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

by Paul Bogard

When a teaspoon of soil contains millions of species, and when we pave over the earth on a daily basis, what does that mean for our future? What is the risk to our food supply, the planet's wildlife, the soil on which every life-form depends? How much undeveloped, untrodden ground do we even have left? Paul Bogard set out to answer these questions in The Ground Beneath Us, and what he discovered is astounding. From New York (where more than 118,000,000 tons of human development rest on top of Manhattan Island) to Mexico City (which sinks inches each year into the Aztec ruins beneath it), Bogard shows us the weight of our cities' footprints. And as we see hallowed ground coughing up bullets at a Civil War battlefield; long-hidden remains emerging from below the sites of concentration camps; the dangerous, alluring power of fracking; the fragility of the giant redwoods, our planet's oldest living things; the surprises hidden under a Major League ballpark's grass; and the sublime beauty of our few remaining wildest places, one truth becomes blazingly The ground is the easiest resource to forget, and the last we should. Bogard's The Ground Beneath Us is deeply transporting reading that introduces farmers, geologists, ecologists, cartographers, and others in a quest to understand the importance of something too many of us take for dirt. From growth and life to death and loss, and from the subsurface technologies that run our cities to the dwindling number of idyllic Edens that remain, this is the fascinating story of the ground beneath our feet.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Nature, History, Ecology, Environment, Biology

285 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2017

About the author

Born and raised in Minnesota, I have lived in Minneapolis, Albuquerque, Reno, northern Wisconsin, Winston-Salem, and now Harrisonburg, Virginia. Ah, the academic life.

I have a wonderful dog named Luna, a Brittany who is nearly 15. Her favorite place to live was Reno. Dog heaven, she says.

Every summer, we leave wherever we are and drive to New Mexico and Nevada to see old friends and walk old walks. Then we head to northern Minnesota for a few weeks. My family has a cabin on a lake there, and so I grew up standing out on our dock, or lying back in a canoe, watching the Milky Way bend from one horizon to the other. That's probably where my book The End of Night was first inspired.

Pizza, the color green, autumn. Things I love.

Reviews

[Terri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who knew a science and history book about dirt could be so interesting? Paul Bogard does a excellent job explaining soil and our environment. It will make you look at the whole world in a different way. It is a wake up call for all of us to stop destroying our soil which contains life itself. I loved his writing on Mexico City and how the earth has sunk at least 30 feet there because the people are extracting the water from below ground. Five star read to everyone who cares about our planet's future. Highly recommend.

[Jeimy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a riveting book about what we are doing to the land. It goes from cities like New York--talking about the amount of concrete it holds--and London--where centuries of archeological treasure lie beneath the streets--to studying the effect of farming practices, and fracking. The book is divided into concise chapters, each painting a comprehensive picture of what the author encountered in his research and visits. As I turned the last page I realized how many more books were added to my TBR because of this read and how I will gladly go down the reading rabbit hole opened up by the author.

[Jeanette · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's truly closer to a 2 star. It's not what the first 60 or so pages seemed it would be.

It's more like a series of short stories, if this were fiction. It only congeals in his preaching to hold it all together -but he applies several interesting locations (Gettysburg was intriguing) to some examples of how we are Earth. The dirt itself and back to that state.

I wanted far more experience of layers and details of earth differences and far less fear mongering applications.

Truly, I suspect he would rather that human beings be back in the ages of tooth and claw where most lived to about 22, if they got past infancy. But the dirt would be "perfect" by his definitions of pristine.

This reminds me greatly of a book I read in my youth by Rachel Carson called Silent Spring. He is preaching to the choir in the same way. And is off, just as much. Science = empirical rule and most of that was missing here.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Paul Bogard's The Ground Beneath Us is about our relationship to the earth. Not the planet, by the way, "earth" here means soil, rocks, worms, turf... Bogard travels from Manhattan to Mexico City to fracking sites to show that we have strived to detach ourselves from the earth. Our agricultural system has tried to transform enriching soil into a holding ground for synthetic inputs. But we are deeply tied to soil, and not just because we need it for food and water. Bogard also travels to multiple burial grounds and mass graves, including but not limited to Gettysburg and Treblinka. In The Ground Beneath Us (and in Montgomery's Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations), it is difficult not to notice our connection to the soil in the fact that we can be returned to it when we die. I wonder if we might be better off (and happier) facing the idea that our death and decomposition can provide nutrients for the future. The Ground Beneath Us is a thoughtful work, but I felt I'd encountered many of Bogard's ideas in the works of Aldo Leopold, Michael Pollan, George Monbiot, and David Montgomery. I know Bogard has read their works because he quotes them often, but because I'd also read those works I rarely felt the elation that comes with reading something... ground breaking.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was a goodreads giveaway winner of the book "The Ground Beneath us" by Paul Bogard. This is a hard book to read and a real eye opener. It is about the Earth we live on and what is happening to the land. It focuses on many categories. One is the vanishing farmlands and grass.. Huge cities like New York City and Mexico city are examples of almost all cement and buildings. We are losing a lot of our farms yet the population is growing. it is estimated that in 50 more years we will be up to 9-10 billion people and not enough food to feed them. He also writes of the Holocaust and uses Treblinka as an example of when almost 100,000 Jewish people were killed and then had it hidden by burning them and burying them as if the Holocaust never happened. Other subjects mentioned are the many huge trees that are hundreds of years old being chopped down. the quality of soil to grow the food and not enough of it. There are many other topics the author discusses in his book that warn us of what is happening to the planet we live on. very hard and a bit depressing to read but gives the reader a lot to think about.

