When I first met Lisa Margonelli, she had just finished writing Oil on the Brain: Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank. The book was a clear-eyed, devastating look at how our habit of sucking petrochemicals out of the ground and setting them on fire has rewritten the lives of people who most of us will never meet. The book was somehow also madcap and unflappable, like a letter from a friend who had ripped up their ticket to a tropical vacation and decided to hang out with a Nigerian warlord instead.

Margonelli’s new book Underbug: An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology (Scientific American/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018) began out of research into what could replace the oil economy—specifically, with a group of termite researchers studying experimental biofuels for the Department of Energy. Termites are able to transform wood—something that is notoriously difficult to eat—into energy with the help of a complicated gut microbiome of mysterious origin. No one is sure how they got the bacteria, and they certainly don’t make it themselves. They just circulate it amongst each other, endlessly, by pooping into each other's mouths.

If humans could just scale up what is happening in those termite guts, we wouldn’t need to dig up oil, gas, and coal. We wouldn’t need to grow food just to turn it—very inefficiently—into biodiesel. We could collect the dead grass, scrap wood, and office paper that is already conveniently located on top of the earth and turn it into biofuel—cellulosic ethanol, a.k.a. “grassoline.”

Grassoline turned out to be very complicated. So did termites, no matter who happens to be studying them. In the book, biologists in Namibia try to crack the purpose and process of termite architecture. A team from MIT uses termites as a model for robots designed to swarm like social insects.

Margonelli follows the trial, error, and advances of each group for nearly a decade—and the result raises as many questions about humans as it does about insects. So I called her up and asked her a few questions about both.

Sierra: In the range of all the crazy ideas people told you about how we were going to replace gasoline, was using microbes from termite guts pretty out there? Or is that pretty typical?

Lisa Margonelli: Actually the termite guts were relatively credible. People talking about doing things like deep-sea mining of methane hydrate were more ridiculous in many ways. There was serious Department of Energy modeling about how—between grass clippings and corn clippings and wood chips and used newspapers and stuff like that—we could potentially unlock the sugars in that cellulose and power our cars.

There had been this early success of synthetic biology. Steve Chu—who is a Nobel Prize winner and went on from Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory to work with DOE—said this was something we should be working on. But as time went on, it turned out to be a much trickier thing. And then the market forces in favor of grassoline changed, because gasoline prices went from more than $4 a gallon to less than $2.

I think what was problematic looking back is that this was an attempt at finding a technological solution for what was really a political impasse about climate change legislation. And there needed to be both. You need to develop biofuels as well as alternative transit methods, and you also need climate change legislation and a price on carbon that makes it worth it to use the biofuels. You need predictable prices.

And the project, which seemed simple at first, turned out to be really complex. First because the way that termites break down wood is too complex to replicate at that point. And even when scientists  put other genes to break down wood into E. coli, they discovered that these cells did not act like computers that had been “booted up” with code. The cells seemed to be able to communicate within themselves or maybe have some kind of memory. They have—I don't want to anthropomorphize a cell, but even an E. coli that's been bred for a million generations in a laboratory apparently has ideas about what it will do and what it will not. Who knew?

The technological solution didn't come through on schedule, but they never do. That's not how it works. There’s usually a 20-year span from the start of something to an application, at the most optimistic. Modeling green tech initiatives on the Manhattan Project turned out to be not that successful.

On the other hand, JBEI [the Joint BioEnergy Institute] and the other synthetic biology joint projects in that cluster have written thousands of papers. They have learned all kinds of stuff that they wouldn't have learned otherwise.

Now that you’ve spent a whole lot of time with both categories, how is hanging out with termite people different than hanging out with oil people?

Both groups of people are really ferociously smart. The oil people that I met ranged from geophysicists who interpret the geology of the earth through sound waves, to super smart self-taught guys who work on oil rigs and analyze the sand samples coming back from the drill bit, to people who run refineries, and then also people who captured the oil in Nigeria out of the pipeline. The oil industry is really wide in terms of space and class and education.

Initially, scientists seem more ethereal, but oftentimes they have to be focused on immediate things, like “What are the termites doing?” or, “How do I smash this termite to extract the genetics from its gut?”

One of the things about being a scientist these days is having minutiae to attend to in the day-to-day, and then these huge questions looming, like "How did the microbes inside the termites evolve? Did they evolve with the microbe, or did they just pick them up?”

Do you feel like termites turn people trippy? Or do they just attract trippy people?

I think it's both. If you have some trippy tendencies and you start watching the termites, they start to accentuate that. At some level, the more you watch the termites the more you wonder, “What does it mean to be human?”  

There’s a quote in Underbug by Tom Curtis: “If the last blue whale choked to death on the last panda, it would be disastrous but not the end of the world. But if we accidentally poisoned the last two species of ammonia oxidizers, that would be another matter. It could be happening now and we wouldn’t even know.” How worried should I be about humanity taking out the last of the ammonia oxidizers?

