TED Radio Hour - Listen Again: Migration

Episode Date: March 4, 2022

Original broadcast date: April 30, 2021. Migration is a part of everyone's history. This hour, TED speakers explore ideas about places we call home — and how these experiences continue to reshape our culture, countries, and species. Guests include bioarchaeologist Carolyn Freiwald, journalist Isabel Wilkerson, comedian Maeve Higgins, and ecologist Sonia Altizer.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hey, it's Manusch, and migration, human migration, has shaped so much of our history. It is happening again right now as we see Ukrainians fleeing their homes. The EU is estimating up to 7 million people will be displaced. And these refugees, many of them, are looking for shelter in a community and culture that isn't their own. This migrant crisis is, of course, only the most recent. But I think it's also a moment when we can look again at how migration shapes the human experience. These are the questions we explored in an episode back in April of last year. And I've been thinking about it a lot, especially my conversation with the wonderful Isabel Wilkerson,

who studied so in depth the great migration here in the U.S., which many of us know so little about. So whether you're listening to this episode again or for the first time, I hope it's sparked. something new in you, too. It definitely did for me. Thanks so much. I'll see you next week with a new episode. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're going to find. challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy?

And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Anoush Zamoroti. So, a few years ago...

I was in my office here in Mississippi. It's in Oxford, northern Mississippi. And an archaeologist I work with came in and asked me if I wanted to help relocate a cemetery. This is Carolyn Fry. Normally when someone asks you to move a body, you wonder, okay, when are the police going to show up? Or at least you should. But Carolyn wasn't worried because she is a bio-archologist. She finds clues from our past by studying our bones.

Because it sort of brings a person back to life. I kind of hope somebody studies my bones, if possible. When I'm dead, though. That day, Carolyn was asked to examine the bones from an abandoned cemetery near Jackson, Mississippi. The cemetery was last used about 100 years ago, and it probably included a span of time of maybe the 1840s into the 1940s, and nobody had really been there for decades. And my role on the project was going to be to help study the people themselves, their skeletal remains, to see a little bit about how old they were, how they were buried, if they had health conditions or even what their lives were like. Carolyn thought they'd uncover the remains of just a couple dozen bodies. But as it turns out, it wasn't just 40 graves.

It turned out to be more than 350. And so the cemetery was a lot bigger than we originally anticipated. So it turned out to be a really big job. But with all of those graves, 15% of the people buried in the cemetery had a name recorded either on a stone or perhaps in historic records. And we wanted to try and understand who the other people were who had. lived and died in that area. So who were some of the people you found? Like, what do you know about them?

So we know that some of the people in the cemetery came from eastern states. So we have people whose gravestones, say, for example, like Richard M, he was born in South Carolina. And we think that he came through Alabama and then decided to move his family and his household to Mississippi. Historic records show that he was a planter. And with him, he brought some of his family because we know there were other people with his last name in the cemetery. But we also know that he held 31 enslaved people. And it's pretty likely that he brought some or all of them along from South Carolina to Alabama to Mississippi to establish a plantation here. That also means that the Cherokee, the Chickasaw, the people who are living here were forced out.

So in a way, this is a snapshot of how the U.S. was formed. You have people who have European ancestry. You have people whose ancestors came from Africa. And we didn't expect to find that. I didn't expect to be able to study migration in Mississippi, but once we started to look at the people here, to try and figure out who they were, that's what we found. More than 10 to 15% of the people who we were able to study in the cemetery weren't from Mississippi. They weren't born here. They came here from someplace else. So we're finding that instead of migration being an anomaly, that it's actually the norm.

This is what people do. They move. Migration is part of everyone's history. even if you've never traveled far. A hundred thousand years ago, our early ancestors began moving within and then out of Africa, spreading across the globe. Since then, migration has shaped empires, countries, and cultures, while debates over borders and who can and can't migrate continue to this day. And so on the show today, migration, ideas about the search for a place to call home. For bio-archologist Carolyn Frywald, our bodies tell our migration story. I want you to think about the image that you see when I say one word, migrant.

