The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World - Hardcover

Melillo, Edward D.

 
9781524733216: The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1524733210 ISBN 13: 9781524733216
Verlag: Knopf, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

A fascinating, entertaining dive into the long-standing relationship between humans and insects, revealing the surprising ways we depend on these tiny, six-legged creatures.

Insects might make us shudder in disgust, but they are also responsible for many of the things we take for granted in our daily lives. When we bite into a shiny apple, listen to the resonant notes of a violin, get dressed, receive a dental implant, or get a manicure, we are the beneficiaries of a vast army of insects. Try as we might to replicate their raw material (silk, shellac, and cochineal, for instance), our artificial substitutes have proven subpar at best, and at worst toxic, ensuring our interdependence with the insect world for the foreseeable future.
     Drawing on research in laboratory science, agriculture, fashion, and international cuisine, Edward D. Melillo weaves a vibrant world history that illustrates the inextricable and fascinating bonds between humans and insects. Across time, we have not only coexisted with these creatures but have relied on them for, among other things, the key discoveries of modern medical science and the future of the world's food supply. Without insects, entire sectors of global industry would grind to a halt and essential features of modern life would disappear. Here is a beguiling appreciation of the ways in which these creatures have altered--and continue to shape--the very framework of our existence.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

EDWARD D. MELILLO is professor of history and environmental studies at Amherst College. He is the author of Strangers on Familiar Soil: Rediscovering the Chile-California Connection (2015), which won the Western History Association's 2016 Caughey Prize for the most distinguished book on the American West. He was awarded the Mellon New Directions Fellowship in 2017. He received his PhD and his MPhil from Yale University and his BA from Swarthmore College. He grew up in Falmouth, Massachusetts, and now lives in South Hadley, Massachusetts.

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1

The Bug in the System
 
In November 1944, Decca Records released a single featuring Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots. “Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall” skyrocketed to number one on the top of the Billboard charts in the United States and inaugurated a long-term collaboration between the “First Lady of Song” and the fabled record producer Milt Gabler. A century before this musical milestone, the Ottoman sultan Abdülmecid I (1839–61) founded the Hereke Imperial Carpet Manufacture to supply elaborate silk rugs for his Dolmabahçe Palace on the Bosphorus. These extravagant carpets, among the finest ever woven, featured between three and four thousand knots per square inch. Six decades earlier, on October 19, 1781, Brigadier General Charles O’Hara of His Britannic Majesty’s Coldstream Guards donned his distinctive scarlet officer’s coat, strode onto the battlefield at Yorktown, Virginia, and surrendered the sword of Lieutenant General Charles Cornwallis to Major General Benjamin Lincoln of the American Continental Army.
 
A trio of more incongruous events, spanning three centuries, is difficult to imagine, yet these episodes share an astonishing feature. They depended on the tremendous productive capacity of domesticated insects. The brittle shellac of Ella Fitzgerald’s 78 rpm record, the gossamer threads woven into the sultan’s silk carpets, and the crimson cochineal used to dye the brigadier general’s jacket entered the circuits of global commerce as secretions from the bodies of tiny invertebrates. Women and men in rural corners of northeastern India, the Ottoman Empire, and southern Mexico painstakingly raised the lac bugs (Kerria lacca), silkworms (Bombyx mori), and cochineal insects (Dactylopius coccus) that secreted the raw materials for these products.
 
Unwittingly, we have inherited the legacy of human-insect partnerships that yielded Ella Fitzgerald’s shellac, Sultan Abdülmecid I’s silk, and Brigadier General O’Hara’s cochineal. Six-legged creatures have been our unshakable companions and surreptitious roommates for millennia. The average home accommodates a remarkable profusion of insects. In 2017, following a five-continent, five-year examination of residences—ranging from urban high-rises to village bungalows— California Academy of Sciences entomologist Michelle Trautwein and her colleagues concluded, “Our lives are completely mixed up with the bugs that share our homes. . . . Every home you’ve ever lived in, from a rural Peruvian farmhouse to a studio apartment in Paris, is teeming with tiny life.”
 
