UPEI hosts public lecture about use of insects as weapons of war on July 22
Assassin bugs that eat away the flesh of prisoners, plague-infested fleas, disease-carrying lice, bee bombs-the stuff of science fiction, you say? Not true!
Award-winning science writer Jeffrey A. Lockwood will give a public lecture about the use of insects as weapons of war on Wednesday, July 22, 2009, from 3 to 4:30 p.m. in the Wanda Wyatt Lecture Theatre (Room 104), K.C. Irving Chemistry Centre at UPEI.
Lockwood has recently published a book called Six-legged Soldiers, exploring the many ways in which insects have been used as weapons of war, terror and torture, from ancient times to the present day.
In his book, Lockwood takes a comprehensive look at the role of insect-borne disease in changing the course of major battles--from the development of 'bee bombs' in the ancient world to the trenches of World War I. He explores insect warfare programs used during World War II: airplanes dropping plague-infested fleas, facilities rearing tens of millions of hungry beetles to destroy crops, and prison camps staffed by doctors testing disease-carrying lice on inmates. During the Cold War, secret government operations involved the mass release of specially developed strains of mosquitoes on an unsuspecting American public.
He reveals how easy it would be to use of insects in warfare and terrorism today; they are locally available, easy to produce and disseminate, and capable of staggering rates of reproduction and of wreaking economic, environmental and social havoc. In 1989, for instance, domestic ecoterrorists extorted government officials and wreaked economic and political havoc by threatening to unleash the notorious medfly on California's crops.
Lockwood taught entomology at the University of Wyoming for 20 years during which he wrote 100 scientific and scholarly papers on the ecology and management of grasshoppers and locusts. He is currently a professor of natural sciences and humanities at that university, teaching and researching in the areas of nature and spiritual and religious writing, environmental justice, natural resource ethics and the philosophy of ecology.
His writing has been included in the popular anthology Best American Science and Nature Writing, and he has won both a Pushcart Prize and the John Burroughs Award. He is also author of Grasshopper Dreaming: Reflections on Killing and Loving, A Guest of the World and Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect that Shaped the American Frontier.
The lecture is sponsored by UPEI, the Brigadier Milton F. Gregg, VC, Centre for the Study of War and Society at the University of New Brunswick (Fredericton), and the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies.
