Insect Forms and Patterns Exploring the Language of Nature

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.

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.

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 Metamorphosis of Plants written with Jochen Bockemühl (Novalis Press, 1995), Eco-Geography (Lindisfarne Books, 2001), and his magnum opus Metamorphosis: Evolution in Action (Adonis Press, 2009) have been translated into English.