The Ground Beneath Us: From the Oldest Cities to the Last Wilderness, What Dirt Tells Us About Who We Are

235 Pages·2017·12.9 MB·English

by  Paul Bogard

Copyright
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ISBN 978-0-316-34228-5
E3-20170211-JV-PC
E3-20170211-JV-PC
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
PAVED AND HALLOWED
Manhattan
Mexico City
London
Northern Virginia
Gettysburg
FARMED AND WILD
Bishopstone
Soil
Ames
Grass
The Sandhills
HELL AND SACRED
Appalachia
Treblinka
Alaska
The Sierra Nevada
Home
Photos
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also By Paul Bogard
Notes
Newsletters
For Caroline
Talk of mysteries!—Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter,
to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid
earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are
we? where are we?
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU, THE MAINE WOODS (1864)
Introduction
For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the
presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he
neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history
with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, THE GREAT GATSBY (1925)
F
rom the observatory deck on the 102nd floor of One World Trade Center, the
island of Manhattan spreads north beneath a hazy gray-gold sky—the Hudson
River on the left, the East on the right—a putty-white and beige-brown blanket
of stone, steel, and concrete covering every inch of its once green ground. A belt
of Midtown towers blocks the view of Central Park’s verdant rectangle, but I
know it’s there on the other side. Just as I know what lies beneath the city’s
weight. “I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch
sailors’ eyes,” Fitzgerald wrote, “a fresh, green breast of the new world.”
From near the top of the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere, as far
from ground as it’s possible to be while still connected, it’s difficult to see more
than a few scraps of that old new world. But my plan is to walk up the island
from Ground Zero to the park. Here, in my country’s largest city, its most urban
area, I will begin to look for the ground beneath us—what’s gone missing, what
remains, what may come to be.
For now, what is under my feet here on the observation deck is turning my
legs rubbery. Ninety million pounds of structural steel and more than two
hundred thousand cubic yards of concrete—enough for a sidewalk stretching
from here to Chicago—hold me up and anchor this tower down, but still I swear
I can feel it sway. Long before the tower rose, the belowground level had to be
prepared. Workers cleared debris from 9/11’s wreckage and dug into the bedrock
that would support the new building—two hundred feet below street level.
Digging that deep yielded immediate discoveries, including shoes, wallets, and
even human remains. Deeper still, workers struck timber, the oak ribs of an
eighteenth-century boat from an era when the Hudson flowed through the site. Is
it knowledge of the depth and weight of foundational construction that gives
most people the confidence needed to press against the thirty-foot-tall floor-to-
ceiling window glass, expressing amazement in languages from across the globe
as they peer 1,268 feet down? While I do appreciate the view, I cannot wait to
get back to solid ground.
Less expansive than “earth,” less ambiguous than “the land,” for me “ground”
means where we “have trod, have trod,” as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in his
famous poem, and continue to tread, what we see when we look down, the planet
as we experience it in our day-to-day lives.
And it is a wonderland. We walk on ground that teems with life—an
incredible one-third of all living organisms—a trove of biodiversity still only
just starting to be explored. Said Leonardo da Vinci some five hundred years
ago, “We know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil
underfoot.” Incredibly, that remains true. But it’s also true that this is changing.
Since the new century’s start, our knowledge of soil has bloomed—we have
learned more in the past decade than in all previous years combined. We now
know, for example, that just a teaspoon of healthy soil holds millions of species,
and far more microorganisms than there are people on Earth. This incredible
living ground gives rise to every plant, animal, and human—some 97 percent of
the food we eat comes from the ground—and to boundless beauty. From the
tallest redwoods and evergreens to the tiniest blue wildflowers, the ground holds
the wild world in place. The paths we walk repeatedly, the pressed prints of
elephant, wolf, and lion, the bodies of those who fought and fell, the memories
of everything gone before, the ground holds this all.
Unfortunately, studies reveal that most of us in the industrialized world spend
90 to 95 percent of our time indoors. And when we do walk outside, we see
beneath our shoe-clad feet an unnatural surface, likely some version of asphalt or
concrete. In fact, we have some sixty-one thousand square miles of paved
ground in the United States, an amount that together would be the twenty-fourth
largest state by surface area, larger than any state east of the Mississippi. We
now have more square miles of pavement in the lower forty-eight than we have
square miles of wetlands, and every year a million new houses and ten thousand
new miles of asphalt encase more natural ground. This isn’t happening only in
the United States, of course. Since 1950, the paved surface area in the European