A Humble Insect, the Quest for Knowledge, and Our Unnatural Future

“The proper study of mankind is man,” Alexander Pope famously wrote in 1733. But award-winning journalist Lisa Margonelli’s new book, Underbug: An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology, tells us that the proper study of mankind might very well be termites.

On its face, Underbug is a marvelously engaging work of science journalism that shows how termites have captured the imagination and efforts of scientists and engineers in fields as diverse as genomics, ecosystem restoration, energy production, and robotics. But in telling this tale of what science is learning about termites, Margonelli is really pursuing deeper questions about science and humanity itself, to ask, “How do we know what we know?” and even “How do we know who we are?” Underbug is a wise, funny, disquieting, and hopeful portrayal of how humanity’s quest for knowledge about the world around us is also a mirror on our inner selves.

Join Lisa Margonelli and National Public Radio science reporter Richard Harris in a discussion of Underbug, followed by a book signing. Books will be available for purchase.

Follow the conversation online using #Underbug and following@FutureTenseNow.

Lisa Margonelli is the author of Oil on the Brain: Petroleum's Long Strange Trip to Your Tank (2007). Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, New York Times online, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Wired, Discover, and Salon, among other publications. Formerly the director of the energy program at the New America Foundation, she has won an Excellence in Journalism award from the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists and a Sundance Fellowship. She now lives in Maine and is deputy editor of Zócalo Public Square.

Richard Harris has reported on science for National Public Radio since 1986, and is the author of Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions (2017). Harris has traveled to all seven continents for NPR, reporting from the South Pole, Beijing during the SARS epidemic, the center of Greenland, the Amazon rainforest, the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro (for a story about tuberculosis), and Japan to cover the nuclear aftermath of the 2011 tsunami. He has received the American Geophysical Union's 2013 Presidential Citation for Science and Society, shared the 2009 National Academy of Sciences Communication Award, shared a 1995 Peabody Award for reporting about the tobacco industry, and has received the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s science journalism award three times.