She continues from the TED stage. You may have pictured a crowded boat in rough waters, people clinging to the top of a freight train, or crossing a desert, wearing worn out shoes. This is what we see in the news cycle, 24 hours, day after day, story after story. people who are desperate, fleeing wars, fleeing climate change, fleeing poverty. But in reality, most people move for more common reasons. To get a good education, to find a job, to find family members, or to fall in love. And this is nothing new. Archaeologists like me have been studying migration and finding that people for hundreds

and even thousands of years have been moving around the globe, from Europe's earliest farmers to Vikings, to pirates, Roman gladiators, even Neanderthal cavemen, people like you and me. Mobility is one of the things that makes us human. People move. And we know this because of something that you brought with you here tonight. You carry it with you to many places, to work, to the gym, to bed, and even in the shower. It's not your cell phone. It's you. It's your body and your bones. All 206 of them, I brought mine, because your bones will tell the story of your life, even a single tooth. Okay, so how is it that a single tooth can tell the story of my life.

So, for example, if you have Native American or Asian ancestry, the shapes of your teeth, like your incisors, will be different than people whose ancestors came long back from Europe or from Africa. So if you take your tongue and run it along the backside of your teeth. Okay, I'm doing it now. Hang on. Hang on. Okay. Yeah. Running it along. If you feel just a flat shape, you may have some European ancestors. Yep. If you feel a little scoop shape, that can tell you that some of your ancestors originally came from Asia. And that can include, you know, having indigenous ancestors here in the U.S.

Huh. If we go inside the tooth to the pulp cavity, we may be able to extract the DNA and see if your ancestors came from Egypt or England or both. But we're not interested as much in your family's migration history as yours. And that's where we go to the tooth enamel. made out of to try and find out if a person moved and even when they moved. And it's based on one simple idea that you are what you eat. All the minerals and the elements in the food like calcium, oxygen, which is the O and H2O, sodium and salt, can tell us something about your diet. So we know if you like cornbread or white bread, if you prefer pork, chicken, or if you really like seafood.

There are other elements that tell us where that food came from. And that includes sulfur, astronomy, oxygen, and even lead, which of course you don't want very much of. But these tell us where the food comes from. And that can tell us where you were when you were eating it. And that is what archaeologists use to identify ancient migration. That's fascinating. Do you think it would would your work be done differently if you were studying the bones of migrants today? I mean, I guess, you know, my own parents are immigrants to the United States. You'd know about my flat front teeth. But like, would you know that I, it's embarrassing to say, but I had like vitamin D gummies yesterday and that this morning I had like five cups of coffee.

Would you be able to tell? Well, you can think of art. Your body tells stories in lots of ways. So with modern people, you can look at your teeth. your teeth formed during childhood. Your bones are forming continuously. So if I stop for a second, you just form some new bone cells. So they'll contain records of different things at different parts of your life.

And think, you know, your hair grows pretty fast. So with, say, an inch of hair growth, you might have a snapshot of a month of your life. So scientists can actually do things like, look, for extreme stress and malnutrition, that's recorded by some of the elements, if you had a change in your diet from a major food source, let's say you grew up eating meats and then you decided that you wanted to be a vegan or vegetarian for a while. We could eventually see those changes if you were willing to volunteer a bit of your bone or hair. But figuring out where someone comes from, that's tricky because think about your food. If you wrote down what you ate in the past 24 hours, there's probably not much of it that came from where you're living right now.

Right. Bottled water, you know, fritos, whatever your favorite snacks. are, we might be able to look at combinations of food because people are doing that to try and understand missing persons and migrants today. In particular, the problems of people crossing the southern U.S. border, a lot of times when they don't make it, they don't have ID with them anymore. The desert's a rough place. So we're trying to understand where they came from to get at who they were. And it becomes really tricky, but we're trying to understand how to use these technologies to bring the people back home.

