Lesson Plan
During a recent guest seminar, while discussing the politics of respiratory dependencies, a graduate student abruptly interrupted my remarks on the so-called insect apocalypse to ask: “Does biodiversity even really matter anyway?” (Although it was decidedly not a rhetorical question, I hereby report the incident in italics because I want you, dear reader, to focus on it rather intently.) Perhaps he thought my concerted plea for attention to the entomoafaunal extinctioncrisis—which follows from decades of human-insect extermination fantasies, while anticipating numerous other kingdoms, including that imagined kingdom of human dominion over all others, collapsing into oblivion—was simply some kind of granola-infused, herbal-minded moralizing about how students in the graduate school of design ought to care, or care more, about what we so often and so casually call nature.