The Smart Swarm: How Understanding Flocks, Schools, and Colonies Can Make Us Better at Communicating, Decision Making, and Getting Things Done

2010, Avery (Penguin Group)

What ants, bees, fish, and smart swarms can teach us about communication, organization, and decision-making…

The modern world may be obsessed with speed and productivity, but 21st-century humans actually have much to learn from the ancient instincts of swarms. A fascinating new take on the concept of collective intelligence and its colorful manifestations in some of our most complex problems, The Smart Swarm introduces a compelling new understanding of the real experts on solving our own complex problems relating to such topics as business, politics, and technology.

Based on extensive globe-trotting research, this lively tour from National Geographic reporter Peter Miller introduces thriving throngs of ant colonies, which have inspired computer programs for streamlining factory processes, telephone networks, and truck routes; termites, used in recent studies for climate-control solutions; schools of fish, on which the U.S. military modeled a team of robots; and many other examples of the wisdom to be gleaned about the behavior of crowds–among critters and corporations alike.

In the tradition of James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds and the innovative works of Malcolm Gladwell, The Smart Swarm is an entertaining yet enlightening look at small-scale phenomena with big implications for us all.

~~~

I’ve only just started reading The Smart Swarm, and am already enamored with it. Peter Miller writes in a pleasurable, intellectually stimulating manner. I’m not certain if we’ll be able to include a full  review in Terrain.org, but you shouldn’t wait for that, anyway. This is a book that should be on your list.

SB

Girl on a Bridge
Poems by Suzanne Frischkorn
Main Street Rag Publishing Co., 39 poems in 57 pages

“Suzanne Frischkorn is a fierce and fearless poet. In Girl on a Bridge, she first upends our dainty notions of girlhood and then leads us into the wilderness of violence, madness, fear, and love — and does so with beauty and tenderness.”
– Julianna Baggott

“Good citizens beware: Suzanne Frischkorn has let Girl on a Bridge loose on the world and she’s spreading the word about the furies of femininity and the madness of motherhood with its ‘stone weight of home.’ These poems burn holes on the fairy tale pages of domestic fantasy and uncover the treacherous (though more exciting) narratives of those women who dare stray from the path or, at the very least, who celebrate their desires: ‘What’s more flattering than being wanted by a mouth that waters?’ This book of finely-crafted verse holds up its poetry like a lovely razor blade.”
– Rigoberto Gonzalez

Read poetry by Suzanne Frischkorn appearing in Terrain.org Issue No. 18, and look for a review of Girl on a Bridge in our next issue, online in mid-September.

~~~

Venison: A Poem
By Thorpe Moeckel
Etruscan Press, 1 poem in 66 pages

“Food doesn’t get any more local, cosmic, primitive, tasty, or disturbing than in this book-length, lyrical-meditative poem. At stake are no less than the origins and mysteries of flesh and touch.”
– from the book back cover

“Thorpe Moeckel’s Venison is civilized and wild, like a life lived well, a barbaric yawp of pain and joy and true wonder at the brilliant ordinariness of a life lived close to the earth and close to the bone. Moeckel’s fine poetic is whetted on the visceral and cannily transcendental. Read it.”
– Christopher Camuto

“This book, a glorious and breath-taking incantation of the beauty to be found in killing for nourishment, spins into the realms of woods, home, family, and community. The language is dizzying, as beautiful as you’ll ever read.”
– Janisse Ray