Oh, that's unbelievable. And I guess I'm wondering that now that you have this technology at your disposal, is it common to examine a person's bones and find that they come from somewhere else? Yeah, that's one of the things that we've found with sort of these new technologies, especially with the advent of DNA and being able to look inside people's bones, not just at the shapes of their bones, is that people in the past thought that, you know, societies like the ancient Romans, they would write about the census who lived in their cities. And they were pretty cosmopolitan areas.

But in other places, especially going farther back in time, we didn't think people could move or we didn't think they moved that much. But now people are doing studies around the world from Mesoamerica, the Aztecs, the people who are living in North America all across time and across space, we're finding immigrants. And sometimes you couldn't differentiate them. You'd have a person who was born locally and a person who migrated into the town buried right next to each other the same way that you'd treat family. Huh. So do you think movement is a human thing, a mammal thing, a living being thing? Like, do we just – is movement just inherent? It must be.

I mean, I don't know if you can always know what people's motivations are. But if we think about it, we can go way back in deep time that, All of us, all of our families have a migration story, one that we don't think about because humans actually originated in Africa. And at some point, they started to move, following, maybe following the animals they hunted, maybe out of curiosity, we don't know. But pretty soon they're moving into the Middle East. Some people went over to Asia.

Some moved up into Europe. And over thousands of thousands of years, they got to the Americas. We've even got to Antarctica now. And people are talking about the moon and Mars. When I think of migrant, I think about what the people say about why did you move. And if you look, for example, at the migrants in Africa trying to come to Europe, some of them talk about this thing like a hunger. But they don't mean they're hungry.

They mean it's a hunger. It's a hope. They want to see, you know, what's better, what's life. It's a curiosity. It's an adventurer. These are the modern-day explorers. I don't think of Christopher Columbus. I think of the people today who are taking the risk of going,

maybe it's across an ocean, maybe it's across a river, across a small road, or maybe it's just a community that's new, that's only 10 miles away from where they grew up. These are the people who are, I think of, when I think of migrants. That's Carolyn Frywald. She's a bio-archologist, and you can see her full talk at ted.com. On the show today, ideas about the search. for a place to call home. I'm Anoush Zamorodi, and you're listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR.

Stay with us. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anoush Zamoroti. On today's show, migration. And the idea that by choosing to leave your home to make life better for yourself and your family, you are making history, maybe without even knowing it. I truly believe that, you know, migration sets in motion the life chances and, in fact, the very existence of perhaps a majority of human beings on the planet. This is Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Isabel Wilkerson.

She was born in Washington, D.C., but her parents were migrants, even if they didn't call themselves that. They had come from different parts of the South. My mother from Georgia and my father from Virginia. and growing up in Washington, D.C., surrounded by people whose parents or grandparents had all come up from the South. There was something that was just part of the atmosphere. It was in the food. It was in the accents. It was in the culture. It was the language.

It was the music. It was everywhere. But no one was speaking directly about, no one was giving it a name. But Isabel distinctly remembers that there was a photograph. Yeah, that picture was one of my mother. and a friend of hers, a childhood friend, and they are in their very best clothes. My mother has her pearls on,

and they've put, you know, the small town, Jim Crow South behind them. This was like a passport for themselves to document their having arrived, to be able to show and send back to the folks back home to say, I'm doing well in the new world. That was what it felt to me, and that was one of the photographs that I found that represent that.

for my mother. It wasn't until Isabel was an adult and was reporting from cities across the country that she put the pieces together. Her family's story was a migration story, the story of millions of African Americans who had left the South.

It began very slowly and then went from being a trickle to a flood of people exiting the South and they were seeking refuge. They became in some ways like political refugees within their own country. We now refer to this time as the Great Migration.

