What if Night?

Now Available! Contact Paul for an inscribed copy. Also available through Keystone Canyon Press, or your favorite Children’s bookstore (at Amazon and WalMart, Too).

With the night sky over most cities now nearly 100 times brighter than in the last century, children are missing out on the experience of the natural darkness. This charming story, along with stunning watercolors of night sky and wildlife, presents the thrill and wonder of a child exploring darkness without fear. This is a perfect read-aloud story for bedtime or any time.  

• This book delves into the issues of light pollution and how even a small child can take actions that improve our world.

• What if Night? celebrates the joy of the nighttime world in this early introduction to environmental science.

• Vibrant illustrations and easy to read text makes it perfect for a child to practice reading as they grow.

• Children love seeing the animals that are familiar to them in a natural setting.

The Ground Beneath Us

“A beautiful call for deeper physical, intellectual, and emotional connections between people and Earth." —David George Haskell

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 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 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.

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THE END OF NIGHT

"A lyrical, far-reaching book. Part elegy, part call-to-arms, The End of Night feels like an essential addition to the literature of nature."   — Boston globe

A deeply panoramic tour of the night, from its brightest spots to the darkest skies we have left.

A starry night is one of nature's most magical wonders. Yet in our artificially lit world, three-quarters of Americans' eyes never switch to night vision and most of us no longer experience true darkness. In THE END OF NIGHT, Paul Bogard restores our awareness of the spectacularly primal, wildly dark night sky and how it has influenced the human experience across everything from science to art.

From Las Vegas' Luxor Beam--the brightest single spot on this planet--to nights so starlit the sky looks like snow, Bogard blends personal narrative, natural history, science, and history to shed light on the importance of darkness--what we've lost, what we still have, and what we might regain--and the simple ways we can reduce the brightness of our nights tonight.

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Let There Be Night

The development of the modern world has brought with it rampant light pollution, destroying the ancient mystery of night and exacting a terrible price--wasted energy, damage to human health, and the sometimes fatal interruption of the life patterns of many wildlife species. Artificial light blocks our view of the stars and mirrors a lack of appreciation for night’s gifts of quiet and repose, and it negatively affects ecosystems in ways we are only beginning to understand. In Let There Be Nighttwenty-nine writers, scientists, poets, and scholars share their personal experiences of night and help us to understand what we are losing as dark skies and nocturnal wildness disappear.

Their testimonies speak of the emotional and spiritual comforts of night; the awe we experience in the presence of vast, starlit skies; the scientific complexity of earth's diurnal rhythms; and the thrill of witnessing children's discovery of the magic of nighttime. These writers examine the folklore of night and trace the historical devaluation of nighttime as industrialization and technology banished darkness and its companion, silence, from our lives. And they propose ways by which we might restore the beneficence of true night skies to our cities and our culture. 

Let There Be Night examines a precious aspect of human experience in grave danger. The contributors offer an urgent call to awareness and action, and their diverse perceptions and voices also provide a statement of hope that the ancient magic of the night can be returned to our world.

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