Reading poetry by Thorpe Moeckel appearing in Terrain.org Issue No. 24 and Issue No. 24.

~~~

The Surfacing of Excess
Poems by Arianne Zwartjes
Winner of the 2009 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry
Eastern Washington University Press, 13 poems & 38 stitches in 87 pages

“These lively ‘eco-poems’ take the marvelous, but endangered, species called language on a lively quest for sustenance. Arianne Zwartjes contemplates mysteries, politics, emotions, and aesthetics, indulging us with a feast of realities. The ‘surfacing of excess’ turns out not to be a clever phrase, or a ruse, but the hard work that a beautiful mind accomplishes, thinking about life, in Zwartjes’s case, in an interlinked diction of science and religion, which resolves itself in a language of love.”
– Jane Miller

“Arianne Zwartjes’s thoughtful, playful poems map the surfaces of language, image, flight, and architecture. Reading The Surfacing of Excess is like removing the boring part of your skull and letting the sky abut your brain. Or like hanging around with the theoretical mathematicians’ guild, getting goofy, drinking wine by the jug, positioning geometries, speaking Greek. Ambitious, fragmented, and thinky in ways most poetry doesn’t even attempt, triangulating by stars including Weil, Carson, Plato, Calvino, and Heidegger, Zwartjes is a new breed of bird in a sky filled with sameness. Part descent, part descant, always vector, in her words, herein you’ll find ‘here / we know there is a mystery greater than beauty.;”
– Ander Monson

Read poetry by Arianne Zwartjes appearing in Terrain.org Issue No. 25.

The Original Green is about “the sustainability our ancestors knew by heart. Originally (before the Thermostat Age) they had no choice but to build green, otherwise people would not survive very long. The Original Green aggregates and distributes the wisdom of sustainability through the operating system of living traditions, producing sustainable places in which it is meaningful to build sustainable buildings. Original Green sustainability is common-sense and plain-spoken, meaning ‘keeping things going in a healthy way long into an uncertain future.’ Sustainable places should be nourishable because if you cannot eat there, you cannot live there. They should be accessible because we need many ways to get around, especially walking and biking because those methods do not require fuel. They should be serviceable because we need to be able to get the basic services of life within walking distance. We also should be able to make a living where we are living if we choose to. They should be securable against rough spots in the uncertain future because if there is too much fear, the people will leave. Sustainable buildings should be lovable because if they cannot be loved, they will not last. They should be durable because if they cannot endure, they are not sustainable. The should be flexible because if they endure, they will need to be used for many uses over the centuries. They should be frugal because energy and resource hogs cannot be sustained in a healthy way long into an uncertain future.”

The book is divided into four parts: What’s the Problem? (The Top 10 Problems with Our Current Green Efforts), What Can We Do? (The Top 10 Better Ways of Being Green), What’s the Plan? (The 8 Foundations of Sustainable Places & Buildings), and What Can I Do? (The Top 10 Things You can Do to be Green). It begins with an introduction by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Additionally, the 245 images in the book will be made available  on Mouzon’s Zenfolio site for download and use in presentations and the like.

With so much rhetoric on “green” and “sustainability,” narrow your focus and chances for success by picking up a copy of The Original Green. Learn more at www.originalgreen.org.

Settled in the Wild: Notes from the Edge of Town

By Claudia Broman

Along Maine’s coast there is a rural place where plants, animals, and people make up a community, where town flows into wild places, and where what is wild comes to town.  In Settled in the Wild: Notes from the Edge of Town, Susan Hand Shetterly shares a chronology of personal essays that depict experiences in that rugged place.

What is most striking about Settled in the Wild is Shetterly’s skill in describing community.  The people and wildness around her home are depicted in ways that demonstrate a way of life; even after two readings I could not find a single instance of anthropomorphism.  While each person and each creature is given the space to be their own, these individuals also contribute to an evolving system – a holistic way of communicating and existing with one another.

Shetterly marks time through the interactions she has with others, whether living in a rustic cabin with her husband and children, discovering a cricket “bite” with her son, rehabilitating and relating to a young raven, or appreciating a dead pine in a field.  Shetterly honors her revealed past through the equal attention she pays to the beautiful and the ugly.

The care with which Settled in the Wild is written is testament to the concern Shetterly has for place.  Her essays inspire consideration of what relationships exist in our own communities, what access to wildness we have, and how compassion can better connect us to the places where we live.  The essay collection is Shetterly’s first in 20 years, and it’s well worth the time to read.

~~~~

Claudia Broman lives in Ashland, Wisconsin. Her poetry has appeared in Writing Nature: An Annual of Fine Nature Writing and Drawing.