I don't think we have any idea yet. The discovery of new genes and metagenomic data is going so fast, it's faster than the discovery of stars. It's doubling every seven months or less. So the data that's available now on things like organisms in sea water and dirt—and the insights into that data—are really different than a few years ago.

We tend to really focus on stuff that seems charismatic—so we'll focus on the bees and the elephants. And the pandas. But we don't see all these other tiny building blocks like the termites, and Crocosphaera. It's really unknown territory.

What are some things that you learned about science by watching scientists work on the same research for years?

I'd read Thomas Kuhn on scientific revolutions. And so I had an idea that I understood a paradigm shift. But these disciplines had totally different ideas of what constituted data and evidence.

What a physiologist considers information is different from what a computer scientist who studies termites considers information is different from what a microbiologist using bioinformatics considers information is different from what a mathematical biologist considers information is different from a physicist. Etcetera etcetera. You've got these really different datasets. We call them all science. We even call them biology. But they have very dramatically different ways of dealing with data and thinking about it and different expectations of what it is or what it might mean. And so you could be having multiple paradigm shifts in multiple disciplines and they wouldn't look like each other.

Did their source of funding shift over the years?

Yeah. All of them had different sources of funding. Some of them had very specific funding to accomplish a specific applied science thing. But then they had a larger universal question in the back of their mind. Everybody who was working on biofuels—from the geneticists all the way to the synthetic biologist—had big questions on the back of their mind even though the funding was to do synthetic biology and to create something. That makes kind of an interesting tension.

One of the things that happened over the 10 years is that the synthetic biofuels project actually did produce two synthetic biofuels: limonene and pinene. But they cost about $20  a gallon, so they're not appropriate to put in your car.

However, they can be combined with other things and be used to create a fuel source for missiles that doesn't leave a trail in the sky.

Oh, that's sinister.

Potentially the military is the end point for these really fancy biofuels. Also, when you work on swarming drones, that is potentially going to be used by the military. These things we talked about in fairly idealistic terms ended up having military applications.

But that's also the case with Velcro, and the phone that I'm using to talk with you right now. We use the military to develop technology. We have a very complex relationship to the military and technology that we do not pick apart.

But it also has an element that is democratic. Because we can actually protest the technology that the military has and how it uses it. Whereas when technology comes into the marketplace, it is a much rockier trip, and we don't actually have control of how it is applied or not. And even if a really great technology comes along, markets may not support it.

We talk about technology in very optimistic and utopian terms. We also talk about our fears of technology in really apocalyptic terms. But our cultural preference for these stories of utopia and apocalypse doesn't get us into the hairy details of what we want our future to look like. Or what we feel is right and what we feel is wrong.

We kind of hand that off, and then have a lot of suspicions about scientists.

Would you describe oil as a part of that technology? I mean the military made highways—or, we have those because of the military.

Oil and the military are obviously really tied up. World War I definitely showed that oil was going to take over from coal.

But actually a whole lot of things happened in 1901 and 1909. You had a massive amount of oil found at Spindletop in Texas in 1901, which accelerated the development of cars that ran on oil, and the military use of oil. Machine guns had been developed in the previous century but had never been used in Europe and the U.S.. They were then used in the genocide in Namibia. That's 1904.

Then you had the invention of nitrogen fertilizer in 1909. And you had the inventions of poison gases that were used in the war that were also insecticides and eventually anti-cancer drugs. Suddenly you had this whole mixture of technologies and possibilities all coming in at once. Today half the nitrogen on Earth is produced through the Haber Bosch process—we doubled the bioavailable nitrogen. And that dramatically increased the population of humans on the earth.

All these things happened at this one time period, and then they created profound impacts that we're still feeling to this day. When we think about inventing new technologies that radically change the scale that we operate on the earth, we should go back to 1909, look at how the power configurations around those technologies impacted things, and use that to think about the future.

You mention in Underbug that there are thousands of popular books about honeybees and only a handful about termites. Do you have any theories about why people like bees so much?

Bees are cute. And bees have a long history of being symbolic of industriousness and working hard and making honey for the long winter. Humans have had a lot of contact with bees, and we feel that we have an intimacy.

Termites in the U.S. are seen as pests and destroyers. They eat things. There's not much nuance. In popular culture, they're just a really hideous cartoon on the side of the exterminator's van.

There are other cultures in other countries that have different ways of talking about termites. People in Australia call them "white ants," and have a whole way of talking about certain types of people who behave like white ants, like "Oh she's just white-anting you," which means that she’s just coming in and taking the good stuff and leaving the detritus behind.

But I don't think anyone thinks they're cute. Except for the entomologists on Twitter. Who post things like "Here's a cute baby termite."

I get this question a lot. People want me to say something like "Bees are stupid! Termites are the best!” But you need all the bugs.