In the ‘Long Read,’ we feature a longer scholarly research paper which relates to our ethos. In this inspiring and eloquently delivered discussion which was part of a larger investigation in environmental literature and animal ethics, Bethan Langford takes us on a journey into the marvellous world of insects and explains how rekindling a childlike sense of wonder can not only help us humans extend a better ethics of care towards arthropods and other nonhuman species but generally improve our overall connection with the natural world. The piece is accompanied by some of Bethan’s beautifully crafted arthropod paintings and culminates on a poignant note with the self-penned poem, ‘Tiny Reflections.’
The difficulty in approaching insects (and other arthropods)
Insects, in their many, many forms, often elicit strong negative feelings of fear and disgust, feelings which hinder us from forming any positive relationship with them. As Jeffrey Lockwood outlines in The Infested Mind, we fear them because of their capacity to invade, evade, (over)reproduce, harm, perturb (by their alien otherness), and defy (our reason and individuality).We are disgusted by their flitting or crawling bodies, by their fecundity (and resultant multitude) and by their filthiness. Perhaps we are also appalled by many insects’ ability to thrive in our waste and to penetrate what we consider to be solely human spaces. This article offers some potential ways to alleviate such negativity towards insects for reasons I shall soon explore.
Much of the literature on difference concentrates on the looking back of another, an ‘encounter,’ and yet this does not seem possible for insects, with their unfamiliar eyes and facial structures. While the divide between human and animal has often been challenged (for example, Derrida’s cat and Haraway’s dogs), Tarsh Bates has argued in ‘Necessary Expendability’ that “in all these encounters, the gaze and faciality of these animals were crucial: they look back; their resemblance to us felt as a challenge to complacency and neglect.” But insects do not offer such reciprocation. Even in a book (Insectopedia) dedicated to the fascinating beauty and cultural history of insects, Hugh Raffles confesses that “[w]e simply cannot find ourselves in these creatures. […] They are not like us.” He adds that insects do not “respond to acts of love or mercy or remorse. It is worse than indifference. It is a deep, dead space without reciprocity, recognition, or redemption.” Perhaps, then, it is mainly their lack of response which prevents us from caring about insects. There might be many reasons why we feel the need for a responding gaze in order to care about others: as a form of recognition of another, the validation of one’s presence, or merely because we recognise eyes as the most poignant indication of life. Whatever the reason, to engage with insects and other forms of life that do not look back, we require a shift in perspective, one that need not any response (if only a look) from the other.
The motivation for exploring this perhaps unique negativity with which we generally approach insects is because I believe that we need a better relationship with insects in order to form a healthier relationship with the living world. Carrie Foulkes, while discussing honeybee hives, suggests that “[w]hen we operate from a place of fear rather than of love, there can be no health, no harmony.” Anxiety impacts how we navigate our lives, and so we need to find ways to change that fear of insects to a different emotion. Our responses are also especially important when considering the devastating loss of insect biodiversity as revealed by Caspar A. Hallman’s 2017 study, where many insect species have been left to slip away “ungrieved and unnoticed” (Rosamund Portus). To quote Deborah Bird Rose, we must not abandon the other “as if to do so were to become an accomplice in [their] death.” We must find ways to create an affirmative future that both encompasses and reaches beyond the insect world.
Insects are also especially key lifeforms to engage with the living world in general because they are both local and ubiquitous. In a city (as opposed to the country or ‘wild’), ‘nature’ seems often to not be readily available. However, while many larger animals are absent, insects remain resolutely present, not only in our green spaces, but also (often less welcomed) in our homes. Some towns and cities even offer more insect diversity than some countryside areas, because there is more habitat diversity in these places than the monoculture or sheep ranching of hedge-less fields. It is thus very possible for both children and adults to engage with nature through the many insects that vivify our ever more pervasive concrete-scapes. Furthermore, Rosamund Portus has argued that people are often only willing to engage with climate change when they can actually help. Everyday, we hear about creatures and habitats that are facing ongoing destruction, but except for recycling, conserving energy and campaigning, most of us are not in any position to contribute. With insects, many of us can help because they (in their many forms) are all around us, and they can be aided through more plausible roles. The main problem is our attitude towards them.
