LOCUST

In prose as bright as a song, entomologist Lockwood relates the brief but devastating 19th-century reign of the Rocky Mountain locust, his research into its mysterious disappearance, and its impact on American history and science.

“They were the leitmotif of the Great Plains, as powerful a life force as the great herds of bison,” writes Lockwood (Natural Sciences and Humanities/Univ. of Wyoming; Grasshopper Dreaming, not reviewed). Locusts were mighty destructive too; the text has the ring of Jeremiah as the author describes swarms whose numbers dimmed the sun like an eclipse, the approach of the winged creatures sounding like a wildfire, the cascading bands of nymphs like waterfalls, as they scoured the earth, consuming everything from crops to tool handles to the clothes off a settler’s back. Lockwood also describes the extraordinary measures taken in attempts to control the insect, from days of prayer to a prototype of napalm, and the social transformation that the locust partly inspired: “the virtue of hard, honest work was supplanted by a new standard of worth.” (Money, of course.) The feeling of many in those days, Lockwood writes, was that locust plagues were divine chastisements for wickedness, and the wretched farmer had no one to blame but himself. Still, others of a more rationalistic nature sought answers elsewhere, and Lockwood introduces them with appealingly waggish humor: “A European artist-turned-farmer/writer-turned-entomologist teamed up with a Harvard zoologist-turned-physician-turned-entomologist and a country-lawyer-turned-minister-turned-entomologist to form the first U.S. Entomological Commission.” Then, inexplicably, the locusts were gone. Lockwood considers all the conjectures, including the roles of alfalfa and the extirpation of the bison, then tenders his own fieldwork on the matter, displaying the eye of a patient observer and the talents of a thoughtful, descriptive writer. His clearly articulated theory, as complex but lovely as a quadrille, has gained wide acceptance.

A smart piece of natural history that spills over into social, political, and scientific commentary.