In a related investigation, a team of scientists donned headlamps and latex gloves to comb through fifty homes in Raleigh, North Carolina. Scouring kitchen corners, crawl spaces, basements, closets, and air-conditioning vents, they discovered more than ten thousand species of insects, along with myriad spiders, centipedes, millipedes, and other arthropods. This clandestine menagerie was blithely residing alongside its unsuspecting human hosts.
 
While these findings intrigued some readers and spooked others, they were unsurprising to entomologists and evolutionary biologists. For the entirety of our planetary existence, we have dwelled with insects. We dine together (and, at times, on each other), we travel in tandem, and we sometimes share beds. Such relentless interactions with insects are threaded throughout the human experience. During the spring of 1748, sixteen-year-old George Washington accompanied a team of experienced wilderness surveyors as they trekked through the verdant forests of the Shenandoah Valley. The fledgling apprentice and future United States president was dismayed to find that his bed often consisted of nothing more than “a little straw—matted together without sheets or anything else but only one threadbare blanket with double its weight of vermin, such as lice, fleas, etc.”
 
Although Washington’s account evoked millennia of infested bedding, some of his European forebears had not regarded cohabitation with lice and fleas as a nuisance. At times, the act of hosting six-legged creatures on one’s body epitomized holiness. The union of vermin and virtue was on vivid display following one of the most notorious assassinations of the Middle Ages. On December 29, 1170, four knights in the service of King Henry II of England murdered the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, on the flagstone steps of the prelate’s cathedral altar. Becket’s body lay in the icy church all night. The next day, in preparation for the burial, attendants removed a profuse assortment of garments, including a mantle, a linen vestment, a lamb’s-wool coat, several cloaks, a Benedictine robe, and a shirt. The innermost layer was “a tight-fitting suit of coarse hair cloth, covered on the outside with linen, the first of its kind seen in England. The innumerable vermin [i.e., lice] which had infested the dead prelate were stimulated to such activity by the cold that his hair cloth garment”—an uncomfortable shirt worn close to the skin—“boiled over with them like water simmering in a cauldron [and] the onlookers burst into alternate fits of weeping and laughter between the sorrow of having lost such a head and the joy of finding such a saint.” Suitably, Becket was propelled into the afterlife on the wings of a swarm.
 
In the annals of Christian piety, Becket’s vigorous infestation was hardly uncommon. The Scottish philosopher David Hume recounted how the Catholic saint Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621) “patiently and humbly allowed the fleas and other odious vermin to prey upon him. We shall have heaven, said he, to reward us for our sufferings: But these poor creatures have nothing but the enjoyment of the present life.” Such examples offer a new twist on the dictum “Cleanliness is next to godliness.” For the righteous, the unwashed body provided a safe haven for a holy glut of six-legged creatures.
 
From the sacred to the profane, insects have channeled our desires. The erotic verses of Anglican cleric John Donne’s Elizabethan-era poem “The Flea” illuminate this role. A young man becomes entranced by a winged bug, which suckles on his flesh and then hops over to feed on the woman of his desires. The stanzas ripen with carnal imagery: “It sucked me first, and now sucks thee / And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.” The couple’s bodily fluids merge within the insect. The creature’s innards have become their “marriage bed . . . cloistered in these living walls of jet.” As the old adage reminds us, a meal sets the table for courtship.
 
Whether factual or fictional, such scenarios blur the boundaries between species. We are never without insects. This habitual intimacy helps to explain why bugs have so often served as models of determination, productivity, and resilience. During the seventh century b.c.e., Japan received its ancient name Akitsushima—a hybrid of akitsu (dragonfly) and shima (island)—from Emperor Jimmu Tennō, who likened the ancient Yamato Province to a dragonfly licking its tail. In Japanese, the dragonfly came to be known as kachimushi, the “victory insect,” because of its hunting prowess and bravery. Molded onto sword pommels, embroidered into cloaks, carved onto armored chest plates, and displayed prominently on helmets, kachimushi served as symbols of a samurai warrior’s fortitude in battle and his serenity in domestic life.
 
Insect behavior offered similar wellsprings of inspiration to the Abrahamic religions of Judaism,...

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Verlag
Knopf
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1524733210
ISBN 13 
9781524733216
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

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Osnabrück
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Deutschland

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