A World Filled with Wonder
To contrast this general feeling of repulsion, we have an innate fascination with creepy crawlies, of collecting, watching, and sometimes killing little creatures, and most of us have experienced a bug period as a child. In fact, when advocates of insects write an article or book, they often make a point of their childhood curiosity: “when I was little,” “as far back as I can remember,” “I have been fascinated with insects ever since…” What seems so “eccentric” and “unusual,” as Dave Goulson has found himself called, about adults who love insects reflects the sad normality of losing or ‘growing out of’ this bug period, as though it is a childish stage we must move through before reaching adulthood. This childishness associated with insects is crucial to investigate because outgrowing that creepy crawly stage can often seem representative of outgrowing the living world altogether. Instead, we might see this childhood fascination as an opportunity for engagement: by drawing on that experience of wonder, we might find ways to maintain that creepy crawly stage, rather than outgrow it, however much we might grow in size.
Wonder has many interpretations, with its attendant (ab)uses and critics, so I define it here using Samantha Clark’s delightful summary from ‘The Curator’s Room.’ Firstly, the feeling of wonder has long been an impetus for questioning the world and engaging with its lifeforms. At the the same time, such questioning might present the dangerous possibility of an ordering and consuming drive in wonder. Yet, as Clark continues, Immanuel Kant contrasted “astonishment (Verwunderung) which fades once the novelty wears off” against “a steady, contemplative wonderment (Bewunderung) which does not depend on novelty, and may even grow deeper with familiarity.” The latter, which is the one explored in this study, “maintains the questioning and questing aspect of wonder, and yet rests attentively in the wonderful object without itching after the novel.” It encourages what Clark calls “a contemplative appreciation of the wonderful object which seems to come to us like a gift.” With its seemingly exponential sensitivity, this “wonder keeps our attention in and on things in the world, while poignantly realising their potentiality and fragility.” This wonder also critically recognises differences between entities without generating a damaging abyss of otherness. Now this definition, its emphasis on attentiveness, care and growing sensitivity as opposed to novelty and consumption, is a wonder that might allow for an alternative relationship with insects, which is positive not because we find something to empathise with (and so care about its continuing existence) but because we find something to be fascinated with (and again, so care about its continuing existence).
Insects are useful, beautiful and wonderful
One of the ways we might foster this wonder is through the language we use to address insects. In Arran Stibbe’s The Stories We Live By, he identifies the language that erases life and makes certain entities “unworthy of consideration.” This includes the use of hypernyms (‘bug’), functionalisation (‘Ecosystem Service Value’), metaphors (‘as busy as a bee’), metonymy (‘resource’), passivation, and masks (that distort others, such as the talking, anthropomorphised bugs in A Bug’s Life). While we necessarily view the world through certain (and various) cultural frames, we might instead find positive language that allows us to form productive relationships with a surviving non-human world, as opposed to language which merely erases it (both physically and linguistically). Thus, the remainder of this study is dedicated to (re)finding our childhood wonder by locating some of the language that might facilitate this aim.
Firstly, as opposed to the immediate rejection that negative vocabulary instils, positive terms might encourage a curiosity with which to interact and engage with this wonderful multiplicity of lifeforms. For instance, in Erica McAlister’s The Secret Life of Flies, her “beloved subject” are “wonderful creatures” and “little beauties.” Similarly, in Extraordinary Insects, Anna Sverdrup-Thygeson uses affirmative adjectives such as “strange, beautiful and bizarre,” “astonishing” and “impressive” which contrasts repellent and all-too-common words such as creepy, annoying, disgusting, and alien. Her subtitle likewise lists insects as “Weird. Wonderful. Indispensable. The Ones Who Run Our World.” The full stops here stress the importance of grasping each positive term. Such positivity offers another world to these creatures, if only as an incentive to read on and learn more.
