I was lucky enough this year to spend time in the Serengeti in Tanzania, East Africa. The Serengeti Plains witness an astonishing feat every year - the great Wildebeest migration from the Serengeti to the Masai Mara in Kenya. It's an incredible spectacle - the largest migration in the natural world. An estimated 1.4 million animals on the move in such of water and lush plains.
I was pondering this phenomena on my commute into work earlier this week. When something hit me. Was I, and my fellow passengers, on my own migration? Each day 1.5 million people commute into london (see this 2007 survey for proof).
One and a half million men, women and children flow in and out of the big city.
Our civilised, organised, industrialised city manages IN ONE DAY to migrate more humans than any other mammal manages in a year. Planes, Trains, Automobiles, Bicycles, Buses, on Foot or on the Tube - however we do it, we do it.
This realisation had me gasping. If we were ever to need evidence that human society has completely divorced itself from the rest of the world's species, surely this fact is enough.
There are many questions I could ask about why we do it and how we do it. But, the fact that we do it, and no other mammal does, is the most disturbing thought of all.
For more info on the wildebeest migration, go here.
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