It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when it happened, but right now in America there is a definite movement toward, or at least a renewed interest in, the farm life. Is it city burnout? Recession survival? Or is it just the latest urban trend turned on its head?

Spurred by the rabid followers of Michael Pollan’s popular food manifestos, one engine for the farming rebirth can be found in the growing locavore movement. Increasingly concerned with how their food gets made, these folks are hitting up their local farms or farmers’ markets and buying their groceries directly from the source. Taking it a step further, some ambitious urbanites are ditching the city life completely and actually making a go of it as farmers themselves.

The “back-to-the-land-movement” is certainly not a new phenomenon, and in fact some say it has been going on for centuries. Most recently, it happened in North America during the ‘60s and early-‘70s as hippies and other members of the counterculture migrated to rural areas in order to escape or reject the ills and burdens of city life. Given the tumultuous parallels between then and now, the current embrace of a range life perhaps starts to make better sense.

In this issue, we explore migration both forced and by choice. It is about re-connecting with our past and confronting our present. It is about environment and about searching. We are always moving toward something.

Kevin Bay looks into the summer phenomenon of “crab jubilees,” when a rapid depletion of oxygen forces a mass migration of sea life to the shoreline.

Photographer Wayne Liu is engaged in an ongoing project exploring the transformations ushered in by China’s economic reform through a series of strange and haunting photographs printed on outdated photo paper.

Twenty minutes south of downtown San Diego, Paul Coover reaches the Mexican-American border and finds a shopping mall.

Canadian-born journalist Hadeel Al-Shalchi’s anxiety about her first visit to Baghdad began to ebb after the people accepted her as one of their own.

Soumik Mukherjee makes an emotional visit to Bangladesh more than 60 years after the British Parliament divided the province of Bengal along religious lines and uprooted millions, including his father.

Anne Dailey is part of a growing movement of foodies going underground to obtain a liquid pleasure elusive in America: raw milk.

—The Editors