Insects’ lives are so full of wonder and we can see this by the many fascinating facts about anatomy, habits, and interrelations with which Sverdrup-Thygeson and McAlister fill their books. We learn that insects are not merely irritating pests (though a select few can also be), but rather they have interesting and variable lives. There is, for example, a whole genus of dance flies that wrap up presents (filled with either some prey or a deceptive balloon of froth) with their swollen silk glands on their forelegs, and, if the lady takes too long opening and feeding from it after copulation, the male will fly away with its present for future gifting. There is also a social species of guano-feeding flies, who groom each other (guano is sticky!), and the males vibrate to protect their offspring, making a “zizzing” sound to deter predators. There is even a parasitic wasp who injects a ladybird with both a paralysing virus and its young. While many parasitic wasps act in a similar manner, here the ladybird remains alive, zombified, acting “not just as baby food but also as a babysitter.” The ladybird becomes a shield and jerks a limb if anything comes close, and, perhaps after a week, may even walk away as though nothing had happened. How wonderfully bizarre!
Yet McAlister, after listing some of the amazing attributes of flies, seems to sigh – “But the question you still want answering is: what have all these flies ever done for us?” This question is also often posed about wasps. What is the point of wasps and flies? For some, understanding the benefits or ESV (Ecosystem Service Value) might be the first or even the only step to giving meaning to certain insects. Most people, for example, understand the ESV of bees even if they are uninterested in nature in general and thus accommodate them within their positive frames, whereas while wasps and flies are valuable predators and some also pollinators, most only see them for their sting or bite. Seirian Sumner’s study “Why we love bees and hate wasps” encapsulates this divide, even for scientists, and suggests that a significant percentage of Hymenoptera research is focussed on bees. Sumner further argues that the dislike of wasps might partly be because people are generally unaware of the ecosystem services they perform, so advertising the benefits of wasps (and flies) may provide space for appreciation, instead of indiscriminate negativity. McAlister responds to her question by listing flies’ variety of positive roles (such as chocolate pollination, pest control, food, and decomposition) that impact our daily lives and structuring of society: “The impact of flies on our environment is hard to overestimate.” Similarly, more than half of Extraordinary Insects is dedicated to the roles that different insects (both directly and indirectly) have filled for us to counter those opinions of uselessness and irritation. Sverdrup-Thygeson comments, furthermore, that “[w]e humans have long taken the free services of insects for granted. […] On egotistical grounds alone, we should therefore be concerned about the health and wellbeing of these little critters.” Insects have a paramount importance to our well-being, so it is crucial to present people with the opportunities to recognise this and so alter their perception of insects’ value.
As Paul Manning insists, however, in “Why we should learn to love all insects – not just the ones that work for us,” ESV can be helpful for starting conversations but “economic arguments can only take us so far.” For one, insects are living beings, “not a bundle of ecosystem services” (to use Robert Macfarlane’s phase), and thinking of them only for their ESV allows only for an exploitative relationship as opposed to a loving one. Focusing on their ESV is also problematic when these calculations cannot be bestowed upon species that do not have a unique function, or at least seem economically inconsequential, for there will be no reason under this limited framework to support their continued existence. Manning continues, noting that when people start to see insects’ beauty and many talents, as listed above, “they fall in love […] they will fight for its protection regardless of whether or not it contributes to the provision of a particular ecosystem service.”
What’s in a name?
Discovering more specific insect names might also help us to pay a higher quality of attention towards insects and consequently to care more about them. The problem with using generalisations such as ‘insect,’ ‘bug’ or even ‘bee’ is that these also dissipate any sense of proportion to the great diversity of insect life, which can breed indifference alongside its accompanying distaste. Insects are too often, to use Lockwood’s turn of phrase, “generalised into an undifferentiated lump of disgusting things” or “an amorphous group that warrants aversion.” It is difficult to engage with such entities, let alone find wonder in them.