[Cat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Riveting book. I never thought dirt could be so interesting! Soil provides for us and yet we really don't think that much about it all. The author did a thorough job of researching his theme. I liked reading about the Appalachian area and fracking; it had many valid points. I love the Appalachians, but too many industries are destroying the area and nothing is being done for the plight of it's people. sad. farmed and Wild was sad, too, but well worth reading. Good solid, well written book. Kudos to the author!
I received a Kindle Arc in exchange for a fair review from Netgalley.

[Steve Wiggins · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an important book. Accustomed as we are to the mundane, the very ground under our feet is often more exotic than it might seem. Bogard, with the heart of a poet, explores how we're losing our ground with a sense of poignant loss. The sheer amount—and more—rate of paving in the United States alone is frightening. Our misuse of the soil translates to maybe 60 good harvests left. You read that right—60. If I were the selfish sort I'd cross my arms and smirk that I'm covered, and maybe even my progeny. Beyond that all guarantees (if there were any to begin with) are off.

Bogard considers what make land sacred (on which, see more here:Sects and Violence in the Ancient World), including the bloodshed of war. The section on Gettysburg is gut-wrenching. Tracing my own sojourn, the book has a chapter on Ames, Iowa. It's a land fast disappearing. As if the planet were endless, we scrape, pollute, and contaminate. Once it's gone, its gone. Considering that wilderness is so good for us, this book will make anyone wonder how its possible for a rational species to be so tremendously short-sighted.

So far, the most important book I've read this year. Read, ponder, and be afraid.

[Erica · Rating 5 out of 5]

You might pick up this book--and you should--because you are a gardener, an environmentalist, a history lover, or just someone who loves a good book about traveling the world. It is about topsoil, how we have dug into the earth's crust and why. It is about walking, city planning, and the sacred and profane spaces we create on top of our thin slice of living earth. There are so many beautiful, moving, and disturbing moments in Bogard's book, I think that most people--any of the generalists listed above or specialists looking for another perspective would love The Ground Beneath Us.

I have two favorite chapters, and many others that will stick in my memory for a very long while. "Mexico City," early in the book, is a sharply beautiful chapter about how the city is sinking into the earth for the weight of its never-ending concrete, layered with history and memory. While I previously knew the extent of the damage to natural landscapes done by paving them (I grew up in northern and southern CA and take regular trips to Houston now, so I know from asphalt), I did not know that the weight of all of it literally compresses the ground to such an extreme degree that there are serious consequences to pay for it, even in the most urban of locations.

Likewise, another brilliant and subtle and shocking chapter is "Appalachia," in which Bogard describes his visit to a southeastern Ohio fracking station. Here, too, I had previously understood the process and the science of fracking, but Bogard again finds a way to describe it through a different lens, situating it within millennia of writing about sacred and profane space. I hope that the Appalachia chapter gains traction with a wider readership--I feel that its contents and its tone could be the fodder to help move the American public to action about the lack of regulations on this industry and frightening groundwater contamination and other forms of pollution it incurs.

A wonderful book that you can enjoy chapter-by-chapter or in one big-hearted gulp.

[Broc · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was part eulogy of the liberal conservationist's platform, part elegy of dirt. So I liked it, was educated, but its heavy-handed approach often shut me down with apocalypse fatigue. I'm starting to believe anyone so deeply entrenched in a single platform/ideology compromises the universal applicability and benefit of their position. The ability for a position to value the truth in contrasting viewpoints immediately makes that position more useful, and frequently closer to the truth (at least that's a hypothesis I'd like to test). Anyway, there are unquestionably many conservation crises boiling around us right now. Bogard's appraisal of them was enlightening. I appreciated his attempt to connect the several issues with the theme of the ground, though it wasn't a compelling narrative to me. Nor was his logic always tight, though maybe a consequence of trying to limit technical detail. However, it did influence me to seek more opportunity to be outside and appreciate nature, and resist the terrible and excessive and constant urge for humans to domesticate wilderness. And there were some powerful moments. And I really liked the poetic, spiritual take on nature that undergirded the book.

