## Metadata - Author: [[Sonia Shah]] - Full Title: The Next Great Migration - Category: #books ## Highlights - Parmesan published results from her butterfly survey3 in 1996. At that time, only two other studies had documented a wild species shifting its range in response to climate change, one in plant communities on the tops of mountains in the Alps and another in sea stars and mussels in Monterey Bay. ([Location 188](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081NHNJ6T&location=188)) - Note: First study to show wild species migrating in response to climate change - Scientists who studied everything4 from plankton to frogs started reexamining their data. They found that of the four thousand species that they’d tracked, between 40 and 70 percent had altered their distribution over the past handful of decades, around 90 percent into cooler lands and waters in sync with the changing climate. On average, terrestrial species were moving nearly twenty kilometers every decade, in a steady march toward the poles. Marine creatures were moving into cooler waters even faster, moving about seventy-five kilometers per decade on average. Those averages obscured some spectacular leaps among specific creatures. Atlantic cod, for example, had shifted more than two hundred kilometers per decade. In the Andes, frogs and fungi species had climbed four hundred meters upward over the past seventy years. ([Location 198](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081NHNJ6T&location=198)) - Note: Parmesan's study triggered a wave of research on climate-induced migration - Coral polyps, which over decades form the branching thickets and sprawling nubby plates of the world’s coral reefs, may seem the picture of stately immobility. They are literally stone walls, absorbing the fury of the open ocean, protecting millions of fish species and seaside communities. And yet the coral reefs are moving, too. ([Location 205](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081NHNJ6T&location=205)) - The movements of wild species are shaped primarily by the constraints of their own biological capacities and the particular qualities of the geographic features they encounter on their journeys, such as the steepness of mountainsides and the speed and saltiness of ocean currents. The paths taken by human migrants, in contrast, are shaped primarily by abstractions. Distant political leaders lay down rules based on political and economic concerns, allowing some in and keeping others out. ([Location 259](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081NHNJ6T&location=259)) - In 2015 over 15 million people were forced to flee their countries, more than at any time since the Second World War. ([Location 267](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081NHNJ6T&location=267)) - There is no central authority that collects data on human migration. People who cross international borders may get recorded by some authorities on one side or the other, but only in some places and some of the time. ([Location 274](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081NHNJ6T&location=274)) - Since the early twentieth century, U.S. borders had been closed16 to people from Asia, Africa, and southern and eastern Europe, having been deemed by the then-cutting-edge science of eugenics to be mentally defective and biologically undesirable. But the need for medical workers to staff the newly established government programs of Medicare and Medicaid had created an acute shortage of physicians in the United States. Seated at the foot of the Statue of Liberty one crisp October day in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed a bill reversing the eugenics-based bans of the past, opening the borders to skilled workers from overseas. ([Location 346](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081NHNJ6T&location=346))