Such generalising is a broad issue that extends across our engagement with nature. Robert Macfarlane, whose work emphasises specificity and naming, has said that “[w]ithout names to give it detail, the natural world can quickly blur into a generalised wash of green.” Without specific vocabulary to discern difference, it is difficult to connect people with the world and its tiny inhabitants, because we cannot see what there is to engage with. Macfarlane argues that this language deficit leads to an attention deficit, and that we need attention in order to have the intention to care for our surroundings. Wendel Berry has also commented that “to defend what we love we need a particularising language, for we love what we particularly know.” This suggests we need precise rather than vague terms in order to have the concepts to defend. Specifying vocabulary allows us to differentiate the world around us, to make it visible, and this visibility seems necessary for engagement. To stress, the effect of specificity has formed part of a long debate regarding the 2007 cull of nature words from the Oxford Junior Dictionary. The proponents of the debate proposed that if the dictionary removes vocabulary for children, those specifics will disappear from sight, and they will not be located in the surrounding environment, even when their presence has not also completely disappeared. They argued that the OJD “should seek to help shape children’s understanding of the world, not just to mirror its trends.” Vocabulary is prescriptive as well as descriptive, so by losing these names, we not only lose the ability to love what those words name, but our world might also become even emptier because of it.
It is notable that when confronted by the loss of insect biodiversity in 2017, Kerri ni Dochartaigh finds that “I have no words.” These “Unnameable Things,” as she titles her article, are lost not only because of grief, but we actually do not have the words. It is both grief and pervasive ignorance. When Dochartaigh is finally able “to unearth the words” in her article, to acknowledge that “[w]e are losing species at a terrifying rate” and to name some of them, she feels that it is “not only like an act of rebellion, but like taking my first steps down a garden path; a garden that holds room for unthinkable metamorphosis.” We need the words to confront the loss, the invisibility, and our attitude towards insects.
It is questionable how specific we need to be for insects, however. In Macfarlane’s ‘Landmarks’ project, which recovers words from other languages and dialects across the British Isles, he shows that these words can sometimes offer wonderful connections between things as well as phenomena in the landscape which mainstream British English might not accommodate. Such regional vocabulary is especially important where regional names are still being lost. In “Unnameable Things” for example, Dochartaigh comments on the changing and loss of Northern Ireland names, where the erasing of their culture is mixed within the “loss of connection with the natural world; our unwilding.” She also finds inflections in regional words for insects, where the “Donegal Gaeltacht word for butterfly, I discover, is the same word as for The Aurora Borealis: those lights that dance so magically in that liminal place between […] this world and the other.” This consequently enriches her perspective of butterflies, already symbolic in Ireland. Recovering regional vocabulary can give us the chance to start seeing them in our landscape and to then make new connections.
On the other hand, because insects are so unfamiliar and so numerous, perhaps finding their Latin name or any specific common name might suffice. In his podcast Entocast, Liam Crowley has even suggested that since there are so many insects and so many common names for each of them, the Latin name might be easier and even necessary to learn. Regardless, learning new names can completely alter our perspective of the insect world. In his article “Flower Grace,” for example, Philip Strange sees a white butterfly, which he originally suspects to be a cabbage white, a species that has long ravaged his vegetable patch. When researching further, he instead identifies it to be an orange-tip butterfly and then as the Anthocharis cardamines, the genus name of which translates to something like ‘flower-grace.’ He finds that learning the Latin name transforms his original bias towards the butterfly: “I saw the grace of the butterfly and how, in turn, it lends this grace to the flower.” And this is just one insect species. For UK bees, there are red-tails, moss carders, ashy mining bees, and honeybees; for UK moths, we find hummingbird hawkmoths, scarlet tigers, and canary-shouldered Thorns (my favourite!), among many, many others.