[Andra Legge · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book is probably fine, but from almost every aspect, when you pick it up it looks like it will be a study of the actual ground in various cities and locations of the earth. . A look at the layers of earth and human and geologic histories of each location. Once I started getting into the book I found a limited mention of each location and a larger essay on an environmental issue tied to the chapters. This was not at all what I though the book would be from its cover and blurb, and as I had wanted a geology/history book I was quite disappointed.

[Sydney Doidge · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was gripping the whole way through with chapters that felt like the right length to just propel you along. Ultimately while the book bordered on alarming, it was tempered because of the inclusion of passages about places and grounds like Treblinka and Gettysburg - looking at more aspects of ground and what it means to us than purely an environmental stance. The book was wide ranging and not entirely just about science but felt personal and storylike as well.

[Max Carmichael · Rating 3 out of 5]

A real mixed bag, this book is a treasure trove of haphazardly compiled data on the destruction of natural habitats and ecosystems by Anglo-European societies. Bogard offsets the doom and gloom with warm and fuzzy tributes to the power of love and suggestions that we could start cherry-picking the places and species we want to save from the apocalypse. His subject is vital and his heart is clearly in the right place, but his story of soil is far from definitive. Like most of the non-fiction we get from major publishers, it consists of some city-bound, desk-bound professional writer on the East Coast who "helicopters" into unfamiliar rural habitats and communities for a few days, interviews a few locals and scans a few landscapes, and through mass-market publication, is then validated as an expert.

As someone who does ecological field work with scientists and regularly backpacks into remote wilderness areas, I would've liked to have seen some mention of one of the true frontiers of soil ecology, biological soil crusts in desert habitats. And I was frustrated by Bogard's very limited forays into the sociological and anthropological dimensions of his subject. A better sense of the larger context - for example, the deep historical anthropocentrism of Anglo-European culture, economics, politics, science, and technology - or the socioeconomic origins of urbanism - could've better unified this rudimentary survey of human ecology.

For those interested in the subject, I would also recommend "The Earth Moved" by Amy Stewart.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I stopped reading The Ground Beneath Us for a few weeks. It's a good book so I wondered why I wasn't reading it. I looked at the place where I'd stopped reading. It was right in the middle of the chapter on Treblinka, the most famous Nazi death camp that most of us have never heard of. Why? Because there were no survivors to tell the story. 900,000 people were gassed there, their bodies roasted and the local peasants were forced to fill their wagons with the ashes and scatter them on the roads and in the forests. I realized I quit reading because it was too horrifying, too painful.

But I'm glad I picked it up again and finished reading. Much of the book is painful, the sacred lands chapters being about Civil War battles and Nazi death camps, the chapters on land use about how the whole world is depleting its farm land, and the chapters about how much of the world is paved with cement and how, once land is paved, it is dead and will never be the same again.

It's a painful book but an important book. We march for clean air and clean water, but most people never think about how important the ground itself is to our lives and our future. I won this book through a goodreads giveaway, for which I am grateful.

[Sara Van Dyck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bogard’s book is nominally classified under applied sciences, but should be read with another mindset I think. It dips deeply into history, sociology, and what many consider sacred. While the author acknowledges the sorry state of our soils and the dangerous direction big ag is taking us, Bogard goes deeper to consider the emotional, personal, and spiritual connection many people and peoples have with the ground beneath their feet. This is soil, ground, not just as a source of oil or food, but as a source of memories, sometimes grief, sometimes joy. I found Bogard’s wide range, always looking at what is below, whether paved city streets, Civil War battlefields, or golf courses, rather jarring, but his evident passion for his subject carried me along. And an eye-opener for me: Duke Divinity School has on the faculty Norman Wirzba, professor of “Theology, Ecology, and Agrarian Studies.”

[Debbie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is more of a collection of essays held together - at times tenuously - by the theme of the earth we walk on/farm on/venerate/desecrate, and so on..

If I had never read a book or magazine article on the various topics he covered, such as Gettysburg, fracking, industrial farming, this book might have had more impact.

As it is, Michael Pollen and others got there first.

This sometimes reads like the work of a clever undergraduate writing their senior thesis on everything they had read and every place they had visited over the last four years. Some good insights are tucked into the summarizing, but there was too much shock of discovery: Innocent youth died in the Civil War! The Holocaust is a stain on humanity! Fracking is bad! Native Americans treat the earth with respect!

