Bethany Brookshire, in conversation with Harriet Ritvo, "Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains"

A squirrel in the garden. A rat in the wall. A pigeon on the street. Humans have spent so much of our history drawing a hard line between human spaces and wild places. When animals pop up where we don’t expect or want them, we respond with fear, rage, or simple annoyance. It’s no longer an animal. It’s a pest.
At the intersection of science, history, and narrative journalism, Pests is not a simple call to look closer at our urban ecosystem. It’s not a natural history of the animals we hate. Instead, this book is about us. It’s about what calling an animal a pest says about people, how we live, and what we want. It’s a story about human nature, and how we categorize the animals in our midst, including bears and coyotes, sparrows and snakes. Pet or pest? In many cases, it’s entirely a question of perspective.
Bethany Brookshire’s deeply researched and entirely entertaining book will show readers what there is to venerate in vermin, and help them appreciate how these animals have clawed their way to success as we did everything we could to ensure their failure. In the process, we will learn how the pests that annoy us tell us far more about humanity than they do about the animals themselves.
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Bethany Brookshire is an award-winning freelance science journalist and author. She writes on human-animal conflict, ecology, environmental science, and neuroscience. She is fascinated by the way humans perceive the environment and their place in it. Brookshire is a podcast host on the podcast Science for the People, and her work has appeared in Science News, Science News for Students, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Slate, The Guardian, The Atlantic and other outlets. She is based in Washington, D.C.
Harriet Ritvo is the Arthur J. Conner Professor of History Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research has focused on the history of natural history, the history of human relations with other animals, and environmental history, especially in Britain and the British empire. Her current work engages issues of wildness and domestication. Her books include The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (1987), The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (1997), The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism (2009), and Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Animals and History (2010).
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