Starting in the 1900s, it was the largest movement of people within the United States. But Isabel realized that the stories of those who went north, like her parents, were largely missing from history. And so she decided to do the work herself. She interviewed over 1,200 people and wrote a definitive history called The Warmth of Other Suns. It was the outpouring of six million African Americans from the Jim Crow South to the cities of the North and West from the time of World War I until the 1970s. Here's Isabel Wilkerson on the TED stage. It stands out because this was the first time in American history that American citizens had to flee the land of their birth just to be.

recognized as the citizens that they had always been. No other group of Americans has had to act like immigrants in order to be recognized as citizens. So this great migration was not a move. It was actually a seeking of political asylum within the borders of one's own country. They were defecting a caste system known as Jim Crow. It was an artificial hierarchy in which everything that you could and could not do was based upon what you look like. I know it is pretty common to learn about Jim Crow laws and how terrible the conditions were for African Americans in the South.

But still, I mean, the idea to leave your home, to say goodbye to your family, who you may never see again, I mean, the conditions. that motivated six million African Americans to break all ties and leave. That cannot be understated. Oh, they were living under a regime in which everything that you could and could not do was based upon what you looked like or the group to which you had been assigned. They were living in a world where it was against the law for a black person and a white person to merely play checkers together.

In Birmingham, as one example, they were living in a world where there was actually a black Bible and an altogether separate white Bible to swear to tell the truth on in court, the same sacred object could not be touched by hands of different races. And any breach of that order, that social, political and economic order that have been designed could mean literally your life. Every four days somewhere in the American South, in the first four decades of the 20th century, someone was lynched for some perceived breach of that caste system. And so this was what they were fleeing.

I often say that this migration was not about geography. It was about freedom and how far people are willing to achieve it. It was really a defection, you know, seeking of political asylum. They became, in some ways, like political refugees within their own country. This great migration began when the North had a labor problem. The North had a labor problem because it had been relying on cheap labor from Europe, immigrants from Europe, to work the factories and the foundries and the steel mills. But during World War I, migration from Europe came to a virtual halt.

And so the North decided to go and find the cheapest labor in the land, which meant African Americans in the South, many of whom were not even being paid for their hard work. Many of them were working for the right to live on the land that they were farming. They were sharecroppers and not even being paid. so they were ripe for recruitment. But it turned out that the South did not take kindly to this poaching of its cheap labor.

The South actually did everything it could to keep the people from leaving. They would arrest people from the railroad platforms. Remember, putatively free American citizens. They would arrest them from their train seats. And when there were too many people to arrest, they would wave the train on through so that people who had been hoping and saving and praying for the chance to get to freedom

had to figure out how now will we get out? And as they made their way out of the South, they followed three beautifully predictable streams, as is the case in any migration throughout human history. One was along the East Coast to Washington, D.C., to Philadelphia, New Jersey, New York and on up, there was the Midwest stream which carried people from Mississippi, Alabama, to Chicago, to Detroit, and the entire Midwest. And then there was the West Coast Stream, which carried people from Louisiana and Texas

out to California. And when they really wanted to get away, they went to Seattle. And when they really, really wanted to get away, they went to Alaska. the farthest possible point within the borders of the United States from Jim Crow South. So one of the people you write about is a woman who took the Midwest stream, a woman named Ida Mae. She decided to go north because terrifying things had happened to her, including family friends who had been lynched. And, you know, Ida May is just an ordinary person. But the details in her story tell us so much about what was going on in the U.S.

during Jim Crow. And you spent a lot of time with her, right? Yes, Ida Mae, Brandon Gladney was a sharecropper's wife in Mississippi in the 1930s. And one of the relatives of her husband was accused of having taken something without proof, but he was accused of having taken something. As a result of that, he was beaten to within an inch of his life. And after seeing this happen, the husband, the two of them, decided that this was going to be the last crop they would be making. And they had to set about planning and figuring out how they were going to escape. And they could not go and tell people of their plan. They could only share it with a few trusted people, her mother and one of his cousins.

And they began to give away or remove some of the things from where they were living and quietly went about their work of harvesting the cotton from the field, and then at the appointed hour caught the train to head north. And really, many of them said that they could not really rest and exhale until they had crossed out of that state, really out of the, even out of the state of Tennessee going north. And that's when they could feel that they were truly on their way. Yeah, and you write that even though they made it out, They didn't end up in some kind of northern utopia.

