Joshua Arnold: Bugging the Bug Man
Ada Lambert | February 2, 2023
The region surrounding Warren Wilson College (WWC) is one of the most biodiverse in North America. When Joshua Arnold, professor of sustainable agriculture, was looking to relocate from California during the growing intensity of wildfire seasons, WWC was the perfect place for him to begin his teaching career.
“I got here during the pandemic, so it was a crazy time,” Arnold said. “ I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley, and I started looking for jobs that could potentially take on a grad student that was not quite ready, and a lot of my work has been community and field based so I was looking for a place to go that would really value those things”
Despite the uncertainty involved in getting hired mid-pandemic, Arnold was able to begin teaching on campus soon after his interview. Most classes at the time were completely remote, but he was able to work with a handful of students in-person, which made the transition smoother for him.
“My first semester here, I taught agroecology, and the course arthropods and agriculture, which were both two courses that have really big field components,” Arnold said. “I had students that were here on campus, and then I had students that were remote that I would walk through what we were doing. It was this really high flex situation.”
Previous to Arnold’s teaching job at WWC, he started his pathway to agroecology in the social sciences.
“I was really interested in the socio-ecological aspects of why people make decisions in their environments,” Arnold said. “I really started the road that I was on from the perspective of being in the social sciences. I still love the social sciences. I love looking at patterns and human behavior and how people act and that's really integrated in the work that I still do.”
When Arnold met a professor teaching about agroecology, he instantly felt drawn to the subject, as it was a way to combine his love for social sciences with his interest in nature. He eventually went into field work to gain more hands-on experience with the practice.
“I helped out on the field of broccoli and buckwheat and vanilla beans, and I watched insects and counted them, I measured plants,” Arnold said. “During that time period, the thing that really pivoted me was the study of agroecology, and seeing this pathway towards a holistic study of agriculture.”
Even though Arnold enjoyed the social sciences, he felt like he was able to really make a difference with agroecology.
“It was the fact that there was something that I could literally do,” Arnold said. “In the social sciences, it's hard sometimes to see a way to change things. When I was there in the field looking at insects, I thought ‘oh, there's practices that I can study, implement, and will have a positive ecological impact on farming systems and people.’”
Since then, Arnold has found interest in other aspects of agroecological studies, like entomology (the study of insects) and arthropods (a specific group of insects and animals.)
“When I started teaching that arthropods and agriculture course, a lot of people were like, ‘hey, can you teach general entomology?’ and I was like, ‘I don't know if I can,’” Arnold said. “I'm an applied entomologist, I really know a lot about little wasps and about crop pests.”
Arnold started offering general entomology last semester; it was a big hit among students.
A part of the course has been to reconstruct the old insect collection in Witherspoon.
“When I started to get ready for the class, I opened it up, and I was like, ‘oh, boy, this thing is in bad shape,’” Arnold said. “I was excited to get things started back up and use general entomology as the method to do that.”
The collection was left unchecked for several years, so when Arnold went into the collection, many of the insects were disintegrated or missing.
“What happened to all the insect collections is that there's a whole suite of beetles that like to eat dead insects,” Arnold said. “So a decade in between people not really paying attention to all those dead insects that were hanging out in the collection, there was plenty of time for those beetles to get in there and have a nice lunch.”
Rebuilding the collection has been an exciting experience for both the students and Arnold because of the range of species that inhabit the campus. Arnold’s entomology course has provided an opportunity for students to show off their love for insects through specific studies and field work.
“I've got students right now doing their research projects who are looking at my parasitoid wasps that I brought here with me, spiders and how agricultural practices increase spider populations, I have people doing dung beetle work — so I've got all these folks that want to answer these interesting questions,” Arnold said. “I'm able to help guide them in a way that's holistic and help them get to the end of those projects that they want to do.”