On lanternflies, crops, and identity
Recently, I’ve been reading a lot in newspapers about the issue of the spotted lanternfly. This insect, originally from China, is considered — in the language of biological control — to be an “invasive species” in the US. They first arrived in Pennsylvania in modest numbers around 2014, but since then their numbers have proliferated wildly across a number of US states. Reporting on this species has been articulated along distinctly nationalistic even xenophobic, lines, and local and state officials alike have called on citizens to go out and “squish” these insects almost as an act of civic duty. Bar crawls have been organised around the activity of squishing lanternflies, it has been touted as a fun activity to enjoy with the family over the school holidays, and there is even an app, “Squishr,” which allows users to track their kills through a gamified interface. And, in 2022’s round-up of “best Halloween costumes,” I saw a fair amount of cardboard box wings painted with the spotted lanternfly’s distinctive markings. Often were these cardboard-clad “lanternflies” accompanied by two other revellers dressed as giant boots, poised for the squishathon to begin.
I know that this task pushed us to consider our relationships with plants, but I find the lanternfly media frenzy and its civic response to be really rather telling in this regard. The primary threat posed by the lanternfly is that it can cause damage to many of the agricultural crops upon which the US economy depends, such as apples, hops, and cherries. The insects suck the sap out of these plants, rendering them weak and vulnerable to infection. Many are fretting that these insects will soon reach the grapevines of California’s wine country and cause irreparable damage to its highly profitable economy. I cannot shake the feeling that these newspaper articles exhorting us, as good citizens of the US of A, to go out and “squish” lanternflies in vast numbers as a means of protecting the national economy/ecology and fortifying its borders against foreign threats (understood in a variety of different registers) might offer some measure of interface with notions of vegetation as a space for articulating nationalistic ideas. After all, it is the US crops that we are being called upon to protect by annihilating lanternflies in their droves — and yet this seems to have a strange crossover with preserving a sense of US identity.
This gets all the more confusing, of course, when we consider that many of these crops did not originate in these spaces in the first place, and were transplanted there by the currents of globalisation, colonialism, and imperialism. And the lanternflies were brought over, most likely, via the movements of global trade. So how can we understand the relationship between plants and the shifting borders of national identity in a time of environmental extremes? What is the role of civic duty in all this? And how do the transnational movements of insects impact a form of identity-building that is construed along dually ecological and political lines?
