Ted Benton is professoremeritus in Sociology at the University of Essex, UK. His academic work has focused on integratingenvironmental issues into social scientific theory, and he is a long-timeenvironmental activist. Since childhood he has been a field-naturalist, with astrong interest in insects. He has travelled throughout Europe over the past 35years studying and photographing butterflies in their natural habitats. Inaddition to his academic publications he has authored or co-authored sevenbooks on natural history, including two award-winning volumes in the NewNaturalist series (Bumblebees (2006) and Grasshoppers and Crickets (2012).His photographs of European butterflies have appeared in numerous publications,and he is author (with artist Tim Bernhard) of The Easy Butterfly Guide (Aurum2006).