They basically had to live in squalor, at least to begin with. Yes, they ended up in Chicago and eventually. They actually arrived in the midst of the Depression, which meant that it was very difficult going for them. And there they made an existence, made a family. And she was not one to dwell on what might have been. she was one to think about that everything was meant to be that things were for a purpose. She lived what was called the serenity prayer. You know, she never looked back. I mean, that's one of things about the people in the Great Migration is that a lot of them, one reason why it wasn't

as well known as it otherwise could have been is that the people did not speak of this very much. They didn't want to burden their children with what they had suffered. They didn't want their children to feel the same restrictions that they had grown up under. So they really didn't talk about it that much. And, you know, this was necessary, you might say, because of the post-traumatic stress that they were experiencing. I mean, this is a traumatic life that they were, that they had been forced to lead. You know, a migration, I really believe that every migration is a referendum on the place that people are leaving. And it's a vote of confidence and a leap of faith. and hopefulness about the place that they are going to.

And in that respect, you know, once you've made that decision, you want to believe that it was a right decision to make. You know, I say in the book that, you know, this was the first big step that the nation's servant cast made without asking. Because the vast majority of time that African Americans have been on the soil, they were not given the chance to have agency over their loss. And that's really what migration is. Migration is taking one's life into one's own hands, making decisions that you think will be best for your family going forward and making that

leap of faith into the unknown. Think about those cotton fields and those rice plantations and those tobacco fields were opera singers, jazz musicians, playwrights, novelists, surgeons, attorneys, accountants, professors, journalists. And how do we know that? We know that because that is what they and their children, and now their grandchildren and even great-grandchildren, have often chosen to become, once they had the chance to choose for themselves

what they would do with their God-given talents. Without the great migration, there might not have been a Tony Morrison as we now know her to be. Her parents were from Alabama and from Georgia. They migrated to Ohio, where their daughter would get to do something that we all take for granted at this point,

but which was against the law and against protocol for African Americans at the time that she would have been growing up in the South had they stayed. And that is just to walk into a library and take out a library book. Merely by making the single decision to leave, her parents assured that their daughter would get access to books. And if you're going to become a Nobel laureate,

it helps to get a book now and then. You know, it helps. Music, as we know it, was reshaped by the Great Migration. As they came north, they brought with them on their hearts and in their memories, the music that had, sustained the ancestors, the blues music, the spirituals, and the gospel music that it sustained them through the generations. And they converted this music into whole new genres of music and got the chance to record this music, this new music that they were creating, and to spread it throughout

the world. Jazz was a creation of the Great Migration, starting with Louis Armstrong, who was born in Louisiana and migrated on the Illinois Central Railroad to Chicago, where he got the chance to build on the talent that was within him all along. Miles Davis, his parents were from Arkansas. They migrated to Illinois, Southern Illinois. John Coltrane, he migrated at the age of 16, from North Carolina to Philadelphia, where upon arrival in Philadelphia, he got his first. First Alto Sax.

Salonious Monk, Michael Jackson, Jesse Owens, Prince, August Wilson, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Michelle Obama. These are all a few of the millions of people who were products of this single decision to migrate. Isabel, knowing all you know about the Great Migration, what is your perspective? on more recent migrations within the U.S.? Like the most obvious example that comes to mind is New Orleans. So many people left the city after Hurricane Katrina, and they never returned.

Well, I think that all migrations share so much in common in that one thing that I was really excited to discover in the process of working on the Worm of the Sons was the work of E.G. Ravenstein, who is a 19th century geographer who created what are known as the laws of migration. And he was basically saying that people go no farther. They go no farther than is necessary to achieve their goals. So if a family from New Orleans migrates out and makes lives for themselves and their families someplace else, this is a decision that they made that they felt was the best for themselves and for their children. And I have just the greatest sense of respect and admiration for that. And I think that, you know, when we look at any migration, we should always look at what is it that they're seeking to achieve and to realize that they are looking to find freedom and success. They're not doing this in order

to not succeed. There's too much at stake for them not to succeed. And it could take a different form based upon the location and the group itself and are you crossing national or international borders. But essentially, I think people all want the same thing. I think that they're all seeking the same thing. And if the more that we're able to recognize the very human-centered goals and nature of migration itself, I think we would have greater understanding for any migration that we're looking at. Do you think that lack of understanding is part of the reason why there is always a debate and such controversy over different groups of people migrating into the U.S.? It just comes up over and over again?

