits have outweighed the costs, and not to do minimise the costs. We know there are costs, change is disruptive. There's no doubt about that. It's hard when a lot of people come into a new place all at once. But we don't have to do it that way. You know, we know how the climate is changing to some degree, we can create sister cities, sister countries, we can create, you know, a whole way of moving where it's legal to move because of climate change. Right now it's not legal to move because of climate change anywhere in the world. There's no country in the world that allows you to do it for that reason.

Alasdair: 9:32

One of the things there that you underline I suppose is there's actually probably a greater focus on adaptation. I mean, as part of that, then do you I mean, maybe this isn't this is too shallow a question but do you think there's been insufficient focus on adaptation? And actually, we're probably trying too hard on the mitigation front with climate change?

Sonia: 9:53

No, I mean, I don't think that. I think we need all of it. We definitely need all of it. The adaptation part has to happen right now. I mean, all of it needs to happen right now. But we are shooting ourselves in the foot if we are not looking at migration as a net positive that we need to support moving forward. So I think, you know, in the climate movement, we need a new idea about migration, and we need a new way of thinking about it and talking about it. The rhetoric of fear about a migrant crisis, this whole talk about climate refugees, I think it's really problematic. I mean, a refugee is a very specific legal status, there are no climate refugees, technically speaking, because, you know, the, the Refugee Convention doesn't bestow that legal status when people are moving because of climate. And the other thing to remember is people move for lots of reasons. Migration is a complex human behaviour, there's never one reason for it. It's like asking, well, why did you have children? There's not one reason, it's a complex behaviour. And there's many reasons why people do it. In the end, it's because the positives outweigh the negatives in some way or another. But there are both, you know, and to ask people to kind of collapse this complexity into the one reason they're moving; 'I'm moving because, you know, my fields dried up, I'm moving because the saltwater intrusion around my home', those are going to be contributing factors. But some people are gonna move because of that, some people are going to move because well, there's that happening and 'my sister lives in such and such a place', 'my community is over there', 'I have a job opportunity'. There's a myriad of reasons why people move, and our legal constructs force migrants to collapse all that into one reason so that they can make their application because countries want to say, well, you can move, if you have the reason we like. 'Oh, you're coming here for a job? We don't like that reason, you can't come here for a job.' 'Oh, you're coming here because the guy we hate forced you out? Okay, yeah, then you can come', you know. So there's all these biases in it and I think the climate movement can play a real role here in putting forward a new vision of migration and what it means, you know, and I think we can look to our fellow species for, you know, clues to the how to do that, because they're moving into new places, and they're doing it to survive. And we want that to happen, right? We want biodiversity in the future, even in a climate change future, we want to retain as much biodiversity as we can. And I think we can think about, you know, human movement the same way, and we can, we can change our rhetoric. And we can, you know, there's specific policies that we can also advocate for that would make this happen.

Alasdair: 12:43

Where do you think this could come from? I mean, that might be a hard question to answer. But your book's been published for well, probably more than a year now? And have you had any response from the so called climate movement, or anybody, policymakers, etc.?

Sonia: 13:02

As a writer, I feel my role is to kind of look for hidden stories, lift the lid, people look at it, and then they, you know, then they go wherever they're gonna go with it. I don't have any prescription that I'm going to force people like 'you must take up my policy'. But I will say that people have been pretty open to this idea. There's some resistance I find among people who really deeply want to believe that species have to stay in one place, you know, this whole fight against invasives, you know, invasive species that there's, you know,'certain plants are in my garden, and they don't belong here. They're from Japan, they shouldn't be in my garden, like, I'm in Britain, I'm in you know, Connecticut or Baltimore, or wherever, these are invasives. And, and the wild species around here are going to suffer if they take over and, you know, there's all this thing' and I'm not saying that that's not true. Yes, it's disruptive when things move, but we also want plants and animals to move to some extent, we want to allow them to move so yeah, I get some pushback on that piece of it, because some people are kind of open to the idea [that] 'Okay, maybe I should think about people moving in a more positive light'. But, you know, there's certain you know, 'I don't want like a Japanese maple in my yard', or 'I don't want, you know, XYZ invasive species to come into, you know, my location'. I trace some of the thinking about that in my book, it definitely comes out of this nativist ideology that was, you know, associated with eugenics and racism and all these other things. The people who are promoting that now are not connected to any of that, but that is kind of the intellectual history. And I think that matters because, you know, I've been talking to invasive species biologists, invasion biologists they're called. And they too are changing their thinking and the way they're talking about this idea of invasiveness, you know that some of those creatures are not invaders. They're new natives.

