How literary art can help us value insect conservation

Our Earth is home to an estimated 5.5 million species of insects, with only one fifth of these named. Considered as the most diverse animals, these creatures account for about 80% of them. Sometimes beautiful, often weird, but always fascinating, they offer immeasurable services to our ecosystems, alternately pollinating plants, keeping pests at bay, removing waste and providing food to humans and wildlife.

They may also be the least loved beings of the animal kingdom – something which comes to light when we lavish attention on larger and cuter animals threatened by climate change, such as polar bears and pandas, and ignore the smaller creatures among us. But with 500,000 species facing extinction, scientists are sounding the alarm over an insect apocalypse.

There are many ways we can avoid this, but perhaps the first – and most counter-intuitive – step should be reassessing our relationship to insects. As a poet and scholar, I believe art and literature can lend a hand.

Cameroon’s vanishing bees

Growing up in my native Mbesa (Mbessa) Kingdom in anglophone Cameroon, insects such as carpenter bees, honey bees, wasps, hill beetles, dung beetles, dust bugs, dragonflies and grasshoppers were everywhere. But today, they’re much harder to come by.

This inspired me to reflect on the decline of insects in Mbesa, focusing on how art – particularly literature – can tackle mass insect extinction. In a multimedia essay that blends analysis, poetry and video, I make the case for African arts and literature as powerful tools in the fight against this crisis.

My poem, “Remembering Big Bees in Mbesa”, captures the relationships we as children had with different kinds of carpenter bees.

When we were young, we had many types of bees.
When dry seasons powdered the earth with dust,
there were big yellowish bees – ndehse bangnese,
those not social to live in colonies, but as couples,
that burrowed into dry soft wood in the bushes,
and made a sweet yellow paste which we harvested
when we went to fetch wood. We often dated girls by
offering them the sweet paste. Sometimes we ignorantly
roasted and enjoyed their bulbous larvae back home.
Because they never stung us, we would catch some alive,
bring them home, tie to long thread pieces & fly as planes.
There were also big black bees – ndehse fingnese,
that burrowed into planks and wood on our roofs.
They also made a sweet yellow paste,
but we couldn’t destroy houses to harvest it,
except when our fathers had to renovate.
Facilitated by noisy zinc sheets on roofs,
they sometimes became boisterous bands,
humming gentle melodies from their burrows
to entertain us by day, troubling our sleep some nights.

Insects have long appeared in literature worldwide, but they’re often demonised, especially malaria-causing mosquitos in tropical regions in Africa and Asia. This is reflected in the work of poets such as Cameron Conaway and myself.

The poem “Remembering Big Bees in Mbesa” offers a different perspective, celebrating the positive and cultural memories tied to insects. This fits into a literary tradition of elevating insects, especially as biodiversity declines. Insects inspire lyricism in 17th-century English poetry, evoke wonder in South African writer J.M. Coetzee’s literary universes and are consumed as food in In Koli Jean Bofane’s seminal novel “Congo Inc.”.

Insects have also held important roles as metaphors in proverbs and in oral traditions from around the world. For instance, an indigenous Mbesa proverb says you cannot snatch away a fowl’s insect (wa ka wa boa fi antayn a ngve), which means that the powerful cannot seize the belongings of the weak. Art can rekindle our connection to these vital, yet often overlooked, species – helping to raise awareness and promote their conservation.

The arts and the beauty of insects

It’s true that some insects aren’t easy on the eyes. Earthworms, often dismissed as ugly and slimy, are a prime example. Yet, even these creatures can be celebrated through art and literature. My poem, “Beautiful Earthworms”, highlights their critical role in fertilising soil and nourishing plants. Their beauty must be appreciated with the mind.

Here are the first three stanzas from the poem:

Soft slimy creatures,
You glide underground –
Escorting water and nitrogen,
Distributing nutrients to plants
Which feed us, but some of us measure
Your beauty with their eyes, not with their minds.

Fragile flexing creatures,
You burrow into the ground –
Impregnating the soil for our good,
Toiling tirelessly as natural engineers
To sustain lives, but some of us measure
Your worth with emotions, not with eco-metres.

While some of us burn fuels, the earth warms;
Some others spray into extinction our worms.
Exterminating you leaves us and others sunken
As the scramble for capital keeps us drunken.
No doubt we destroy the earth looking for beauty
And we forget that a healthy earth may be ugly.

The message is clear: “Whether in Mbesa or elsewhere, one of the ways to re-establish our harmonious relations with Mother Earth is to learn or relearn to admire creatures that were hitherto perceived as ugly or nasty.”

To combat the ecological damage caused by capitalism and climate change, we need fresh metaphors and narratives that honour these vital, overlooked beings.

The arts as advocacy for insects

Arts and literature play a crucial role in advocating for climate change action and biodiversity conservation, particularly in raising awareness about the plight of insects. In my recent article, through poems and videos, I emphasise the urgent need to protect various insect species from extinction.

This advocacy – both mine and that of other artists – also condemns the growing use of harmful chemicals like herbicides, insecticides and pesticides in both subsistence and commercial agriculture, not only in Mbesa Kingdom but across Cameroon and the world. These chemicals are significant contributors to the decline of insects as part of the ongoing sixth mass extinction of global biodiversity.

The arts can also mobilise indigenous practices, such as pouring libations and other cleansing rituals in Mbesa for ancestral and spiritual appeasement, to promote insect and biodiversity conservation. Along with using environmental education, I urge traditional authorities like the King (Fon) and the Traditional Assembly (Kwifon/Kfifoyn) to ban harmful chemicals and perform rituals to mitigate the damage already done to the Earth.

Moving forward

Looking ahead, I recommend expanding efforts to help combat insect extinction. Collective initiatives such as anthologies, artistic contests and prizes are vital to raising awareness.

I’m currently editing a forthcoming bilingual English-French poetry anthology on climate change and ecological issues in the Congo Basin. Work in this anthology evokes and celebrates insects such as bees, worms and flies. In a recent contest, readers of The Guardian selected the earthworm as invertebrate of the year. More initiatives like this should emerge in support of our shared Earth and its endangered insects.

We must combine arts, literature and environmental science to advocate for conservation as insect extinctions accelerate. Given insects’ critical role in ecosystems, this is not just a scientific issue – it’s a cultural one, too.