Yellowjackets essay in print!

Yay! My essay on wasps has now been published in the fall issue of the Journal of Environmental Philosophy. At some point I'll make a pdf and post it, friends-locked, for the few of you who have expressed interest in reading it. Meanwhile, here's what guest editor Jim Hatley wrote about it in the introduction:

"Yellowjackets/Vespula vulgari, pensylvanica, germanica, maculifrons: In "Lessons Learned from Yellowjackets," psychologist-in-training eve_prime considers a series of increasingly nuanced moral insights achieved as she both experiences and researchers the behavior of yellowjackets in her everyday life. Yellowjackets, "at best a nuisance" when they appear among human beings, invariably provoke a response. For that reason alone, they provide an excellent opportunity not only to understand better the behavior of another species but also how we humans come to understand the significance of our own behavior. How we respond and how we understand our responses to another living entity are crucial, if we are to move beyond the axiological anthropocentrism bemoaned above by [Christian] Diehm. eve_prime's account points out how easily our misconceptions can distort our understanding of another living entity's behavior and lead in turn to false starts in our own inter-species behavioral repertoire. Perhaps more crucially, misunderstood behaviors lead to false empathy, to a misconstrual of the peculiar world of another living species, and so to poor etiquette on our part. Yellowjackets, it turns out, are neither merely friend nor foe but something more alarming and complex: their lives, so alien and yet somehow similar to our own, transcend our capacity to place them within our usual ethical schemes. If human empathy is to survive the approach of the yellowjacket, we must learn to see this other living entity beyond our usual reliance on facial cues, beyond our usual preoccupation with efficiency, even beyond our usual insistence on understanding. And certainly we must remember that we cannot escape accepting our part in a natural world that is inevitably to be shared with yellowjackets."