I think that there's something that has to do with how the people who are doing the migrating are perceived in the first place. I mean, if migration is something that is, in a way, an origin story from many Americans, then that means that many Americans should already have a sense of appreciation for the ways that migration affected their own family lineage and thus should be able to have more of an understanding of other people who are migrating as well. I think that it has to do with, in some ways, a distancing from groups that are seen as other. It's a marginalization of the people who are migrating, who may not be seen by some Americans as similar to themselves. It's not recognizing the common humanity of various groups, and that is to the detriment of everyone.

Isabel Wilkerson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist. Her most recent book is cast the origins of our discontents. You can find her full talk at ted.com. On the show today, ideas about migration. I'm Anoush Zamoroti, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anoush Zamoroti. And often when we hear the word migration, we think of people escaping hardship, searching for a new life for themselves and their families. But that's not necessarily the case for everyone. Comedian Maeve Higgins moved from Ireland to the U.S. eight years ago. And in 2018, she gave a talk about her experience because she noticed that not all immigrants are treated the same. I don't know if you can tell by my accent. Usually when I start

talking, people are like, you're not from around here. And I'm not from around here. I'm Texan. I'm from Texas and as we say back home, here we are, big sky country. Is that Texas? No, I'm from a place called Cove, which is a harbour town in Ireland. It's a maritime town and there's a history of immigration from my hometown actually. It's the last place that Annie Moore ever saw before she moved to America. Annie Moore was the very first immigrant through the brand new gate. of Ellis Island when that opened in 1892. Cove is also the last place where over two million Irish people left from when they were fleeing sort of the worst years of Irish history.

They were kind of running from famine in some cases, oppression, or lots of people just left to try and find a better life. So we learned all about these people in school growing up in history class, but I never found out what happened to them when they arrived. and I only got interested in immigrants when I became one myself. I moved to New York in 2014. I moved here on an 01 visa. It's for people who've achieved a lot in their field,

and it's often given to those of us who are in sciences, sports, the arts. I'm a writer, so what I do really is I listen to and then I tell stories. And these days, immigrants, I think, are the ones with the best stories. For the past few years, I've been traveling around America and meeting with immigrants and hearing stories of lives left behind and started again someplace new. And I think probably a lot of us heard a very big immigrant story this year. It was when France won the World Cup. So France's World Cup winning team was actually made up largely of immigrants or the children

of immigrants from places like Angola, Algeria, Cameroon, Zaire, from everywhere. and people really went bonkers over this. There was a CNN headline that read, France's World Cup win is a victory for immigrants everywhere. And all these tweets and all these memes went viral, kind of saying, look how great immigration is. Like, you know, they won your soccer match and, like, you should welcome them.

But I really worried about that. I really worried about pointing out, like, how good these immigrants were, because I think by doing so, were helping to build the deadly and the disgusting case that a lot of racists and anti-immigrant xenophobes have of some lives being worth more than others. Every immigrant has a story of one life left behind

and another one started anew. Annie Moore, the girl I was telling you about, I don't think I mentioned she was only 17. So she was an unaccompanied minor. She was undocumented. And when she reached America, she was safe. She was allowed in, in fact, the US authorities gave her a gold coin to commemorate the occasion and they reunited her with her parents, as it should be. Annie Moore never made a fortune.

She never wrote a book or invented a computer. And really, why should she? Why should immigrants have to prove themselves extraordinary to deserve a place at the table, to deserve a fighting chance? Constantly having to prove yourself worthy of basic human dignity is exhausting. And it's unfair. People should not be considered valuable just because they do something of value to us, like pick our fruit or perform our life-saving surgery or win our soccer game. People are valuable because they are people. And I think that we need to hold that close because if we forget that or if we deny it, then terrible things happen. That was comedian Mave Higgins. She's the host of the podcast, Mave in America, Immigration, IRL. And you can find Mave's Full Talk at TED.com. On the show today, migration.

