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Cargando... The Ground Beneath Us: From the Oldest Cities to the Last Wilderness, What Dirt Tells Us About Who We Arepor Paul Bogard
   Ninguno Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro.  ElentarriLT | Mar 24, 2020 |   Paul Bogard is an old fashioned romantic. Everywhere he goes, he likes to take off his shoes to feel the ground. He feels with his feet. And as he travels widely, his feet are quite experienced. He could have called the book If These Feet Could Talk and it would have been accurate. The Ground Beneath Us is a travelogue, very, very loosely connected by what he put his feet on. Bogard roamed from Manhattan to Treblinka, from Gettysburg to Alaska, from Mexico to London. And at some point he usually refers to the ground, from the softness of the tundra to the sterility of the concrete, and everything in between. There are odd, headscratchable side trips into what different religions and cultures quantify as sin and hell. And there are brief discourses on the effects of fracking, global warming and drought. But it’s all very superficial and on to the next venue. There is no progression or flow. It does not build to a point. The chapters could be standalone essays. If there is a lesson, it might be that you should walk barefoot more. Or appreciate nature more. Or appreciate history more. Hard to tell. But none of it is anything new or different. None of it is deep or profound. And the additional research is minimal at best. Rather, there is silliness, as a zoo ranger shares his hopes that if we can just get to the other side of the human population bubble, all their work capturing and confining African animals will have succeeded, right? He obviously has not read the Alaska chapter, in which the melting of the permafrost is about to unleash untold multiples of our already record setting CO2 into the air in the form of methane, wiping out countless more species. Bogard’s romanticism ranges from feeling the hallowed ground at Gettysburg to the profane ground of a Nazi concentration camp. He mourns the covering over of all the human tragic history that has gone before. Concrete keeps us from our reality. For his many fans, this will be another great excursion. For those looking for new insight into anything, not so much. David Wineberg (  ) DavidWineberg | Jan 12, 2017 | sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
"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? Who 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 clear-- 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 granted-- dirt. From growth and 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.-- No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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 Google Books — Cargando...GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)631.4Technology Agriculture & related technologies Techniques, apparatus, equipment, materials Soil ScienceClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio: (2.5)
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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 (