Dave Goulson

This book is a delight from beginning to end. The catalyst for writing it is his home in the Charente, bought so he could provide home, in the form of an extensive meadow, to a huge variety of wildlife, specifically insects. This is no Aga saga of a Brit in France, but a mixture of reminiscence, hard scientific fact, vivid stories of his own experiments and research, and the work of others. It's a page turner and a tale well told with humour, and an eye for the telling detail. I'm no scientist, but I was absorbed from start to finish.

His concluding message is a serious one: through ignorance, through folly, the human race risks destroying natural systems and eroding biodiversity.... and thereby itself. This is the really important message. But the other is that the world of insects and other small 'bugs' is entrancing and intriguing. Notice what we have beneath our feet and at the bottom of the garden!… (mer)

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/bee-quest-by-dave-goulson/

A heartfelt and passionate book about bumble bees, and how the destruction of the traditional landscape in the name of agricultural productivity has made us all poorer. Goulson is dedicated to the study of bees, and goes all over the world to find them (there’s a particularly vivid section in Argentina). He conveys well the frustrations of research on small, fragile and often hostile invertebrates, and the grim situation of species disappearing from the face of the planet before they have been recorded. Now that he mentions it, isn’t it weird that bats are strongly protected by the law when other animals (less cute perhaps) are not? This is an eloquent call for more thought about and care of our natural heritage.… (mer)

My mom is a field biologist who performs invertebrate (insect) stream studies. The first time I joined her in the field, I was six weeks old. So I may be a little more into insects than much of Goulson's readership.

Ever since I read a long-form piece on the insect apocalypse while at Slow Food Nations in Denver in the summer of 2017, I've been looking for a good book on the subject. Unfortunately, I can't say that Goulson's is the one. As this is a subject I've already been interested in, I didn't learn much of anything new.

Goulson does spice up his writing by featuring insect interludes between chapters, but it seems that he was going for choosing particularly bizarre insects, as opposed to helping to build empathy with the insect world.

The book goes off the rails about three quarters of the way through, when Goulson decides to write a short piece of fiction about his grandson in 2080 on the 3:00am garden watch shift with his rifle. For a book that is supposedly about insect, it feels to me myopically anthropocentric. This chapter felt like something out of "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy. Now, if Goulson had wanted to write a piece of fiction from the perspective of the insect kingdom (and he wouldn't even need to choose a future date to come up with some chilling material), I would be entirely up for that, but this chapter simply has no place in a book supposedly about insects.

Then Goulson moves into climate change, as well as a series of recommendations to a wide range of actors. The bit on climate change feels like it is taking cues from Al Gore's, "An Inconvenient Truth," and feels terribly outdated. And then the recommendations come across as overly prescriptive and, again, not something to put in a book. Goulson should be making recommendation, but these recommendations should be in media targeted to the audiences he's speaking two, such as white paper, interviews, etc.

Yes—the insect apocalypse is very much upon us, and I encourage you to research the subject. But agonizing over the future of humanity and climate change won't do anything for insects. At moment, Goulson does mention that insect matter in their own right, but this book does not make such a case.… (mer)