Let’s give insects a chance
There are many ways to learn about, share, help and get closer to insects (and nature in general). One is reading, and the texts explored in this article not only encourage wonder but are all very accessible. Those who are lucky enough to have a garden, or perhaps a balcony, can also cultivate – and yes, this is about careful management – diverse insect-friendly pesticide-free plant spaces. Those with time can volunteer, and those who teach can integrate this into their lessons. Or simply, to quote Sverdrup-Thygeson, “it’s just about how you talk about insects to your kids or grandchildren or neighbors or colleagues at work.” Hopefully this study has offered some of the words for doing so.
These small but important tasks might even be more possible in the height and aftermath of COVID-19 lockdown. A few writers, for example, have discussed the changing landscape presented by COVID on The Clearing, The Landlines Project and The Dark Mountain Manifesto. In her piece “In Search of the Ashy Mining Bee,” Eline Tabak states that “[i]f anything, lockdown has given me the time and space to look at and truly appreciate my direct environment,” including her garden, and she has learned that excitement can be found in the smallest and closest of places: “Travelling all over the world to see the more than human world around is exciting, eye-opening, wonderful — but sometimes an ashy mining bee flying around a cake tin will do.” Similarly, Strange, following an orange-tip butterfly to the edges of a carpark during lockdown, asks “[w]hy hadn’t I noticed this profusion of growth before? Usually it was busy here and the border was inaccessible, but I also had not taken the time to look properly. Now I had that time.” First believing he would not cope in lockdown without his “regular forays into deep countryside or to the coast,” he instead finds there is lots “to be seen in our immediate environment and, if I looked carefully, this might include some surprises.” So perhaps, as Strange adds, “when the coronavirus crisis is over, we can hold on to this new sense of wonder, this awareness of wildlife we find directly around us, even in the most unlikely places.” This moment offers the perfect opportunity to reflect upon our locality, to find wonder in it, and to help it thrive, so let us take our more positive and specific vocabulary and embrace those lifeforms that surround us.
To conclude, this study was an attempt to locate positive, fascinating, and particularising language that might help nurture a loving attention and wonder towards some of the world’s smallest creatures. Insects may be very different, but wonder makes them approachable. Hopefully, then, the wonder found in insects (instead of sympathy or identification) will also make them worth caring for. Furthermore, by improving our relations with the little “ones that rule our world”, I have suggested that this wonder might also expand outwards towards our shared surroundings. Plodding about the Brecon Beacons in summer 2020, I paused and wondered: what would it be like to sit, notice the details, and find the right words for what I see? This is a poem that recalls that moment.
Having recently completed an MA centred on environmental literature and animal ethics, Bethan Langford is currently dedicating her writing to exploring our attitudes towards different landscapes and life forms, with all their physical and cultural beauty, as well as finding ways to communicate this beauty and value to others.
Further Reading
Bates, Tarsh and Megan Schlipalius, ‘Necessary expendability: an exploration of nonhuman death in public’, in Animal Death, ed. by Jay Johnston and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2013), pp.43-66.
‘Beauty and the Beasts: falling in love with insects’, Manchester Museum, 2020, exhibition. <https://mmbeautyandthebeasts.wixsite.com/mmbeautyandthebeasts> [accessed 20/10/2020]
Clark, Samantha, ‘The Curator’s Room’, Terrain, 2 December 2014. <https://www.terrain.org/2014/nonfiction/the-curators-room/> [accessed 14/09/2020]
Dochartaigh, Kerri ní, ‘Unnameable Things’, The Clearing, 26 February 2019. <https://www.littletoller.co.uk/the-clearing/unnameable-things-by-kerri-ni-dochartaigh/> [accessed 7/10/2020]
Flood, Alison, ‘Oxford Junior Dictionary’s replacement of ‘natural’ words with 21st-century terms sparks outcry’, The Guardian, 13 January 2015. <www.theguardian.com/books/2015/ jan/13/oxford-junior-dictionary-replacement-natural-words> [accessed 05/09/20]
Foulkes, Carrie, ‘There’s Something Wrong with the Bees’, Dark Mountain, 19 June 2017. <https://dark-mountain.net/theres-something-wrong-with-the-bees-on-sun-hives-and-crisis-houses/> [accessed 19/09/2020]
Goulson, Dave, Bee Quest (London: Vintage, 2018).
