Linda Wiener

Santa Fe, NM

Linda Wiener has a Ph.D. in entomology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.  She worked as a post-doctoral fellow in the Linguistics Department at Harvard, and also curated insects at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University.  Since 1985, she has been a tutor at St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico where she teaches "great books" throughout their liberal arts curriculum. She also runs a consulting business, called The Bug Lady which involves a variety of activities including survey work for the New Mexico state parks and conservation organizations and working with small scale organic farmers in Nicaragua, Thailand, Mexico, India, and Hopi. She has two recent books, "Leaving us to Wonder, with Eric Ramsey which is a critique of scientism and an offering of alternative and complementary ways to think about nature and our place in it and "The Theater of Insects" with photographer Jo Whaley.

I abandoned academic science because of the narrowness of the scientific view of nature.  Some aspects of nature are captured adequately through scientific research, but much more is missed.  In particular, all those "anthropomorphic" traits that we supposedly project onto nature are rejected as subjective fancies.  I believe this to be wrong headed.  I am investigating the psychological, mythological, and aesthetic traits we find in nature as aspects that all organisms share (after all a beetle or bird is as much a child of nature as I am).

→ The Theater of Insects  by Linda Wiener, Jo Whaley and Deborah Klochko

→ Leaving Us To Wonder: An Essay On The Questions Science Can't Answer by Linda Wiener and Ramsey Eric Ramsey

2010, 2012 and 2014 Participant