Aldo Leopold’s writing reframed marshes as sites of profound wilderness value.

Evidence

The first prominent sign of a new way of seeing marshes came in a celebrated essay by Aldo Leopold – “Marshland Elegy” – first published in 1937 in American Forests and then reprinted in 1949 in the conservation classic A Sand County Almanac. “A dawn wind stirs on the great marsh,” Leopold began. “With almost imperceptible slowness it rolls a bank of fog across the wide morass. Like the white ghost of a glacier the mists advance, riding over phalanxes of tamarack, sliding across bogmeadows heavy with dew. A single silence hangs from horizon to horizon.” Describing the first stirrings of the marsh, Leopold focused on the approach of a great formation of cranes, first flying “on motionless wings,” then settling “in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds.” For Leopold, the quality of the scene went beyond mere beauty to “values as yet uncaptured by language.” The cranes in the marsh were symbols “of our untameable past, of that incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the affairs of birds and men.” Thus, the marsh offered a rare encounter with a humbling form of natural history. In the wildness of the marsh, Leopold suggested, we can feel a fundamental truth: We are as much a part of the evolutionary world of nature as the cranes. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 648

Categorization

• XREF: Leopold writes of listening/observation-as-method and land ethic — ties to the LGST polyad’s ‘listening’ thread and prior chapters’ conservation-into-environmentalism narrative. — connects to: Wetlands advocates fused ecosystem ecology with Leopold’s anti-anthropocentric land ethic — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 660; Seeing how wilderness connects to settlements heightens the sense it must be preserved — Gordon Hempton, John Grossmann, One Square Inch of Silence- One Man’s…, 1640

Broader Connections

• Seeing how wilderness connects to settlements heightens the sense it must be preserved #expands (0.75) — Gordon Hempton, John Grossmann, One Square Inch of Silence- One Man’s…, 1640