And up until now, we've been talking about human migration. But of course, humans aren't the only animals that migrate. There are many hundreds, if not thousands of species of birds that migrate. There's caribou across Canada, wildebeest in Africa. There are migratory fish like salmon, and also a lot of marine animals migrate long distances like sea turtles and whales. But right now, let's turn our attention to the humble but tenacious monarch butterfly. I think of monarchs as the tanks of the butterfly world. So they're small.

They weigh only a half a gram, but they can travel thousands of kilometers in the wild. This is Sonia Altizer. I'm an ecologist at the University of Georgia, so I study the ecology of animal migration. And Sonia says monarch butterflies are different because their migration is multi-generational. So the same monarch never makes the journey twice. It's their grand offspring and great grand offspring of the migratory generation that will migrate again the following year. Sonia is specifically talking about a migration path east of the Rocky Mountains. These monarchs travel thousands of miles across international borders every year.

Ecologists think they're looking for the precious milkweed plant. Inarguably, the most important driver for them is food, and especially milkweed plants where the females can lay their eggs. Another reason why they migrate is to ride out the winter in the Sierra Mountains. Madre Mountains near Mexico City. So there might be 10 million butterflies or more in a single colony. And these colonies would be densely packed butterflies that are hanging in these beautiful fur forests.

And so they're carpeting the trunks of trees. And it's almost like the butterflies spend the winter in the refrigerator. And then the temperature does warm up, especially as the overwintering season progresses into the spring. And these clusters will sort of burst open, almost like orange confetti, fluttering through the sky. Does it make a sound when they burst open like that? It does.

So it's almost like a very gentle wind or rustling of the leaves. And sometimes the air is so thick with butterflies, that it might be hard to see a person standing 50 meters away just because there's so many butterflies flying through the air. By early March, it's time to procreate. So the butterflies leave the mountains for northern Mexico and Texas to lay their eggs on milkweed. The only plant that their caterpillars will eat. But by this time, they're really old.

So they've been alive for about nine months and eventually they die. And then it takes time for their offspring to develop. But by May, this new generation is ready to continue the journey. And the part of the United States that we refer to as the corn belt, so Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and even farther north into Michigan and southern Canada. There, the butterflies have enough milkweed, nectar, and sun to stay put and cycle through one, even two more generations. But then the last generation at the end of the summer, it's the shorter day lengths and the

cooler temperatures that signal to those butterflies, that generation, that it's time to get ready to migrate. And so instead of producing eggs and mating and hanging out in milkweed patches, those butterflies instead tank up on nectar, they build up their fat reserves and they head south towards the overwintering sites in Mexico. And so they have to be in a special physiological state to be able to successfully make that migration. Huh. So they keep the species going, but it's this, I mean, I'm sorry, but describing a butterfly as fat is like, I've seen fat caterpillars, but I've never seen a fat butterfly.

Yeah, they are butterballs in the fall and winter. And it's important that they build up those fat reserves because they not only need the energy to fuel the migration, but they have to live off of their fat reserves for five months at the overwintering sites and also use them to fuel that journey partway back north again. Here's Sonia Altizer on the TED stage. Now this migration of monarchs is one of the Earth's last great migrations. But around the world, a lot of these great migrations have disappeared or are disappearing due to things that we as people are doing to them and their habitats. their losses change the entire ecology of ecosystems, and they're impossible to replace.