Telling it Real: The Best of Pilgrimage Magazine 2003-2008
Edited by Peter Anderson
Pilgrimage Press, 2009

In the world of environmental literature, there are only a handful of steadfast publications — those you know you can turn to for excellent literary work in poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, as well as enticing artwork. They work in part because of the strength of the editing team, in part because of the array of contributors, and in part because they speak to place. Pilgrimage Magazine, a small journal located in Colorado, is one such journal.

“I believe in the power of stories,” says former Pilgrimage editor Peter Anderson, “stories from the world’s great wisdom traditions; stories that help us to know home and place; stories that speak to the social justice issues of our time; stories that invite reflection; stories that can open, heal, and empower us; the kinds of stories that once led poet Robert Bly to describe Pilgrimage as ‘one of the finest journals in America.’”

Anderson’s last move before stepping back from his editing role at Pilgrimage was to assemble Telling it Real: The Best of Pilgrimage Magazine 2003-2008, and as you might imagine the collection sings. (Disclaimer: Terrain.org editor Simmons B. Buntin has an essay in the collection, “Ben’s Bells,” so he’s biased — but if you spend any time at all with this collection, you’ll acknowledge his bias is right on.)

Telling it Real is introduced by Peter Anderson and then divided into four sections: Story, Place, Spirit, and Witness. At first, you might think: Well, where are all the leading environmental writers? There’s no Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, or Alison Hawthorne Deming, for example. The writers mostly represent the American Southwest, and they represent it beautifully. They are, perhaps, lesser-known, and yet their work — like the anthology itself — is strong and image-filled and built on a passion for and sturdy relationship with the natural world. They include Kim Stafford, Rick Kempa, Pamela Uschuk, William Pitt Root, Reyes Garcia, Maria Melendez, William Stimson, and others.

Telling it Real can be difficult to locate — it’s not on Amazon.com, for example. But you can get it right here:

http://www.pilgrimagepress.org/telling-it-real.html

And we recommend you do.

Animal Logic, by Richard Barnes

Animal Logic
by Richard Barnes
with contributions by Susan Yelavich, Jonathan Rosen, and Mark Strand
Princeton Architectural Press, 2009

A buffalo stands horns to head with a man who is calmly vacuuming the snow-covered plains beneath its feet. A herd of plastic-wrapped zebras surrounds a giraffe, while a man on scaffolding above them paints a lovely trompe l’oeil sky. Photographer Richard Barnes has spent more than ten years documenting the way we assemble, contain, and catalog the natural world. His behind-the-scenes photographs are haunting reminders that there is nothing natural about a natural history museum.

Animal Logic, Barnes’s first monograph, collects four related species of his photographic work that touch on themes relevant to science, history, archaeology, and architecture. Through his lens sights and objects normally hidden from public view — half-installed dioramas, partially wrapped specimens, anatomical models, exploded skulls, and taxidermied animals in shipping crates — take on a strange beauty. Barnes peels back layers of artifice to reveal the tangle of artistry, craftsmanship, and curatorial decisions inside every lifelike diorama and meticulously arranged glass case. Animal Logic investigates both the human desire to construct artificial worlds for “the wild” and the haunting and poignant worlds the real wild constructs. Barnes’s camera freezes migrating starlings to reveal the visual poetry hidden inside their dense formations. His extraordinary photographs of birds’ nests constructed from detritus — string, plastic, milkweed, tinsel, hair, dental floss, pine needles — sculpturally embody our often complicated relationship with nature.

