THE GROUND BENEATH US

From the author of THE END OF NIGHT - Bogard turns his attention now to a landscape hidden right in front of our eyes, one full of discoveries and of vital import to our future on this planet showing us a new way of considering something on which our lives depend: the natural ground.

Concrete races to encase the world, just as we’re beginning to understand how essential our ground really is. What does it mean for a teaspoon of soil to contain millions of species? What is the risk to our food supply, our birds, our dependence on the planet’s soil, as we pave the earth so thoroughly? How much undeveloped, untrodden ground do we even have left? Paul Bogard answers are astounding: all the paved ground in the United States is bigger than its 24th state, and this is the story of what we’re losing underneath it. From New York (where more than 118,000,000 tons of human development rests on top Manhattan island) to Mexico City (which sinks inches each year into the Aztec ruins underneath it), Bogard shows us the weight of our cities’ footprints. And as we see hallowed grounds coughing up Civil War bullets at Gettysburg; long-hidden remains speaking out from below the sites of concentration camps; fracking’s dangerous, alluring power; the peril of the planet’s oldest living things, the giant redwood; one truth becomes astoundingly clear: the ground is the easiest resource to forget, and the last we should. Bogard’s The Ground Beneath Us is wildly transporting reading that introduces farmers, geologists, ecologists, cartographers, and more, in a quest to understand the ground. From growth and life to death and loss, and from the subsurface technologies that run our cities to the idyllic, wild Edens we have left, this is the story of the ground beneath us. Paul Bogard is the author of The End of Night which was shortlisted for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and a finalist for the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. It is “an essential addition to the literature of nature” – the Boston Globe – and was licensed to NA/Little, Brown, UK/4th Estate, China/Beijing Science and Technology Press, Germany/Blessing, Japan/Hakuyosha, Korea/Puriwa Ipari, Taiwan/China Times. Bogard's writing and commentary on the natural world has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Slate, Salon, and All Things Considered. He teaches creative nonfiction at James Madison University and lives in Minnesota.