∎ Libro The Ground Beneath Us From the Oldest Cities to the Last Wilderness What Dirt Tells Us About Who We Are Paul Bogard 9780316342261 Books

The Ground Beneath Us From the Oldest Cities to the Last Wilderness What Dirt Tells Us About Who We Are Paul Bogard 9780316342261 Books

Download As PDF : The Ground Beneath Us From the Oldest Cities to the Last Wilderness What Dirt Tells Us About Who We Are Paul Bogard 9780316342261 Books

The Ground Beneath Us From the Oldest Cities to the Last Wilderness What Dirt Tells Us About Who We Are Paul Bogard 9780316342261 Books

Bogard does what I wish more environmental authors would do -- he pulls together art and literature into his science writing to good effect. But as I read (unfortunately in a hurry for a bookgroup discussion) a few of his science facts needed more support and verification than he provided here.[ I know I should give examples, but again, I'm in a hurry. ] Actually I longed for more soil science, and felt misled as to the depth this subject would be investigated. I love his use of the concept of "number of remaining harvests" for fields and crops, this is a measure I could totally grasp. I found the footnotes to be in an odd format, which I enjoyed reading, but at the same time, I expected to find full citations for his sources, and these were often lacking. The battlefield and holocaust examples of uses of archaeology while interesting, did not really tell us much about how our soils sustain us.


Tags : Buy The Ground Beneath Us: From the Oldest Cities to the Last Wilderness, What Dirt Tells Us About Who We Are on Amazon.com ✓ FREE SHIPPING on qualified orders,Paul Bogard,The Ground Beneath Us: From the Oldest Cities to the Last Wilderness, What Dirt Tells Us About Who We Are,Little, Brown and Company,0316342262,Earth Sciences - General,Earth Sciences - Geology,Ecology,Earth sciences,Earth sciences.,Soil and civilization,Soil and civilization.,Soil science,Soil science.,GEOLOGY (SPECIFIC ASPECTS),General Adult,NATURE Ecology,NATURE General,NatureGeneral,Non-Fiction,SCITECH,SCIENCE Earth Sciences General,SCIENCE Earth Sciences Geology,SCIENCE Earth Sciences Mineralogy,SCIENCE Earth Sciences Sedimentology & Stratigraphy,Science,ScienceEarth Sciences - Geology,ScienceEarth Sciences - Sedimentology & Stratigraphy,ScienceMath,ScienceMathematics,Technology & EngineeringAgriculture - Agronomy - Soil Science,URBAN ECOLOGY,United States

The Ground Beneath Us From the Oldest Cities to the Last Wilderness What Dirt Tells Us About Who We Are Paul Bogard 9780316342261 Books Reviews

I think I bought this because of NPR. I'm not even half way through it, but I do like it a lot. It's not quite the book I thought I was buying, but I'm enjoying reading it. The problems for me are the tangents into archeology and history that keep being made. Interesting, but not the reason I wanted to read this book, and I feel that they are there to take up space.
What do golf courses, civil war battle sites, concrete, the Holocaust, farming and Sandhill Cranes all have in common? They are all part of what is explored in Paul Bogard's book The Ground Beneath Us.

A book on the ground may not sound very interesting, but trust me, it is. Like in his previous book (The End of Night), Bogard has a very personal way of bringing the reader through this interesting and moving look at the ground, how all life depends on it, and the profound environmental degradation that is coming. While the book can be depressing, it is a good read.
I would recommend this book to most people- its super interesting and enjoyable.
I really enjoyed this book Bogard has a great writing style, and he covers a wide range of interesting topics. I learned a great deal.
It arrived OK
The greenhouse gases that drive global warming are so alarming that they might well cause the species to neglect other threats. Environmental triage, in effect. To state the obvious, first and foremost we need air to breathe and that plain fact explains much of the concern with global warming (and such appendages as rising seas and an increased frequency of severe climatic events). Perhaps because we can, crudely put, stay alive a bit longer without food and water than we can without oxygen, environmental threats on those fronts have lost ground to the global warming cause. There are exceptions. Notably, opposition to the Dakota Access pipeline and its threat to the Standing Rock Sioux’s water supply. And the proposed KeystoneXL pipeline that would pass through the Ogallala aquifer, the nation’s largest drinking water aquifer. Paul Bogard reminds us that we can see two of the three things we need most to survive—air, water, food—only by looking down.

The Ground Beneath Us is a thoughtful meditation on dirt. Dirt of all kinds but especially the top soil that supports all life. This book makes clear that our poor stewardship of our atmosphere is matched by our poor stewardship of common ground. And as with global warming, there is a line of usual suspects Big Oil’s pipelines and fracking crusades, the consumer-culture fetish for roads and more roads and ample parking day or night (as the South Park kids and their booster elders promise) in both city and suburb. For that matter, would the suburbs even exist without a pavement-drive car culture uber alles? “Once a property is subdivided,” Bogard quotes an environmental consultant, “it can never come back into one parcel again. Asphalt is the last crop.” Global warming has given us a Fahrenheit creep that might have already pushed past the proverbial point of no return. The Ground Beneath Us shows that the creep of concrete and asphalt pavement—impermeable surfaces—pose as serious a threat to our food and water as those greenhouse gases pose to the air we breathe. Pavement is necessary. But too much of it in the wrong places can be disastrous.
Bogard does what I wish more environmental authors would do -- he pulls together art and literature into his science writing to good effect. But as I read (unfortunately in a hurry for a bookgroup discussion) a few of his science facts needed more support and verification than he provided here.[ I know I should give examples, but again, I'm in a hurry. ] Actually I longed for more soil science, and felt misled as to the depth this subject would be investigated. I love his use of the concept of "number of remaining harvests" for fields and crops, this is a measure I could totally grasp. I found the footnotes to be in an odd format, which I enjoyed reading, but at the same time, I expected to find full citations for his sources, and these were often lacking. The battlefield and holocaust examples of uses of archaeology while interesting, did not really tell us much about how our soils sustain us.