Animal Logic presents more than 120 of Barnes’s photographs and features texts by Jonathan Rosen of the New York Times, former poet laureate Mark Strand, and curator Susan Yelavich that explore the themes that emerge from Barnes’s unique body of work.

~~~

Animal Logic will be fully reviewed in the forthcoming issue of Terrain.org, “Virtually There,” publishing in mid-March.

Rope
by Alison Hawthorne Deming

From the publisher:

Alison Hawthorne Deming’s fourth collection of poems follows the paths of imagination into meditations on salt, love, Hurricane Katrina, Greek myth, an experimental forest, and the search for extraterrestrial life. These disparate interests are linked by the poet’s faith in art as an instrument for creating meaning, beauty, and continuity — virtues diminished by the velocity and violence of our historical moment. The final long poem, “The Flight,” inspired by the inclusive poems of A.R. Ammons, is a 21st century epic poised on the verge or our discovering life beyond Earth.

Quoth Christopher Cokinos, editor of Isotope and writer of poetry and prose:

“Alison Deming seems in this book like a poetic delta in which run the rivers of Walt Whitman, Muriel Rukeyser, May Swenson, and Frank O’Hara. This book pitches into chant, slides into talk, candles the self and finds the solitary paths we’re all on. ‘Mercy was a skill my hands would have to learn,’ she says — and poetry this fine is a form of mercy too, I think, an act of compassion, a gift.”

Sample poems (with audio):

Read (and listen to Alison Deming read) three poems from Rope also in the current issue of Terrain.org:

“Pandora on Prozac”
“Specimens Collected at the Clearcut”
“Glooscap in Wolfville”

Terrain.org micro review:

As the old adage goes, we live in interesting times — we always do, of course, and yet doesn’t it seem that with technology’s exponential growth, global climate change, globalization in general, and the profusion of literature and art that in fact we do live in the most interesting of times?  Literature and art, in fact, may be the best indicators, and if so, then Alison Deming’s newest collection of poems, Rope, is a bellwether.

Rope not only brings together an amazing array of topics — the publisher’s summary above points those out — but weaves those topics into politics, passion, and perspective wholly uniqe and yet universal. Folks who have read Deming’s poetry (or prose) know of her curiosity for and allegiance to the workings of our natural world, and beyond. What makes Rope so delightful, and so important, is how Deming crafts that curiosity: there’s both caution and candor, verve and nuance — always elegant, often pointed.

I think this is particularly true with Deming’s longer poems — “Definition of Disaster,” which takes a sort of artist/scientist systems approach to the after-effects of Hurricane Katrina; “The Andrews Forest Quintet,” a series of five poems written while at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest; and perhaps most surprisingly (and stunningly) “Works and Days,” a 45-part prose poem that ranges as only a true artist’s mind can.

The worry with such a far-ranging collection is that it could come across as scattershot — too much of everything, not enough of anything. But that’s not the case with Rope, because even the shorter poems fit like a cog into the larger system of the book. And the longer poems help bound the overall set, so that reading Rope is like following a pathway that meanders but maintains direction. The direction is not just forward but up — the mountains, the sky, the stars.

If we live in interesting times — and we certainly do — then Rope is a worthy and essential guide.

Evidence: Poems, by Mary Oliver
Beacon Press, 2009

From the book jacket:

Inspired by the familiar lines from William Wordsworth, “To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,” Evidence is a collection of 47 new poems on all of Mary Oliver’s classic themes. She writes perceptively about grief and mortality, love and nature, and the spiritual sustenance she draws from their gifts.

Ever grateful for the bounty that is offered to us daily by the natural world, Oliver is attentive to the mysteries it imparts. The arresting beauty she finds in rivers and stones, willows and field corn, the mockingbird’s “embellishments” or the last hours of darkness permeates her poems. Her newest volume is imbued through and through with that power of nature to, in Oliver’s words, “excite the viewers toward sublime thought.”

A Note from Terrain.org’s Editor

I’ve long been a fan of Mary Oliver, beginning with the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Primitive, which I consider one of the most influential volumes of American poetry, and one of the best. I picked it up while perusing poetry collections at the Boulder Bookstore, early in my own writing career. Since then, Oliver — along with A.R. Ammons — is the poet I’ve turned to the most for the pure joy of reading her poetry, for inspiring my own, and for sharing.

But I admit I received her newest collection with some apprehension, because I’ve been mostly  disappointed in her newest work. While many of the poems are still wonderful, I’ve sensed a decline in her work — as well as a reliance on a formula that worked so well in her first several books but now feels, well, formulaic.

