Terrain.org's columns include the issue's Guest Editorial as well as regular columns from the editors:
 

Guest Editorial: Solar is the Bridge to Our Future
Gabrielle Giffords, U.S. Representative, Arizona's 8th Congressional District

Just as oil was a passport to wealth in the 20th century, I believe the sun will be a gateway to prosperity in the 21st. But what would it take for solar to really become a major power source in the United States? Last year, the U.S. Department of Energy issued a report outlining how we could generate 20 percent of our power from wind by 2030. What if we were to adopt a comparable target for solar? What would it take to achieve that?"

The Literal Landscape: My Neighbor's Bird
Simmons B. Buntin, Terrain.org Editor/Publisher

The sculpture that is my neighbor’s bird perches on the wall outside my window. It is black like the buzzard, still as a heron, slick as kestrel. In the quick corridor of afternoon light the bird’s shoulders shine through the thin window and into my eyes. At night its silhouette absorbs the moonlight, half in shadow. In the morning it drinks the dew and tastes the salty air from the ancient seabed upon which our homes are built.

Plein Air: Mapping Mary Ann Armstrong
by Deborah Fries, Terrain.org Editorial Board Member

he first time I saw her picture, I wanted to know everything about her. I wanted to know where she’d lived before she married my great, great grandfather in 1859. I wanted to know what her parents, Mariah and William G. Armstrong, looked like; whether William G. had been a planter in Tyrrell County, North Carolina, or a yeoman farmer. I wanted to know which of Mary Ann’s six children looked like her, rather than their eagle-featured father, Edward Parisher. I wanted to know why she looked so very serious.

Bull Hill: The Road That Must Be Taken, with Online Image Gallery
by David Rothenberg, Terra Nova Editor

Whenever I visit my wife’s cousins in Kildu, Estonia, I always take the same route on a bicycle, heading west on a straight dirt road that soon leaves the farm lands of potato, rye, mustard, and rapeseed to enter a cool, swampy forest. The road, sometimes wet, other times dry, heads straight as an arrow deeper into the swamp country, called soomaa in Estonian. Various roads cross the main one, all fainter, but most equally straight like some perfect grid imposed on the landscape from above.

A Stone's Throw: The View from Point Sublime
by Lauret Savoy, Terrain.org Editorial Board Member

What is it about memory that can hold you and never stale —like this place-moment from childhood — as if it’s still formative decades later? More than 40 years have passed since that morning we first stood at the canyon’s North Rim. I was just seven years old, yet the memory remains as new as yesterday, indelible. And the need to return to Point Sublime still pulls.