Blessed "Pests" of the Beloved West: An Affectionate Collection on Insects and Their Kin



	"Grasshopper" © Edie Dillon/Native West Press; "Centipede" © Matt Welter/Native West Press; other images © Terril L. Shorb. Cover design by Amanda Summers.

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Description

Edited by Yvette A. Schnoeker-Shorb & Terril L. Shorb
144 pages, with photos and art

$9.95 (Plus $5.65 P&H)
ISBN: 0-9653849-3-4

ISBN13: 978-0-9653849-3-3
Status: Currently available

Blessed "Pests" of the Beloved West is not a cute book. If sweet stories and poems about cuddling with caterpillars, flirting with flies, and talking with ticks were expected, we apologize for our title being misleading. Rather, this is an adventurous book, and the reader is invited to come along on an unusual exploration. Within this book are the works of people from many different fields of expertise. Many of the contributors within this collection have had intimate experiences, not always intentionally, with some of our least loved, little, pesky participants in this strange and mysterious condition we all share called life. This book includes essays by Elizabeth Bernays, Stephen R. Kellert, Joanne E. Lauck, Jeffrey A. Lockwood, Robert Michael Pyle, Harley G. Shaw, and others, as well as poetry by Antler, Lynne Bama, Carol N. Kanter, Sara Littlecrow-Russell, Philip Miller, Tim Myers, and many more. The life-forms addressed within this book (many of whom have counterparts in the eastern U.S., as well as in other parts of the world) are all endowed by our Western culture with the reputation of being, in one way or another, pests.

[Click here for Contributors/Complete Table of Contents (pdf)]

[Click here for Contributing Artists/Photographers (html)]

The contributors within this collection have in common an affection for life and a respect for natural biodiversity—and Earth's millions of years experience at balancing it. The writers and poets represent a diversity of disciplines from within the sciences, social sciences, arts, and education. Their works reflect a broad spectrum of approaches to understanding human relationships with some of our most disliked, little affiliates. The essays and poems serve to inspire mindfulness even when complexity and circumstances prevent solutions from being ideal. This book offers some strong doses of perspective related to a variety of insects and their kin who dwell within or whose regions extend to the American West. While these small creatures of occasional conflict may be deemed pests by our culture, they are, like all of us, members of the extended family of life that is Nature's true blessing.

—Adapted from the Introduction