Advice to Bogard for his next book: Use primary sources your readers are less likely to have read, and leave you and your friends out of the narrative as much as possible.

[Thea · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read this for school as we're learning about soil and the microbes in it. I didn't feel like this book really gave me much, it was mostly just annecdotes from the author and the people he interviewed. When they did actullay talk about the ground it didn't go much further than simply "the ground is amazing, so much is going on in the ground all the time", but no further explanation.

It was very poorly written as well. Several grammatical errors, which made some sentence difficult to read and understand. A few times it also felt like the author tried to use buzzwords, or make the prose sound more philosophical, which just didn't work at all.

I might just not have liked this because it wasn't what I had expected, nor wanted, from this book, but I don't think I'll read more from this author if I'm being honest.

[Elentarri · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was disappointing. This book is 95% biographical anecdote (which got boring after a while) and 5% science, environmentalism and politics explained in the most vague manner possible. The message this author wishes to convey is important, he just doesn't do the subject justice.

Other recommended books:
- Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by David R. Montgomery
- Earth Matters: How Soil Underlies Civilization by Richard D. Bardgett
-Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization by Richard Manning
-Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence and Survival? A Scientific Detective Story by Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski, John Peterson Myers
- What Has Nature Ever Done for Us?: How Money Really Does Grow on Trees by Tony Juniper

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

A strong paeon for ecology, the message is not disguised. Mr Bogard throws in just about everything he sees to recall that has to do with soil and our connection to it, he might have done better to elaborate further on his topics as many of them, such as the Colombian tribe. I must admit being old fashioned, and noting that other authors have this note of caution to offer, that sentences do not being with conjunctives and that an author should be an example of good sentence construction! The book reads like it is spoken aloud, then . No grammatical errors that way, we can't see the punctuation. thank you, Paul.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who knew dirt could be so fascinating? This was a great mix of history, science, current events and literary influences. I kept it way to long from the library and was threatened to be sent to collections if I didn't return it in time, which thankfully I did.

It touches on many issues we and future generations will need to face as the reality of what we have done to our planet (especially soil) becomes less in the margins and we no longer can ignore the effects of "progress".

This also made me incredibly grateful to live in a state like Montana where nature and wild landscapes are revered and (mostly) protected.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Author visits 15 places around the world, meets with experts of various kinds, advocates for preserving, and ideally expanding, the increasingly limited areas of unpaved, living soil. Very interesting but sometimes confusingly discursive as he weaves in quotes and philosophies that are not directly related to the ostensible topic at hand. Valuable introduction to numerous writers who have prized the environment.

[Luis Cuesta · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received this book as a giveaway. I like how Paul Bogard describes life on and under the pavement in cities like Mexico or New York. He does a good job chronicling his interviews with activists trying to preserve bits of nature. Highlighting current and future predicaments, Bogard ponders what humans have sacrificed in the name of progress.

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading the book it seems so obvious, but I never gave much thought to how the unpaved and wild ground is essential to the well-being of the planet. Bogard takes multiple, eye-opening perspectives: what lies under ancient cities and battlegrounds, and the lands cleared for fracking. The footnotes are one of the joys of the book.

[Heather Antti · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was more grim than I expected, but that is just honesty. And it was also unexpected in many other ways. It reads pretty quickly yet gives you plenty to think about. Many passages are just beautiful, and Bogard finds unusual ways to look at things. I am adding him to my list of must-read authors.

[Jared · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book really got me thinking about our connection to the ground, and to the world around us. I have been thinking a bit lately about how little I get outside anymore, so this book was a timely reminder about the importance of recognizing what is around us and it's importance.

[Kathy Heare Watts]

I won a copy of this book during a Goodreads giveaway. I am under no obligation to leave a review or rating and do so voluntarily. So that others may also enjoy this book, I am paying it forward by donating it to my local library.

[Zora]

This collection of essays was well written enough, but somehow, after reading a couple of chapters, I could not make myself go back to it to finish. More my mood than the book, perhaps, but I haven't read enough to give it a star rating.

[Kathy Hale · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very chilling look of how mankind is not taking care of one of our most valuable assets, our soil. The author visits different places, including Gettysburg, to see what is happening around the globe.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quick read, soft science. Left me feeling gloomy about the future of the earth under human care.

[Ray Smithee · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book about the bonds between humans and the natural world, specifically the ground we take for granted underneath us.

[Janett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Love the subject, and the author did a lot of research. However the book is not organized very well and jumps around a lot. Some really eye opening information for sure and much needed.