Alasdair: 15:14

I was going to ask you about invasive species. I think that was [a] striking part of your book, and about the ideas around the dangers of the outsider and the native species, or rather, the outside species. One of the themes was around the kind of use of science for political or ideological purposes. That kind of runs right the way through. I just wondered whether there's any of that now going on, you think in the current climate, politics, you know, that we have in things like, I don't know, the IPCC and the COP climate talks? And climate modelling. Do you think there are any kind of similarities in that?

Sonia: 15:53

Science is done by people, and it's funded by people who are powerful, who have money to fund it, and that inevitably shapes where the science goes. And I think that's just a true fact that we need to kind of accept and understand that science isn't this, you know, pie in the sky thing that, you know, emerges a hole out of the brilliant scientists mind with no connection to power, politics and influence, and all the rest of it. I write about that in this book and I've written about in almost all my books, you know, because science is practiced by people, and it's a political activity. So what I tried to say, and you know, I said this around pandemics when I wrote my book before this migration book was about pandemics, the thing we need to do is really democratise science. You know, science right now is very much an elite activity. It's conducted by elites, it's funded by elite institutions, even if the scientists themselves are not elites. And I know scientists are not - most of them are not elites at all. Most of them are, you know, working really hard on difficult things and getting no recognition for it. But overall, it's an elite activity, and it has elite language around it to guard people from coming in and out of it. And I think we need to flip that on its head. So everyday people need to get involved in science that is in our education system. I don't know how it is in Britain. Here in the States, there's very low scientific literacy. So when there's an article in the paper and says, scientists have discovered blah, everyone's just like, 'oh, okay, that must be true'. There's no critical thinking about it because we haven't learned how to do that. We haven't learned how to evaluate 'well, what was the method? You know, what was the dataset? Who's funding it? Where are the confounding factors? Where is there the possibility of bias?' You know, these are human activities, these are fair questions to ask, but nobody does it or hardly anybody does it because we haven't been educated enough, you know, we don't have that scientific literacy. And, you know, to me, every kid who graduates from high school should be able to read a scientific paper in the peer reviewed literature. They should at least be able to understand that abstract, and like, get a sense of the conclusions and have some critical idea of like, was this a good study or a bad study? Should I believe the conclusions or should I understand them with some qualifications? We should think about science that way. But I think science has enrobed itself in this mystique of well, it's science, it's math, like it's got to be true. And everyone will believe me if I you know, publish it in this paper, publish in this journal. And I understand why that happens, right? Like they did that because that's how you gatekeep, that's how you professionalise, that's how you get authority. You know, every profession tries to do that, in one way or the other. But, you know, in the western society, like, since the enlightenment, science has been put up on this pedestal. It gives us technology, and these two things have become the new religion that replaced, you know, what we used to believe in, which is that, you know, divine intervention would save us. Now, it's 'technology will save us', you know, and that's okay, that's human, that's part of our cultural heritage. But I think if more people get involved and feel like they can comment on science, you know, I think a lot of people feel like, 'well, it was, you know, it was a paper in Nature. It was a paper in, you know, the PNAS or some, like fancy journal, published by the IPCC, like, therefore, it's got to be true, and I can't question it. And if I do, I'll look like, you know, I'll look like an idiot'. The other reason we need to do it is because this whole rise of right wing populist leaders are using this against us, you know, they're using the elitism of science to say,'well, those are just a bunch of pointy headed fancy people. Were the real people. Like, we don't need to listen to those guys. You know, they're like, out of touch and they're experts and we're not gonna listen to them. We're not going to take their vaccines. We're not going to use their masks where not going to use their medicines'. I mean, you see this everywhere, here in the States, Trump did it in spades, right, like anything scientists said was like completely derided and condemned, you know, and that's how populists have come into power, because I think ordinary people also feel talked down to, left out of scientific discourse. So elitism in science I think is a major problem. And I think it's why we get, you know, what you're referring to, which is, these tricks are happening behind the scenes, you know, like, 'okay, the models are leaving out some crucial factors, but scientists and mathematicians came up with it, so we can't question it'. You know, I think we're in a good moment, historically, right now for reimagining science also, because all of our biggest challenges are so you know, heavily science and technology based, you know, from climate change to the pandemic, to you know, all of these, the biodiversity crisis, all these things are happening to us that we all need to grapple with, you know, have sience at their centre in terms of how we understand those issues.

