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Titre:
Bee

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The bee is not a domestic animal, yet our relationship with this creature is one of the longest-standing between humanity and any other species. Since the earliest times the unique manufacturing and architectural abilities of the bee and its remarkable social organization have been regarded as miraculous. Because of this ancient relationship, bees always carry profound cultural meanings which can tell us much about who we are. Bees are also the subject of an enormous body of legend throughout the temperate world; no less extraordinary is the natural history of the bee, and the ways in which its biological and social organization have been adapted and encouraged by mankind in search of honey. Claire Preston’s Bee follows the natural and cultural history of our relationship with the bee and the development of these legends, from ancient political descriptions of the bee to Renaissance debates about monarchy, and the accompanying scientific discoveries about insects, to the modern conversion of the virtuous, civil bee into the dangerous swarm of the Hollywood horror flick, and finally to the melancholy recognition that the scientific study of bee behavior gives us a warning to beware our own awful technologies of destruction.

Titre:
Les rats

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l'ouvrage aborde les apects biologiques, scientifiques et culturels. Photographies de Nicolas Lenartowski.

Titre:
Corbeaux

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Le corbeau semble un signe inscrit à l'encre noire sur nos paysages. Un signe élégant, marchant posément au sol, s'envolant sans effort et glissant sur le monde. Signe de malheur, parfois, puisqu'il est à l'occasion charognard et a toujours suivi les hommes sur les champs de bataille, à travers les catastrophes. Mais aussi signe de vie. Dans de nombreuses traditions, des Chinois aux Indiens Hopi, la présence du corbeau est interprétée comme un présage heureux. Chez les anciens Grecs, sa parade nuptiale et ses mœurs fidèles lui valaient d'être invoqué comme gage d'amour conjugal. Et partout, son intelligence remarquable a intrigué, exaspéré, étonné ou charmé les humains. Ce livre explore les traces des corvidés (corneilles, corbeaux et pies) dans la mémoire et les cultures du monde, dévoilant les multiples formes du lien entre les hommes et ces oiseaux si fascinants.

Titre:
Rat

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The rat has been described as the shadow of the human. From ancient times it spread via the routes of commerce and conquest to eventually inhabit almost every part of the world. Its impact on history has been enormous in terms of the damage done through plague and disease, the destruction of agricultural produce, and the infestations of cities. At the same time the rat has provided science with a huge resource for experimentation. This highly adaptable, fertile and intelligent creature is almost universally loathed, but there are cultures in which it is revered, even deified. This book traces the history of the human relationship with rats from the first archaeological finds to the genetically engineered rats of the present day, describing its role in the arts and sciences, religion and myth, psychoanalysis and medicine. The author includes wide-ranging examples of the rat’s appearance: in literature – 'The Pied Piper'; Beatrix Potter stories, 'The Wind in the Willows'; in culture – Victorian rat-and-dog baiting pits, its popularity as a pet, even the subject of a ’70s pop song; folklore – it was a good luck symbol in ancient Rome, symbol of cunning in Chinese mythology; and psychoanalysis – Freud’s Rat Man, for example. The book also seeks to answer two problems raised by the complexity of human attitudes to the rat. The first concerns how it was that the rat came to be seen not just as verminous, but also as being particularly despised for being so – more so, in fact, than other parasitic animals. The second concerns the manner in which human attitudes to the rat can be so contradictory, when admiration for its abilities are set against this idea of hatred. The rat can be found at the heart of human preoccupations with hygiene, sexuality and appetite, and exists as a perverse totem for the worst excesses of human behaviour. In 'Rat', Jonathan Burt provides a fascinating account of this animal in history, myth and culture.

Titre:
Crow

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Though people generally do not think of them in such terms, crows are remarkably graceful: from the tip of a crow’s beak to the end of its tail is a single curve, which changes rhythmically as the crow turns its head or bends toward the ground. Foraging on their long, powerful legs, crows appear to glide over the earth; they take flight almost without effort, flapping their wings easily, ascending into the air like spirits. Nevertheless, the whiskers around their beaks and an apparent smile make crows, in a scruffy sort of way, endearingly ‘human’. In a vast range of cultures from the Chinese to the Hopi Indians, crows are bearers of prophecy. Because of their courtship dances and monogamous unions, the Greeks invoked crows at weddings as symbols of conjugal love. Crows are among the most ubiquitous of birds, yet, without being in the least exotic, they remain mysterious. This book is a survey of crows, ravens, magpies and their relatives in myth, literature and life. It ranges from the raven sent out by Noah to the corvid deities of the Eskimo, to Taoist legends, Victorian novels and contemporary films. It will be of interest to all people who have ever been intrigued, puzzled, annoyed or charmed by these wonderfully intelligent birds.

