Floods, not engineering foresight, saved the marsh from drainage

Evidence

Now the saw bites into 1910-20, the decade of the drainage dream, when steam shovels sucked dry the marshes of central Wisconsin to make farms, and made ash-heaps instead. Our marsh escaped, not because of any caution or forbearance among engineers, but because the river floods it each April, and did so with a vengeance—perhaps a defensive vengeance—in the years 1913-16. The oak laid on wood just the same, even in 1915, when the Supreme Court abolished the state forests and Governor Phillip pontificated that ‘state forestry is not a good business proposition.’ — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 42

Categorization

• XREF: Textbook disturbance-history case for the Landscape polyad: hydrology as the agent determining which land-use schemes survive. — connects to: Engineers framed preserved wetlands as natural flood-control infrastructure — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 510; Federal flood engineers chose to buy wetlands instead of building reservoirs. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 646

Broader Connections

• Federal flood engineers chose to buy wetlands instead of building reservoirs. #expands (0.80) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 646
• Engineers framed preserved wetlands as natural flood-control infrastructure #complicates (0.78) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 510