Underbug

An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology

By: Lisa Margonelli

Narrated by: Christina Moore

Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins

Publisher's summary

The award-winning journalist Lisa Margonelli, national best-selling 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 10 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.

©2018 Lisa Margonelli (P)2018 Recorded Books

Could have been a great book with good editor.

Reads like honeysuckle. Very uncoordinated. Not arranged in any way. Jumps from one time frame /topic to another.

Subject itself is very engaging. Author obviously knowledgeable, committed scientist / person.

I finally gave up. I'd like to listen a heavily revised support subsequent version

Blind Termites hold the keys, we make our future blindly

A tale of survival, a musing of the difficulty to capture reality, a thoughtful analysis of the limits of technology, the consequences of not thinking through its consequences and a stark warning of the dehumanization of “us” through autonomous weapons. Exhilarating and depressing.

Brain candy

This is a fantastic foray into a foreign world that reveals so much about science and humanity. The author is witty, thorough and kind. She makes a strong case for the deep paradigm shifting gain we make from the study of termites. This is fun engaging and mind expanding.

Started Strong

This was intensely fascinating at first, then nothing happened! It could have been shorter with more info relating to the title. I did find the author's relationships with and descriptions of the scientists to be intriguing, but I felt it was another story, another book entirely.

A Heavy Lift Lightened By Many Legs

Lisa Margonelli diligently pursues where her subject leads her, to the arcania of living systems, a swarm intelligence perspective on neuroscience - "perhaps this" rather than some "just so" for children.

Where the topic get's thick she sustains the narrative with wit & human warmth, including a view into that peculiar world, academia & it's oddball geniuses. It's tough going variously, tho surely less so than for the scientists puzzling the topic out.

I mean, I too didn't rewind at her discussion of diploid chromosomes (termites & humans) vs the half diploid honeybee - familar ground from my local beekeepers association. But hard facts are hardly an authors "fault" vs readers who'd rather she'd just given Jiminy Cricket a new cartoon - with a smart phone & a updated beat.

If you can't stand the kitchen go Uber some Burger King.

John McPhee faced similar from an early editor, which McPhee addressed by baring down on him until he acquiesced to the master.

Spoiled by Wanderings Into Politics

Only limited information about termites. The author has the usual scattered diatribes against modernity and the way humans ruin the natural world.