Titre:
Cockroach

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The cockroach could not have scuttled along, almost unchanged, for two hundred and fifty million years – some two hundred and forty-nine before man evolved – unless it was doing something right. It would be fascinating as well as instructive to have access to the cockroach’s own record of its life on earth, to know its point of view on evolution and species domination over the millennia. Such chronicles would perhaps radically alter our perceptions of the dinosaur’s span and importance – and that of our own development and significance. We might learn that throughout all these aeons, the dominant life form has been, if not the cockroach itself, then certainly the insect. Attempts to chronicle the cockroach’s intellectual and emotional life have been made only within the last century when a scientist titled his essay on the cockroach ‘The Intellectual and Emotional World of the Cockroach’, and artists as radically different as Franz Kafka and Don Marquis created equally memorable cockroach protagonists. At least since Classical Greece, authors have brought cockroach characters into the foreground to speak for the weak and downtrodden, the outsiders, those forced to survive on the underside of dominant human cultures. Cockroaches have become the subjects of songs (La Cucaracha), have competed in ‘roachraces’ and have even ended up in recipes. In this accessible, sympathetic and often humorous book, Marion Copeland examines the natural history, symbolism and cultural significance of this poorly understood and much-maligned insect.

Titre:
Ant

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Ants are legion: at present there are 11,006 species of ant known; they live everywhere in the world except the polar icecaps; and the combined weight of the ant population has been estimated to make up half the mass of all insects alive today. When we encounter them outdoors, ants fascinate us; discovered in our kitchen cupboards, they elicit horror and disgust. Charlotte Sleigh’s 'Ant' elucidates the cultural reasons behind our varied reactions to these extraordinary insects, and considers the variety of responses that humans have expressed at different times and in different places to their intricate, miniature societies. Ants have figured as fantasy miniature armies, as models of good behaviour, as infiltrating communists and as creatures on the borderline between the realms of the organic and the machine: in 1977 British Telecom hired ant experts to help solve problems with their massive information network. This is the first book to examine ants in these and many other such guises, and in so doing opens up broader issues about the history of science and humans’ relations with the natural world. It will be of interest to anyone who likes natural history or cultural studies, or who has ever rushed out and bought a can of Raid™.

Titre:
Capturing nature: 150 years of nature printing

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Hailed as the earliest precursor to photography, nature printing is the practice of using impressions from the surface of a natural object such as leaves, flowering plants, ferns, seaweed, snakes, and more to produce an image. Author Matthew Zucker has spent decades curating the most extensive collection of nature prints ever assembled, with more than 13,000 images across 120 rare and seminal works, including journals, published books, unique manuscripts, American currency, and instructional texts related to nature printing from 1733 to 1902. This volume explores Zucker's collection, allowing readers to see these nature prints presented side by side for the first time and enabling unique comparisons while creating a visually stunning journey through the developments over a 150-year period in printing methods, including photography with examples of cyanotypes.

Titre:
Plants have so much to give us, all we have to do is ask: Anishinaabe botanical teachings

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Mary Siisip Geniusz has spent more than thirty years working with, living with, and using the Anishinaabe teachings, recipes, and botanical information she shares in ''Plants have so much to give us, all we have to do is ask''. Geniusz gained much of the knowledge she writes about from her years as an oshkaabewis, a traditionally trained apprentice, and as friend to the late Keewaydinoquay, an Anishinaabe medicine woman from the Leelanau Peninsula in Michigan and a scholar, teacher, and practitioner in the field of native ethnobotany. Keewaydinoquay published little in her lifetime, yet Geniusz has carried on her legacy by making this body of knowledge accessible to a broader audience. Geniusz teaches the ways she was taught-through stories. Sharing the traditional stories she learned at Keewaydinoquay's side as well as stories from other American Indian traditions and her own experiences, Geniusz brings the plants to life with narratives that explain their uses, meaning, and history. Stories such as "Naanabozho and the Squeaky-Voice Plant" place the plants in cultural context and illustrate the belief in plants as cognizant beings. Covering a wide range of plants, from conifers to cattails to medicinal uses of yarrow, mullein, and dandelion, she explains how we can work with those beings to create food, simple medicines, and practical botanical tools.

Titre:
Lichens: toward a minimal resistance

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The result of several years of investigation carried out on several different continents, this remarkable book offers an original, radical, and, like its subject matter, symbiotic reflection on this common but mostly invisible form of life, blending cultures and disciplines, drawing on biology, ecology, philosophy, literature, poetry, even graphic art. What if lichens were at the heart of some of the most pressing and topical questions of our day? Does the fact that they can live everywhere, even in very harsh environments, that they persist when almost all other traces of life have disappeared, mean that, despite their fragility, lichens are a force of resistance?