Casey Brown is an assistant professor of landscape architecture at Clemson University and a Principal Researcher with P-REX an organization embedded within the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT. He is the 2010/11 recipient of the Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture and has recently followed research concerning the U.S. - Mexico border, North American urbanization trends and large-scale mining and extraction sites. In dispatch 31 Brown shares his thoughts regarding his working methods for his research in Rome as well as for entities as diverse as Toyota, the Environmental Protection Agency EPA and the U.S. Defense Department, all of which, in Brown’s words “document herd/swarm behavior, cascading effects, negative/positive externalities, and low probability/high impact events”. June 6, 2011