Bethany Brookshire: Rethinking “pests” and the ways they challenge power
Green Dreamer: Seeding change towards collective healing, sustainability, regeneration
Kaméa Chayne
4.8 • 694 Ratings
🗓️ 17 September 2024
⏱️ 53 minutes
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Summary
What does it mean that the labeling of “pests” often relate to how they challenge power and order? How do the ways that “pests” are often targeted and managed further exacerbate socio-environmental injustices? And how might we learn to relate with animals deemed “out of place” beyond the subjective framing of “pests” altogether?
In this episode, we are honored to discuss all things related to “pests” with Bethany Brookshire, an award-winning freelance science journalist and author of the 2022 book Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I have a quick but important ask. As you're probably aware, Green Dreamer is an independent |
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| 0:53.8 | What I found really interesting when I was |
| 0:56.7 | studying and researching for this book was to learn that, you know, obviously different |
| 1:03.5 | languages have different words for pest, but not all languages do, because not all cultures |
| 1:10.7 | have a word for pest, because not all cultures have a concept of an animal that meets that definition. |
| 1:33.1 | You're listening to Green Dreamer, and I'm your host, Kamehashane. |
| 1:46.0 | Today we are joined by Bethany Brookshire, an award-winning freelance science journalist, and author of the 22 book, Pests, How Humans Create Animal Villains. |
| 1:52.9 | With a PhD in physiology and pharmacology, she is fascinated by the way humans perceive the environment and their place in it. |
| 1:54.9 | And she also writes on human-animal conflict, ecology, environmental science, and neuroscience. |
| 2:05.7 | According to the Oxford English Dictionary, as every college essay since the beginning of time has |
| 2:12.2 | begun, the OED usually rates the word pest back to the 14th century, where it is from the French pest, P-E-S-T-E, which means plague or pestilence, and usually referred to illness. |
| 2:29.5 | And then began to refer to pests as individuals. And it usually was referring to smaller animals. |
| 2:38.4 | So mice, but also locusts, flies, things like that. Until about the 16th or 17th centuries, |
| 2:47.2 | we were talking about larger animals that bothered people, which could include, |
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