Alasdair: 21:05

You did actually write a book about the history of oil. And I know it's a while back now, but have you kind of kept in touch with the fossil fuel industry, particularly in the US, and its kind of development and has anything changed since you wrote that book?

Sonia: 21:20

Oh, my God has anything changed. I mean, when I read that book, that was like, 2002, I think that book came out. Back then, you know, climate change science was very well settled, very well documented, it was all happening back then. But nobody was talking about it. Nobody was even thinking about it. It was just this completely obscure thing that you know, a few scientists were thinking and talking about. So that has changed hugely. The oil industry was, you know, very much a background player, even though it controlled whatever, a third of the global economy or whatever the statistic is, but you know, people weren't really thinking about it at that time at all. So that book was very much like, 'hey, let's look at this industry that has been able to stay in the background, even though they it shaped so much of our lives'. So yeah, there's been just a complete turnaround from there in the past 20 years, which has been incredibly satisfying to see, as dire as our climate crisis is, and as inadequate and troubled our response has been, it still feels like a huge accomplishment that people are even talking about it, you know, that like, all my kids, all their friends, they know about it, they learn about it, they learned about it in school, in college, they're engaged. So people have been alerted. You know, that is I think, if you step back historically, that is huge. And the fact that we still haven't found our way out of it, like, we haven't found a way forward, maybe we can think of that in a, you know, if we step back, like, okay, it can take time, you know, because it took 20 years for us to get to this point where, okay, now everyone's talking about it, even, you know, right wing, people are talking about it, everyone's aware of it, new generations of people are aware of it, it's in the newspapers every day, all of that is completely new. We didn't have any of that 20 years ago. And now we do. So I feel like we're at a moment when there's a lot of good minds that are being put to this difficult problem, we have not found the solution, yet. We're not on a path towards a good solution yet. But this is the necessary step forward. So historically, when a huge number of people start to get alarmed about something, there will be some change that comes out of it. Now, whether it'll be fast enough in at the scale we need, you know, all of that is totally unknown. But, you know, I have to say, I am personally heartened by where we are now, compared to where we were 20 years ago when I wrote that book.

Alasdair: 23:56

That's a nice thing to hear. I thought that in your book as well, there's quite a sprinkling of optimism throughout the darkness that you described.

Sonia: 24:11

I mean, what's the point otherwise, right, like we can be pessimistic, then we know the worst thing will happen, you know, or we can try, at least if we try, like maybe there's a possibility.

Alasdair: 24:21

What are you working on now? What's coming up in your work?

Sonia: 24:24

I'm working on a new book now. You know, I'm still in the early stages of it, but it's basically, I'm trying to look at human and animal relationships and how they've changed over time. And this goes back to a lot of things we've been talking about how this kind of Christian idea of humans being outside of nature, not being part of nature, sort of being, you know, excluded from nature that there's human culture on one side of the duality and the other side is nature, something separate from us. That's kind of a Christian idea that humans are special and different. It's very much been incorporated into science. And I think you can see that in a number of different ways, and then we have the scientific justifications for widespread animal exploitation. For example, factory farming, where we have billions of individual beings who are being slaughtered every day and we don't even think about it. But I think the bill is coming due. We're seeing now that wanton destruction of other living creatures is now you know, we're gonna have to pay the price. We're having habitat loss, habitat destruction, climate change, like all the things right, 150 species being lost every day. These are things that are going to affect us and I try to trace that back to this way of thinking about humans as somehow not part of nature.

Alasdair: 25:44

Thanks very much to Sonia for her time. On our podcast blurb you can find the link to her book The Next Great Migration, as well as a reading list of some of our previous books such as the prophetic Pandemic, and her own suggested reading of other science authors. Please do also check out the ELCI website, where we have many new interesting articles from our ELCI journalists, and thanks for listening!