Gross, Jessica, ‘Why Bugs Deserve Our Respect’, Longreads, July 2019. <https://longreads.com/2019/07/02/why-bugs-deserve-our-respect/> [accessed 27/08/2020]
Hallmann A. Caspar, et al., ‘More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas’, Plos One, 12.10 (2017). <https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185809> [accessed 04/10/2020]
Lockwood, Jeffrey, The Infested Mind: Why Humans Fear, Loathe and Love Insects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Macfarlane, Robert, ‘Badger or Bulbasaur – have children lost touch with nature?’, The Guardian, 30 September 2017. <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/30/robert-macfarlane-lost-words-children-nature> [accessed 20/08/2020]
——– ‘The word-hoard: Robert Macfarlane on rewilding our language of landscape’, The Guardian, 27 February 2015. <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/27/robert-macfarlane-word-hoard-rewilding-landscape> [accessed 13/01/19]
——— ‘Should this tree have the same rights as you?’, The Guardian, 2 November 2019. <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/02/trees-have-rights-too-robert-macfarlane-on-the-new-laws-of-nature> [accessed 20/08/20]
Manning, Paul, ‘Why we should learn to love all insects – not just the ones that work for us’, The Conversation, 12 January 2016. <https://theconversation.com/why-we-should-learn-to-love-all-insects-not-just-the-ones-that-work-for-us-49925> [accessed 04/09/2020]
McAlister, Erica, The secret life of flies (London: National History Museum, 2019).
Portus, Rosamund, ‘An Unusual Bee Hotel: Cultivating Care in a time of Ecological Loss’, Centre for Environmental Humanities, 29 July 2020. <https://bristolenvironmentalhumanities.wordpress.com/2020/07/29/an-unusual-bee-hotel-cultivating-care-in-a-time-of-ecological-loss/> [accessed 29/07/2020]
——– ‘Where are the Bees now’, Dark Mountain, 12 December 2018. <https://dark-mountain.net/where-are-the-bees-now/> [accessed 02/08/2020]
Stibbe, Arran, The Stories We Live By <http://storiesweliveby.org.uk/the-course/4593307269> [accessed 23/10/20]
Strange, Philip, ‘Flower Grace’, The Clearing, 12 August 2020. <https://www.littletoller.co.uk/the-clearing/flower-grace-by-philip-strange/> [accessed 13/10/2020]
Raffles, Hugh, Insectopedia (New York: Vintage, 2011).
Sumner, Seirian, et al., ‘Why we love bees and hate wasps’, Ecological Entomology, 43.6 (2018), 836–845.
Sverdrup-Thygeson, Anne, Extraordinary insects, trans. by Lucy Moffatt (London: Mudlark, 2019).
Tabak, Eline, ‘In Search of the Ashy Mining Bee’, Land Lines Project, 17 August 2020, blog. <https://landlinesproject.wordpress.com/2020/08/17/in-search-of-the-ashy-mining-bee-eline-tabak/> [Accessed 18/09/2020]
TEDx Talks, Why we all need to learn to love insects | Dave Goulson | TEDxBratislava, online video recording, YouTube, 17 January 2020. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TS0L4D2nCQ> [accessed 08/08/2020]
‘The birds and the bees: encountering wildlife extinction in museum collections and beyond’ POLLEN 2020, 22 September 2020, conference. <https://event.pollen2020.exordo.com/session/82/the-birds-and-the-bees-encountering-wildlife-extinction-in-museum-collections-and-beyond> [accessed 24/09/2020]
‘The Weird and the Wonderful’, Entocast, 13 August 2018, podcast. <https://www.entocast.com/episodes/2018/8/12/the-weird-and-the-wonderful> [accessed 10/10/2020]
Lyonesse Journal 