Heteroptera: The Beautiful and the Other, or Images of a Mutating World

by Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, Christine Luisi (Translator)

Since 1987, drawing and painting directly from nature, Cornelia Hesse-Honegger has fought a one-woman campaign against the scientific establishment to show that artificial radioactivity, whether at high or low levels of fallout, is mutilating the insect and plant life that relate directly to genetic damage sustained by humans living under the same conditions. Following the path of the fallout from the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in the Ukraine in 1986, she has collected bug and leaf specimens from sites in Sweden, Switzerland, and around the Chernobyl power plant itself. She has also studied insect and plant life around Sellafield in England, and at Three Mile Island in the United States. In every case, she has produced exquisite watercolors and drawings which record the malformations and growths she has found in meticulous detail, and the beauty of her art work only makes our understanding of the damage more acute. This is a brave and deeply political book which should be read by anyone concerned with the future development of life on the planet from the smallest bug in the garden to our children, and to their children after them.

310 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2001

Reviews

[Pascale · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book offers some amazing theories about the necessity to merge drawing/observation and scientific method using the author/illustrator's own experience as a scientific illustrator observing bugs in Switzerland before and after the nuclear meltdown at the Chernobyl power plant in Belarus. It's amazing!