Reflections on Aldo Leopold's "Marshland Elegy"

Fall evenings are fine times to wile away the encroaching hours of darkness by perusing works of great naturalists and conservationists, such as Aldo Leopold.  Tucked at the back of his well-known book, A Sand County Almanac, are two of Leopold's short essays, The Land Ethic and Marshland Elegy.  Though written over 70 years ago about the marshes of Wisconsin, where Sandhill Cranes breed, Marshland Elegy could just as easily have been written about their winter home in the wetlands and farmlands of California's Great Central Valley.

Leopold begins his Elegy with the poetic prose for which he is so beloved, painting the kind of word pictures I love to get lost in.

"A dawn wind stirs on the great marsh.  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... 

"...High horns, low horns, silence, and finally a pandemonium of trumpets, rattles, croaks, and cries that almost shakes the bog with its nearness, but without yet disclosing whence it comes.  At last a glint of sun reveals the approach of a great echelon of birds.  

"On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds.  A new day has begun on the crane marsh."

Substitute "tule reeds" for "tamarack" in the first paragraph above, and you have a perfect description of morning in a Central Valley "crane marsh."  

While the marshes of Wisconsin come alive to the "clangor of cranes" every spring, here in California's Great Central Valley, autumn is the season that is annually awakened by the return of family groups of Sandhill Cranes.  Yet this western landscape is no less ancient than the peat bogs of the Midwest, and certainly no less threatened, its future no less precarious.  

Despite the diminishing size of wetlands across North America, the cranes persist, returning each year to traditional northern breeding grounds in the spring, and southern overwintering sites in the autumn.  Year after year this goes on, as reliable as clockwork, a perpetual cycle, an eternal dance as old as the ancient peat bogs and tule marshes themselves.  

"To what end?" asks Leopold.  

To what end, indeed.  

As Leopold points out, 

"Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.  It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.  The quality of cranes lies, I think, in this higher gamut, as yet beyond the reach of words."

We as humans have a bad habit.  Many bad habits, actually, but in this context one is particularly insidious: Man looks at a thing and sees only what he may get out of it.  How will x benefit me?  How can x make me a profit?  How might x be exploited for my own personal gain?

To that end, egrets were once hunted to near extinction for their fetching plumage.  To that end, countless millions of acres of wetland habitat have been drained, filled and paved.  To that end, North America very nearly lost its vast herds of bison.

So often, we utterly fail to see and properly appreciate that the value in a created thing is bound up in its very existence.  It - the crane, the egret, the bison, the wetland, the grassland, the redwood tree - has value simply because it exists as a piece of this magnificent world.  

The story of Wisconsin's crane marshes is not at all unlike that of our own wetlands.  Settlers arrived, bringing agriculture and development, and the landscape was forever altered as a result.  The wheels turned slowly at first, at a pace that benefited, for a brief time, man and crane.  But progress detests sluggishness, and things must go on, ever faster and faster...

"The marsh might have kept on producing hay and prairie chickens, deer and muskrat, crane-music, and cranberries forever.  The new overlords did not understand this.  They did not include soil, plants, or birds in their ideas of mutuality.  The dividends of such a balanced economy were too modest.  They envisaged farms not only around, but in the marsh.  An epidemic of ditch-digging and land-booming set in.  The marsh was gridironed with drainage canals, speckled with new fields and farmsteads." 

As it was across the Midwest, so it was in California's Central Valley.  

"For [the cranes], the song of the power shovel came near being an elegy.  The high priests of progress knew nothing of cranes and cared less...  What good is an undrained marsh anyhow?" 

But I would argue, as Leopold and many naturalists before me have done, that the value of nature, the true value of birds and beasts, wetlands and woods, stretches far beyond cold profit.  In the branch of economics that deals with natural resources and the environment, this is known as intrinsic value, an idea which assigns worth to a species or place simply because it exists.  

We value the knowledge that wild birds and wild lands are out there, in pristine condition (or so we like to believe), and simply knowing that they are there is worth something.  I'll probably never travel to the bamboo forests of China or the Arctic tundra, but there is something deep inside me that needs to know they are still there.  They have intrinsic value.

"The ultimate value in these marshes is wildness, and the crane is wildness incarnate."

- Aldo Leopold

To be sure, in true elegy fashion, Aldo Leopold does not end his piece on an uplifting note.  He claims that even to preserve land is essentially to destroy it, as roads must be built for access to this "wild" land, since what use is there in having a roadless marsh, pristine wilderness if it can't be accessed by the masses?  This is Leopold's great paradox:

"But all conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wildness left to cherish."

I, however, can't take such a gloomy view of things.  It's just too much for this naturalist's soul to bear.  I must see the positive side of things, and be grateful that we have managed to preserve and restore enough acres of wetlands in the Central Valley to support even this small remnant of an ancient wintering population of cranes.  

As Leopold believed, 

"Upon the place of [the cranes'] return, they confer a peculiar distinction."

And I certainly agree.  What would the Central Valley be without the annual arrival of its treasured flocks of Sandhill Cranes?

Leopold predicted:

"Someday, perhaps in the very process of our benefactions, perhaps in the fullness of geological time, the last crane will trumpet his farewell and spiral skyward from the great marsh." 

But I certainly hope that these magnificent creatures will be with us for quite some time yet.

All quotes were taken from Aldo Leopold's essay, Marshland Elegy, published in 1948.  Click here to read it for yourself!