A Sand County Almanac: Part II: Wisconsin Summary & Analysis

Since the ice age, Leopold says, cranes have arrived on the Wisconsin peat bogs. The bogs themselves contain layers of history, of moss, trees, and the bodies of cranes, the whole landscape a “bridge into the future” and into the past.

Leopold observes that nature’s worth often derives from its beauty, but that nature can hold value in other complex and difficult-to-describe ways. The cranes, for example, are important because of the longevity of their species, not just because of their physical beauty. The cranes are a “symbol of our untamable past,” a reminder of the scale of “evolutionary time,” their very migration “the ticking of the geologic clock.” The cranes and their behavior serve as a timekeeper and an anchor for humans and for the landscape.

Leopold recounts a broad survey of the history of the cranes and the marshland. First, a glacier cut through the land, then a lake filled the land cleared by the glacier, then it drained away. Instead of waterways, mossy meadows and bogs took over, and the cranes migrated through them. Leopold imagines French trappers stopping by the marshes, then Englishmen making farms and cutting hay from the prairies a century later.

During these “haymeadow days,” marsh dwellers celebrated an “Arcadian age” in which plants, animals, and humankind lived together in peace. However, the humans didn’t understand the delicate balance they had struck with the marshes. They wanted to farm not just by the marshes, but in the marshes, and so they converted them into dry farms. This destroyed the area, as the farms were unsuccessful, and the remaining marshes dried up and caught fire. As a result, the number of cranes diminished.

Leopold believes that the engineers who drained the marshes didn’t care about the cranes, and imagines them thinking, “What good is an undrained marsh anyhow?” However, the government eventually began to regulate the area, and the marsh was partially re-flooded.

Leopold argues that “the ultimate value in these marshes is wildness, and the crane is wildness incarnate.” However, to many people a marsh that is truly wild and inaccessible is worthless. He alleges that, unfortunately, to appreciate wilderness “we must see and fondle” and therefore destroy the wilderness we were trying to protect.

Leopold bought a farm in the Sand Counties in the 1930s. The counties are economically poor, but ecologically rich. The counties are full of plants and flowers (like the draba), as well as many endemic bird species. No economist would stop and look at any of these plants or animals, but they enrich Leopold’s life.

Leopold traces the life of an atom from the Paleozoic era to the present. The atom began lodged in a piece of limestone, but was released by the root of an oak tree, traveled through many flowers, into a plover, back to the prairie, and eventually into the sea (taking many detours along the way), where it is lost forever.

Tracing another atom, Leopold imagines a farmer coming into the prairie and failing to understand the value of natural diversity. Instead, the farmer only makes room for what he finds useful: wheat and oxen. As a result, he makes no effort to protect the natural landscape, allowing the loam to slowly erode, restricting the rivers, and allowing the passenger pigeon to die off.

Leopold meditates on the now extinct passenger pigeon, for whom a monument was built and dedicated in 1947. Society grieves for the passenger pigeon, which was once so populous that its flocks could blot out the sun, but which was hunted to extinction in the early 20th century. Leopold sees that the pigeon was part of a greater exchange: a natural world for an industrialized one. He wonders if this was a fair trade. Although “the gadgets of industry bring us more comforts than the pigeons did,” he asks, “do they add as much to the glory of the spring?”

Leopold worries that not many people know what he now deeply understands: humans travel forward in time not alone, but with all the plants and animals on earth. Choices humans make not only affect them, but the wider natural world as well. Although the individual person who killed the last of any endangered species likely didn’t notice or mourn its loss, Leopold believes it is society’s ability to collectively mourn for a species whose extinction we have caused that separates humans from animals.

“Economic moralists” might argue that if the pigeons did not go extinct when they did, farmers protecting their land would have killed them later. Leopold feels this misses the point. He believes that the ability “to love what was” and to celebrate the history of the land is another way in which humans are superior to animals.

Leopold considers childhood and the wilderness after some young men canoe past him on a river. He sees that, for them, this trip down the river is “their first and last taste of freedom,” an opportunity for them to make mistakes and take control of their own lives in between the order of school and their professional lives.

Leopold remembers his own childhood. Going down a nearby river, he felt that the wilderness was unimpressive, interrupted by docks and cabins. On a wider scale, much of the wilderness had been destroyed or developed, to the point that many Wisconsin log cabins were made with wood from Idaho or Oregon. However, in 1943 the State Conservation Department began to actively try and restore a stretch of wilderness along this river. Then, in 1947, dairy farmers organized and petitioned to dam the river to create a cheaper source of local power. Their petition was approved, the river dammed, and the wilderness destroyed for good.

In his final passage in the chapter, Leopold reflects upon an old oak that had been girdled, and had died. Killing this tree for its wood, to Leopold, seems equivalent to burning one’s furniture in order to keep warm—a last ditch effort that will bring you no joy in the end.