While serving as a missionary to Madagascar with my family in the 1980s and 90s, I witnessed at least two locust swarms. On one level I was fascinated by the spectacle of a good portion of the sky suddenly becoming black with a thick cloud of locusts. There was something eerily beautiful about the shimmering light that managed to pass through the swarm to the ground as the insects passed overhead. Even a small swarm may cover several square miles of sky and weigh thousands of tons. Locusts eat the equivalent of their own weight in a day, and, driven by the winds, a swarm can travel some 300 plus miles a day during the late afternoon and evening. The largest swarm on record covered 400 square miles, consisting of approximately forty billion locusts!
However, I knew that my detached, acade…