Spotted Lanternflies

In Invasives: Unknitting Despair in a Tangled Landscape, Catherine Bush wonders "How can I, child of immigrants, with a long cultural history of colonial extirpation behind me, object to the presence of other invasives"? My research starts in a similar place of self-reflection and a pandemic-induced desire to listen more to the landscape around me. I spent past summers, like many in the Northeastern U.S., squashing spotted lanternflies. In thinking about these so-called invaders, I felt unable to shake a sense of odd kinship with them and it was this feeling that became a catalyst for looking into the relationship between the movement of people and the movement of our non-human kin. This led me to trace lineages of 'transplants', questioning why we often don't include European species like Apis Mellifera (honeybee) when talking about non-native species: "The familiar… honey producer Apis Mellifera … was brought over by European colonists as part of the ecological package in which they conquered and transformed the New World with Old World flora and fauna" Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Empowering Nature.

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