My take, then, on Evidence? I think it is her strongest book in quite some time. No doubt several of the poems work even as they fall into that predictable formula. But I find the most pleasure in the longer poems of the collection, most notably “To Begin With, the Sweet Grass,” the title poem, and “At the River Clarion.” Oliver seems to be expanding her notable repertoire here, and doing so in new, skillful, and exciting ways. To that I say: bravo — Mary Oliver is back!

Evidence is a must-have for any Oliver fan, of course. But I think it is also an essential book for any lover of poetry. It is wide-ranging in form, relentless in its questioning: searing, aspiring, lovely.

About Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, was recently awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Tufts University. Her 18 previous books of poetry include The Truro Bear and Other Adventures, Red Bird, and New and Selected Poems, Volume One and Volume Two. She lives in Privincetown, Massachusetts.

New Anthology Offers Personal Stories and Reflections on Global Warming from New and Established Writers and Photographers

Unique collaboration between nonprofit and publisher will make interactive book accessible to millions of Americans for free.

NEW YORK – A new generation of writers and photographers with a personal connection to global warming are taking inspiration from Henry David Thoreau and other legendary environmental authors by publishing their works in a special anthology from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and Penguin Classics.

The nonprofit science group and Penguin Classics selected essays and photos by 67 Americans for the new book Thoreau’s Legacy: American Stories about Global Warming. The contributors include scientists, students, grandparents, activists, veterans, journalists, evangelical Christians, artists, and businesspeople who live in 32 states stretching from Alaska to Florida. A foreword on global warming by award-winning novelist, poet and nonfiction author Barbara Kingsolver helps to set the context.

UCS and Penguin Classics will offer the anthology for free online as an interactive book at www.ucsusa.org/americanstories and a forthcoming eBook. A limited edition hardcover also will be available for purchase. The online interactive book will allow the anthology to be instantly shared with friends through emails and on social media sites.

“This partnership was unique in so many ways, but no more so in the reversal of roles we each played,” said Kevin Knobloch, UCS’s president. “Penguin Classics spearheaded efforts to inform the public about the need to speak out about global warming, while we took the editorial and publishing lead.”

“I have great respect for the work of the Union of Concerned Scientists,” said Elda Rotor, editorial director at Penguin Classics, “and it’s been very satisfying for us to have been able to help generate public participation in this project, and we hope their voices will be heard; particularly as Congress debates legislation to reduce the pollution that contributes to global warming.”

Personal Perspectives from Across the Nation

As Ms. Kingsolver writes in her foreword, to find hope in our future “we must radically reconsider the power relationship between humans and our habitat.” The contributors to Thoreau’s Legacy do just that. We see the changes in New England’s natural beauty through the eyes of an observant ninth-grader. We learn how pollution and a warming climate are affecting the Yakama Indians’ way of life. We follow a family whose faith has led them on a journey to protect the planet. We look into the fearsome eyes of an old polar bear crossing the Alaskan ice. And we get a useful, if painful, lesson from a New Orleans native who can never go home again and who worries for other American cities. These are just a few of the many personal accounts about climate change in this collection.

The Genesis of this Anthology

UCS and Penguin Classics teamed up in September 2008 to encourage writers and photographers to submit their personal impressions of global warming — in words or images — for publication in a new book.

Hundreds of bookstores across the country joined the effort by displaying easels and distributing free bookmarks about the project. Both Penguin Classics and UCS featured the project prominently on their Web sites.

The partners received nearly 1,000 submissions from established and aspiring writers and photographers from across the country. They submitted 200- to 500-word personal accounts or photographs that focused on the places they love and want to protect; the animals, plants, people and activities they fear are at risk from a changing climate; and the steps they are taking in their own lives to stem the tide of global warming.

A team of reviewers from Penguin Classics and UCS selected 67 contributions for the anthology. Working with Mixit Productions, they produced an innovative interactive book. In July a limited edition hardcover coffee table book and a downloadable eBook will also be available.

###

The Union of Concerned Scientists is the leading science-based nonprofit working for a healthy environment and a safer world. UCS combines independent scientific research and citizen action to develop innovative, practical solutions and to secure responsible changes in government policy, corporate practices, and consumer choices.

Penguin Classics is the largest and most comprehensive publisher of classic literature in English in the world, and as a publisher is committed to using paper products from manufacturers that are committed to sustainable paper production techniques, and to in-house conservation and recycling in our daily business practice.