Insect Forms and Patterns Exploring the Language of Nature

<p>This book by Andreas Suchantke is about insects but it also opens up a door to realms that go beyond entomology. Suchantke focuses on the morphology of insects. He takes morphology in a broad sense to include not only their forms shapes patterns and colors but also their behaviors development and lifecycles. In other words he brings us back to our senses to the concrete and manifold appearances of beetles butterflies bees and their kin.</p><p>These sensible manifestations are for Suchantke a script a language of forms which we must learn to read. His work is not a schematic or comprehensive overview of entomology. It does not propose or defend a general theory model or hypotheses whereby we might explain this or that feature of insects. It is rather an exploration of the language of nature. He gives the reader not just new things to see but a new way of seeing; not just a panoply of interesting but mute or brute entomological facts but new living ideas. His hope is that by exploring and cultivating such living ideas we might learn to allow the appearances of insects to become their own language and to speak to us.</p><p>Andreas Suchantke (1933-2014) was born in Basel Switzerland. He was trained in zoology and botany at the universities of Munich and Basel. For nineteen years he taught natural sciences in the Waldorf school in Zurich and became increasingly involved in Waldorf teacher training in European and non-European countries. He travelled extensively with a focus on developing an ecological understanding of landscapes and the traditional cultures inextricably bound up with them. His research resulted in a number of books of which <em>Metamorphosis of Plants</em> written with Jochen Bockemühl (Novalis Press 1995) <em>Eco-Geography</em> (Lindisfarne Books 2001) and his magnum opus <em>Metamorphosis: Evolution in Action</em> (Adonis Press 2009) have been translated into English.</p>