The award-winning journalist Lisa Margonelli, national bestselling
author of Oil on the Brain: Petroleum's Long, Strange Trip to Your
Tank, investigates the environmental and economic impact termites
inflict on human societies in this fascinating examination of one of
nature's most misunderstood insects.
Are we more like termites than we ever imagined? In Underbug, the
award-winning journalist Lisa Margonelli introduces us to the enigmatic
creatures that collectively outweigh human beings ten to one and consume
$40 billion worth of valuable stuff annually--and yet, in Margonelli's
telling, seem weirdly familiar. Over the course of a decade-long
obsession with the little bugs, Margonelli pokes around termite mounds
and high-tech research facilities, closely watching biologists,
roboticists, and geneticists. Her globe-trotting journey veers into
uncharted territory, from evolutionary theory to Edwardian science
literature to the military industrial complex. What begins as a natural
history of the termite becomes a personal exploration of the unnatural
future we're building, with darker observations on power, technology,
historical trauma, and the limits of human cognition.
Whether in Namibia or Cambridge, Arizona or Australia, Margonelli turns
up astounding facts and raises provocative questions. Is a termite an
individual or a unit of a superorganism? Can we harness the termite's
properties to change the world? If we build termite-like swarming
robots, will they inevitably destroy us? Is it possible to think without
having a mind? Underbug burrows into these questions and many
others--unearthing disquieting answers about the world's most underrated
insect and what it means to be human.
