502 Next Great Migration (book review)
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The Next Great Migration | Sonia Shah (NOT an affiliate link):
https://soniashah.com/the-critics-on-the-next-great-migration/
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Transcript (auto-generated)
How many of you have looked at species or looked at plants and animals and thought they are bound to their ecological niche or that they, somehow there are they they, they have their place that they that they are. I had thought that better than last year or so this has been challenged on two things, mainly a book that I'm going to be talking about here called The Next Great Migration by Sonia Shah. And also by a course that I had taken. So before we get started, my name is Scott Gillespie, I do #RealisticRegenAg, which means that in my company, we give advice, but we don't have a sales pitch because we don't sell any products. So getting to the book. In this book, Sonia talks about the how humans move around mainly by for political reasons, because they are, they're forced into other places by other humans, but also animals and plants, and anything else that's living moves around, too. So how she has traced this, and this is where it gets more into the science side of things is looking at Linnaeus, and how he was part of the European movement in the 18th century to classify and categorize everything. They were looking to bring order to the world that they were exploring. Now, an inadvertent or possibly a actual planned expectation or a planned part of this was to help to colonize because by by coming up with your own naming system for everything, you took away, local names and local Yeah, local knowledge of things. So. So that was one thing with it. What was this is interesting, because this was, they thought that they could categorize everything. The ancient Greeks, at least according to Sonia didn't do that. They just saw things as always in a constant flow state. Now how this, how this relates to something that I've learned over the last year or so is I took a Blackfoot Phenology class, which year long online where we did our own observations and came together. And one of the things I really noticed that, oh, I should say, Blackfoot are the indigenous peoples of this area. And it was a way to get to know a different way of doing things. And one of the things that was really fascinating to me, that I learned is how things are always on the move. So in my area in the winter, we have birds that have come down from the Arctic, because they see this as a warm place to be or more ideal food sources for them. And they can handle this weather. Whereas other ones that live here in the summer are off to the Americas or even down to mother's far down to South America. So things are always on the move. Now, this was in contrast to what Darwin had been seeing, because this was a similar time period. He could see things changing, but he didn't see things as being always stuck to their place, just just that they were constantly adapting and moving around. Now, Linnaeus had his biases. One of the big ones was it he was convinced that everything came out of the Garden of Eden. So he was trying to fit everything into that narrative that had all moved out settled in his area, and then that was it. And it got him. He had the European mindset that you were, these were the pinnacle of God's creation and everything else was subordinate. And she explores this more in the book.
Now this in our recent past, led to eugenics because of the idea of seeing that good breeding was superseded any need for nurture nutrition and education for the masses, which from the book, and that we didn't need to focus on social programs, because that was a lost cause, because we just needed to work on getting better humans. And so unfortunately, that was aware of it, where it went on things. So now I was I was surprised in reading this book as to how recent a lot of this stuff was, there was even a person who was a regular guest on The Tonight Show, which I always thought it was an entertainment show, but to warn of the problems of population explosions. And that was right up until it was right through the time I was born in the late 70s. It was through that time. So it's recent, and which explains a lot of what we see today. And the, the revival, or at least I guess, the bubbling up of these, these ideas coming to the surface again, about borders, and immigrants and trying to hold things in our own place.
something fascinating, too, was her exploration of how species moved. One way that when the continents were still close to each other, or one big landmass, it made sense that things could have moved up from there. And then as the continents moved and got further apart, then they just evolved and did their thing in their own area. But it turns out that things can cross the ocean more than just humans and more than just European humans, which was another interesting story within the book. It wasn't just the Europeans that could make it all the way across the ocean. But in our time, there was a 900 square foot floating island with trees, and presumably animals and all kinds of other things. Observed in 1892, moving along the east coast of the US up through Canada. Hi, my notes, right, I think it went for 1200 miles, or I guess that's 2000 kilometers. So it's not improbable that things can go vast distances across the ocean and come across tiny islands in the middle of a vast ocean. So they're, things can move. And of course, you have to think of this that, you know, you could go 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of years, and nothing makes it to a particular place. But then one incident and they make it there, and it changes things. So yeah, that was one of the interesting things I think I'll finish on near the end here, where she just talks about how how we are going into a new era, or we're, we're seeing more and more walls going up. And her thesis of the argument of the book is that things have always moved. There's always migrations of things as as the changing of resources and and for at least for humans, political change. So anyways, I thought it was an interesting book. I'll put links to it in the episode description and you can check it out. And if you need any help with regenerative agriculture, I'm in southern Alberta, where we can work in person, which is in Canada, but of course with with all the remote tools we have now, very easy, we can work anywhere in the world. So with that, I will end this and I will talk to you again, the next time
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