9. Locust History for Future Teachers: A Relational Approach to California’s Environmental Principles and Concepts

• In Event: Nature-connectedness and the More-than-human in Environmental Education - Environmental Education SIG Structured Poster Session

Abstract

For millenia, the Rocky Mountain Locust, which went extinct in the early 1900s, was a keystone species from its homelands in the arid altitudes of the eastern Rocky Mountains and across the vast grasslands of the North American plains. The biomass of its swarms could equal that of the equally impressive herds of native bison, and the locusts served important ecological metabolic functions across the entire prairie ecosystem from as far south as Texas to the northern reaches of Manitoba. In the years after the American Civil War, as settler colonial land grabs and agricultural transformations exploded across the plains, Rocky Mountain Locust swarms threatened to derail the colonial project, making them a direct target of scientific and political campaigns designed to exterminate them. While these efforts were not themselves successful in causing the locusts’ final demise, the larger systemic transformations wrought by the colonizing process spelled the end for this remarkable insect by the time the century turned (Lockwood, 2005; Sorensen, 1995).

Author

• Jeannette Vaught, California State University - Los Angeles