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

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)

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 skythe Hudson River on the left, the East on the righta 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 Parks verdant rectangle, but I know its there on the other side. Just as I know what lies beneath the citys 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 its possible to be while still connected, its 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 countrys largest city, its most urban area, I will begin to look for the ground beneath uswhats 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 concreteenough for a sidewalk stretching from here to Chicagohold 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 9/11s wreckage and dug into the bedrock that would support the new buildingtwo 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 lifean incredible one-third of all living organismsa 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 its also true that this is changing. Since the new centurys start, our knowledge of soil has bloomedwe 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 humansome 97 percent of the food we eat comes from the groundand 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 isnt happening only in the United States, of course. Since 1950, the paved surface area in the European Union has grown 78 percent while the population has grown 33 percent, and in the ever-expanding cities of the developing world, the trend is true as well. As one recent study began, Paved surfaces are quite possibly the most ubiquitous structures created by humans.

As our cities and suburbs and small towns expand, a seemingly inexorable spread of pavement on which we walk, build, and live separates us from the natural ground itself, concealing from us our profound relationship not only to the source of our food, water, and energy, but to the many intangible ways the ground sustains our lives. Remarkably, many children now growing up in cities around the world rarely stand on unpaved ground, and fewer still ever stand on ground we might think of as wild. For anyone living in an urban areaalready some 50 percent of the human population, and by 2050 almost 70 percentit can sometimes feel as though the natural ground on which everything we know and love is built is itself disappearing or has already disappeared.

Of course, we need paved surfaces. The network of roads connecting our cities and countries allows dramatic and dynamic freedom of movement, and concrete literally supports our daily lives, from the foundations and floors of our houses and buildings to the bridges, walls, and infrastructures all around. In the end, the question we might ask is not whether we will have concrete and pavement, but how and where, and at what cost?