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

Guest Editorial: Defining the City: On Being and Becoming
by Scott Doyon, Principal, PlaceMakers

For cities, this means listening. It means being a good study of history. It means deciphering the language of your streets and the stories they tell, responding to collective will instead of special interest, and leveraging partnerships to reinforce shared ownership. A city’s Being is not a concoction of the Chamber of Commerce or the Tourism Bureau. It’s not a major league franchise or top notch schools or temperate weather. It’s none of these things and yet, at the same time, it’s all of them. And more.

Almanac: Red Buffalo, Black Butterflies
by Elizabeth Dodd, Terrain.org Editorial Board Member

“Honk on around,” says Gene on the radio. It dangles from my neck so I can hear what’s happening on the other side of the hill where Myron will or will not get the truck stuck in the mud. I listen, and try to figure out just how this complicated mixture of choreography and improvisation—a controlled burn—is moving across the early-spring prairie. Once, dry lightning might have ignited these senescent stalks and seedheads; once, Plains peoples might have set the flames.

Plein Air: Home
by Deborah Fries, Terrain.org Editorial Board Member

The house was ready to occupy in the winter of 1952. Now, when I look at photos of the just-constructed house and large lot, it seems an embarrassingly raw intrusion of the built environment upon that slope at the foot of Dunning’s Mountain. There are no other houses, the road is unpaved and unlit, and our frozen, seeded lot is covered with straw. Spring, the softening curves of landscaping, the infill of neighbors—lie beyond the focal range of imagination.

Field Notes: Casting Off, About, and Somewhere in Between
by Kathryn Miles, Terrain.org Editorial Board Member

All the sailors I know think often about their first solo sail. It’s a big deal, this moment where one casts off camaraderie and group think to enter, instead, into an exclusive and exceedingly tenuous relationship with wind and water. There’s nothing like such a moment to really hit home the fragile tenacity of one’s own agency .I recently had cause to experience the power of that kind of moment firsthand. That it might have been long in coming only made it all the more palpable.

Bull Hill: The Picture of a Song Freezes the Music of Nature
by David Rothenberg, Terra Nova Editor

Why is it that we could never take sound seriously until we could turn it into image? It’s like human beings need to turn time into space to admit that it unequivocably, factually exists. Look how people have made sense of even one simple bird song over the centuries! Consider the song of the veery, known for its querullous, queasy descending line heard every spring in the green wooded forests of eastern North America; Catharus fuscescens, a brown, spotted-belly thrush that lives in temperate American forests.

A Stone's Throw: Geographies of the Interior
by Lauret Savoy, Terrain.org Editorial Board Member

Every journey across the continent reveals to me lessons of time and geography. While they can be skimmed over the course of a flight, I prefer to read more slowly and deeply as I drive the back roads and highways. On each trip, by land or air, Erwin Raisz’s landforms map of the country is at my side. Land patterns from the Atlantic coast westward provide condensed narratives of Earth and human histories inseparably linked, histories of ideas as well as actions, histories of change.