The Ground Beneath Us by Paul Bogard

Author:Paul Bogard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science / Earth Sciences / General, Science / Earth Sciences / Geology, Science / Earth Sciences / Mineralogy, Science / Earth Sciences / Sedimentology & Stratigraphy
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2017-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

The original grasslands in all their glory are something we will never see. “The most decimated ecosystem in continental North America,” the prairie is sometimes called. Gone are the grizzly and the wolf, and the populations of nearly every species—bird, animal, plant, and even insect—are severely reduced. In the past decade, as the monarch butterfly began to disappear, it marked the latest species to decline.

But still there is a wildness in the ground that brings the prairie potholes alive each spring, for days or weeks or months at a time. Dry beds in the landscape, shapes to which most of us would be blind, are the shallow basins in which so many lives will form. The ducks that visit our city skies, that flash past in fast Vs over suburban lakes and ponds—those ducks are made of this ground. This is the fountain of energy that Leopold spoke of, rising from soil into sustenance into brown and gray-white bodies, cinnamon and emerald heads. This is that fountain rising into beaks and feet, eyes and wings.

“What really drives the system is invisible,” Ray says, turning the Chevy back toward the interstate. Yes, but sometimes, it seems, the evidence of that invisible life is everywhere for us to recognize. Just a day’s drive south of here, one of the world’s greatest remaining displays of wildlife still settles from the sky to share the ground on which we stand.

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