Might migration be the solution to environmental catastrophe?

Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval
GAIA VINCE
(ALLEN LANE, 288 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • tel 020 7799 4064

Cue the big helicopter shot: a vast expanse of dry savanna, across which a line of countless animals, their morning shadows longer than their height, make their dusty way, while a voice – the famous one – explains that these elephants or wildebeest are making their annual journey towards water or something green to browse. Or maybe it’s a drone shot, with a more excitable commentary, following a tiny seabird which, with its internal organs shut down and atrophied, is making the first leg of its twice-annual flight from pole to pole. And we’re impressed, even awed, by these sights.

So now flick the remote to a couple of news channels, and there are humans like ourselves being helped out of swamped boats at our shoreline, or desperately squeezing through wire on some hotter boundary. And here’s the difference. Both are examples of migration. One is regarded as a miracle, the other as problematic. But maybe this is set to change.