Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect that Shaped the American Frontier

by adminEcology

Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect that Shaped the American Frontier

Language: English

Pages: 320

ISBN: 0465041671

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


In 1876, the U.S. Congress declared the locust “the single greatest impediment to the settlement of the country between Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains.” Throughout the nineteenth century, swarms of locusts regularly swept across the American continent, turning noon into dusk, devastating farm communities, and bringing trains to a halt. The outbreaks subsided in the 1890s, and then, suddenly—and mysteriously—the Rocky Mountain locust vanished. A century later, entomologist Jeffrey Lockwood vowed to discover why.Locust is the story of how one insect shaped the history of the western United States. A compelling personal narrative drawing on historical accounts and modern science, this beautifully written book brings to life the cultural, economic, and political forces at work in America in the late nineteenth century, even as it solves one of the greatest extinction mysteries of our time.

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To arrest Christians, Paul experienced the most unambiguous of epiphanies. The poor fellow was struck to the ground, blinded by a heavenly light, and heard the voice of God cry out, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” His attendants, who also heard the Almighty, led him the rest of the way to Damascus, where the voice said he would receive further instructions. And the rest is history. I can’t recall that there was an astonishing moment of “Eureka!” or a sudden realization of an impending.

Is a final, ironic connection between the bygone days when the Rocky Mountain locust descended on the pioneers, consuming the hard-earned fruits of their labor to fuel the life of the swarm, and modern times, when industrial agriculture descends upon the land, consuming vast quantities of oil to fuel our system of food production: The discovery of grasshopper bodies surfacing in glaciers was made possible by the rapid melting of these ice fields. Global warming is releasing the locusts from their.

Of the few international laws that seems to be both widely recognized and consistently enforced, perhaps because its provisions don’t really matter to the big issues of the modern world and the worst penalty for breaking the law is that everyone ignores you. Under this code, when a species has been mistakenly assigned two (or three or more) different names, the earliest given name is retained. Carolus Linnaeus, the Swedish-born Father of Taxonomy, had first named this creature migratoria in 1758.

The extermination of bison as a strategy for suppressing the Indians was never explicitly stated as an objective of the government, there can be no doubt that this aspect of the industry was well understood and heartily endorsed. In less than a century, the bison population in North America had been reduced to just 0.2 percent of its original size. By 1889, there were fewer than a thousand of these creatures left on the continent. The effects were far-reaching. With the bison no longer.

Extended to the early 1800s. We also hoped to discover whether outbreaks became more frequent with European settlement. Although the theory had been largely dismissed by force of rhetoric, there might have been something to Cantrall and Young’s contention that the irruptions were aggravated, maybe even caused, by human disturbances. Clever arguments and rebuttals are fine, but hard data were needed to refute various theories—and perhaps to develop a viable alternative case. The grant review.

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