#5: Eddie Dunbar on Getting People Excited about Insects, and Building an Online Community

Eddie Dunbar is an entomologist, the Founder and President of the Insect Sciences Museum of California and Adjunct Professor at Merritt College. With 38,000 species of insects in California alone, we need people like Eddie to help make sense of it all.

Eddie’s passion is to engage the public with insects so they can understand how they fit in our environment. Through the Insect Sciences Museum of California, Eddie promotes this engagement through numerous events such as “Bug Camps” and bioblitzes, and online through a popular Facebook group. The museum has portable displays, a large insect collection, and provides thorough field guides to parks of the Bay Area at bugpeople.org. In fact, Eddie and his volunteers have embarked on an immense project - creating an Insects of the San Francisco Bay Area virtual field guide.

Eddie’s unique background, including working with the UC Berkeley cooperative extension and researching pesticides, allows him to uniquely engage the public, who often see insects through the lens of pest control. Eddie has years of experience helping people change their views and understand the wide array of ecosystem services insects provide.

In this episode we talk about Eddie’s unique journey that led to the founding of the museum, his methods and tactics for engaging people online and in person, methods to create virtual field trips using Google Earth, ISMC’s projects, and how others can participate in ISMC or launch similar projects of their own.

Full show notes are on naturesarchive.com

Music Credits:
Opening: Fearless First by Kevin MacLoed
Closing: Beauty Flow by Kevin MacLoed
https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/