Wetlands became valued as wilderness precisely because they resisted development.

Evidence

The new appreciation of wetlands in the 1950s was also tied to the rise of a new aesthetic. For decades, outdoor enthusiasts had prized the sublime, but few people thought that marshes, swamps, and bogs possessed breathtaking grandeur. Even in 1932, for example, a prominent conservationist dismissed the Florida Everglades as a place with “mighty little that was of special interest, and absolutely nothing that was picturesque or beautiful.” The Everglades “were not as ugly or repulsive as some other swamps I have seen,” he acknowledged, but “a swamp is a swamp.” As roads crisscrossed more and more of the country, however, wetlands became more attractive: Because they were hard to develop, they often offered the increasingly valuable satisfactions of wilderness. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 647

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely counterintuitive inversion: the trait that excluded wetlands from the sublime (undevelopability) is what made them scarce wilderness once other land was paved — scarcity (created by sprawl itself) manufactures aesthetic and conservation value.
• XREF: connects to: Productivity rhetoric reframed wetlands as already-developed rather than wasted — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 653

Broader Connections

• Productivity rhetoric reframed wetlands as already-developed rather than wasted #qualifies (0.82) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 653