Migration is probably the most controversial and widely discussed political topic in the world today. Climate change, by comparison, gets far less public attention, yet the two are closely intertwined. It is curious to note that the people who are most likely to deny, in the teeth of all the evidence, that the climate is changing tend to be the people who are most vociferously opposed to admitting migrants to their countries. It is difficult to disentangle the various pressures and pulls which cause people to leave their homes. Were the surprising number of elderly Americans we came across in Panama a few years ago “economic migrants” (the cost of living is very much lower there than in American cities so a pension goes further) or were they “environmental migrants” (it is a lot sunnier and warmer there than in Chicago or New York)? The answer in most cases was probably both. Similarly, the conflict in Darfur which led to refugee crises in neighbouring countries was primarily a racial and religious clash between the Muslim Arabs of the north and the Christian/Animist black Fur people, but had a secondary driver in climate change which is drying up the traditional grazing lands of the Arab nomads and simultaneously making the land formerly farmed by the Fur people less suitable for agriculture and more suitable for grazing.
It is plausible that population movement due to environmental change has driven the entire course of human existence. The Complete World of Human Evolution (Stringer and Andrews, 2012) (RR 2012/265) suggests that the human race came into being in the post-glacial period as African forests dried up, so sub-humanoid forest-dwellers were forced to move to a savannah-based existence, and that the subsequent movement of all our ancestors out of East Africa was due to the push of arid conditions at home and the pull of fertile land becoming available in the Middle East as the glaciers withdrew. As pointed out in our review of The Routledge International Handbook of Migration Studies (Gold and Nawyn 2013) (RR 2013/223), “we are all descended from immigrants, with the dubious possible exception of the North African Berbers”.
Recent years have shown an enormous increase in mass migration, fueled by conflict, poverty, improved cheap transport, increasing awareness through social media of lifestyles in other countries and climate change. A further factor, possibly in fact the major factor, but usually left unmentioned, is population growth. This is a thorny topic which tends to be avoided partly because of its racist and eugenic background and partly for fear of upsetting the Pope and other religious prodnoses. It is worth noting that the world’s population has more than tripled during my lifetime while the world’s supply of fresh water and of farmable land has shrunk. The oldest folktale in the world, all round the world, begins with “Once upon a time there was a farmer and he had three sons, so the youngest had to go out into the world to seek his fortune [...]”. This book is no exception: the unmentioned elephant in the room is that all the desperate migrants described here face the problem that there are more and more of them at “home” and less and less empty spaces for them to fill. The nineteenth-century Irish potato blight coincided with the availability of land in USA and newly developed steam ships capable of getting them there. Now, there are more people who would like to get to Western Europe, Australia or USA than there are people currently living in those regions, and numbers are already triggering strains in these host communities. Population growth is not even mentioned in the contents, glossary or index to this book.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) arose out of the Provisional Intergovernmental Committee for the Movement of Migrants from Europe, set up to cope with refugees in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. It has broadened its scope to having 165 member states and has become a major point of reference in the global debate on migration. It operates a website, reviewed in this journal by Kellian Clink (RR 2011/265), and produces a wide range of publications (listed at http://publications.iom.int/), of which this book is one.
Although this is called an atlas, it does not contain many maps. It consists of a string of short slightly repetitive essays, profusely illustrated with graphs, diagrammatic representations, photographs, artwork and the occasional sketch-map. These are preceded by three forewords by more or less distinguished persons from the IOM and are followed by a fully annotated glossary adapted from the IOM’s previously published Glossary on Migration (Perruchoud and Redpath-Cross, 2011), a bibliography mainly covering printed resources with just a few websites and a brief index.
The international situation regarding migration in general, including migration triggered by environmental events, is horrendous. All the evidence suggests that it is going to get worse. Some of the data here are bound to be out of date, and (at the time of writing this review) 2017 has hardly started. Very few governments are willing to do more than pay lip service to the need to reduce the rate of climate change. No one is willing to draw attention to the elephant in the room, certainly not the compilers of this book. There is no obvious humane solution to this worsening problem. Stocking this book in libraries would at least give people access to some facts and figures to work on, so academic, government and public reference libraries should consider acquiring it. I do not suppose that it will alter anyone’s preconceptions or prejudices though.
