Charting the exploration of an unknown world—our own—with a new cartography of living things rather than space available for conquest or colonization. This book charts the exploration of an unknown world: our own. Just as Renaissance travelers set out to map the terra incognito of the New World, the mapmakers of Terra Forma have set out to rediscover the world that we think we know. They do this with a new kind of cartography that maps living things rather than space emptied of life and available to be conquered or colonized. The maps in Terra Forma lead us inward, not off into the distance, moving from the horizon line of conventional cartography to the thickness of the ground, from the global to the local. Each map in Terra Forma is based on a specific territory or territories, and each tool, or model, creates a new focal point through which the territory is redrawn. The maps are “living maps,” always under construction, spaces where stories and situations unfold. They may map the Earth’s underside rather than its surface, suggest turning the layers of the Earth inside out, link the biological physiology of living inhabitants and the physiology of the land, or trace a journey oriented not by the Euclidean space of GPS but by points of life. These speculative visualizations can constitute the foundation for a new kind of atlas.

DEA Operative Cameron Andrews can finally use her Master’s Degree in International Affairs when she's assigned to help Ambassador John Taylor in Argentina negotiate a trade treaty. But it’s a front for her real objective: extricate the ambassador’s eighteen-year-old son, Tad, from the trouble he is in with the Salavados Cartel and then work with the Argentine authorities to trap the Cartel in a sting. Since her boss gave her the authority to use any means at her disposal, Cam falls back into a cover she's used before: the very wealthy and independent Canadian, Laura Stuard. By playing the headstrong Laura to the hilt, Cameron is invited to the Salavados compound where they make a business proposal to her: use her SeaFarer Cruise Liners to move the drugs to Canada. It is a dangerous and exhausting game Cameron and Tad are playing, because not all the Salavados brothers are convinced by “Laura Stuard.” Cameron will have to stretch her considerable skills to not get killed during this scheme.

An "unusual name for an unusual place," Tehachapi is actually a Southern Paiute description for the convergence of the Mojave Desert and the wetlands of California's southern Central Valley. In 1876, the Southern Pacific Railroad used the Tehachapi Valley to link Northern and Southern California rail lines near the thriving dual communities of Williamsburg and Greenwich. These hamlets were known by the area's ranchers, farmers, loggers, miners, merchants, and outlaws as Old Tehachapi and New Tehachapi. The railroad created its own town, Summit Station, which informally became known as Tehachapi after it outlived both early settlements. These raw frontier outposts eventually evolved into the anchor city of southern Kern County, surviving droughts, floods, fires, and a devastating 1952 earthquake.