Like these other migrations, monarch migration is declining too. In fact, the last three consecutive years have been the lowest numbers of monarchs ever recorded in Mexico, so low, in fact, that scientists estimate migratory monarchs have declined by 90%. So if monarchs were people, this would be like losing every person living in the United States, except for those in Ohio and Florida. Now, what are the causes of this monarch decline? Well, unfortunately, there's a lot of different challenges facing monarchs, ranging from climate change and drought to deforestation and illegal logging in Mexico, even car strikes along roads during the fall migration. One of the more ominous threats has been the loss of milkweed plants in agricultural habitats due to shifting agricultural practices. So it might surprise you to hear that what we eat affects food that's available to the monarchs. So you actually link the monarch's well-being to how we humans grow our food.

Can you just explain what that link is, what the connection is between the two? Well, so monarchs need milkweed. Milkweed isn't the only resource that they need. They also need nectar plants. But milkweed is the key resource that monarchs need to reproduce. And it's an agricultural weed. And so you would find it along roadsides, even country roads or gravel roads. It would be growing in and around cornfields and around other row crops and orchards. And so one thing that has become popular since the late 1990s are crops that are genetically modified to resist common herbicides like Roundup, and the herbicides can be sprayed on crop fields of soybean or corn, and the crops do just fine, but milk weeds and other agricultural weeds that would be providing nectar for monarchs would die. So you suggest that one way to help stem the decline is to buy non-GMO food. But GMOs have been around for, what, nearly 30 years now? Is that even possible anymore?

That's an interesting question. I mean, certainly we can use our purchasing power as consumers to buy sustainably sourced crops or agriculture. So buy local, buy organic. It's probably too late to turn the clock on GMO crops. And it is a controversial topic. So the technology itself isn't harmful or evil. It's just the way that these crops have been deployed and the scale at which they've been deployed. It means that we're growing food now in a way that doesn't leave room for other biodiversity.

And these agro-ecosystems have become almost ecological deserts, if you will. So is there anything else we can do? Like, I guess, plant monarch-friendly gardens, plant more milkworms? weed? Definitely planting milkweed, but especially native milkweeds, is something that people can do to help them. And again, being aware that it's not just milkweeds that monarchs need. It's nectar plants and other resources, too. And if you plant habitats and gardens for monarchs and other pollinators, you'll be helping dozens of other species as well. And so it's realizing that monarchs are part of these complicated food webs that involve birds and spiders. and ants and other plant species, even parasites that attack them. And certainly milkweed is a critical part of that, and there are other parts too.

One of my dreams is to be able to take my kids to the overwintering sites in central Mexico to let them be able to see what it's like to stand in a forest full of millions of butterflies. And so to see that declining, to see those migrations unraveling, make me sad. At the same time, they are resilient. And they can acclimate or adapt to a wide range of conditions. And so they do exist in places in the world where they don't undergo long-distance

migrations. So there are native resident monarch populations throughout central and South America and the Caribbean islands. And monarchs more recently colonized the Pacific Islands. They've also recently crossed the Atlantic. They've crossed the Atlantic, like literally, do you think? Yes, they have. And so one interesting fact about monarchs is that in England, people used to call them storm fridilaries in historic

times because they would occasionally blow over with big storms. People thought that they maybe naturally just blew across the Atlantic in storms. It also seems likely that monarchs have hitched a ride with people to different places around the world on trade ships, for

example. But in a lot of these places monarchs breed year-round and don't undergo long-distance migrations. And so how these tiny insects can show such a wide range of behavioral responses to different environments is fascinating to me. And so I think a lot of us are trying to figure out what's going to be the new normal. Yeah, I mean, the new normal sounds like it's not great for these butterflies. There's a lot we humans keep doing to cause problems for them. So does that mean, that in addition to studying them, we also need to start enacting laws to protect them. You know, one of the great challenges with protecting migratory species is that they don't see

or respond to or respect geopolitical boundaries. And so we need to think about ways of engaging in conservation that cross these boundaries, which are really just artificial constructs of people and nations. And you really reflect on the fact that for most of life on earth, movement is not only a part of their life, it's essential to the persistence of these species. That's Sonia Altizer. She's an ecologist at the University of Georgia. You can learn more about her research and what we humans can do to help the monarch butterfly at ted.npr.org. Thank you so much for for being with us this week to talk about migration. To learn more about the talks on today's show,

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