“They envisaged farms not only around, but in the marsh. An epidemic of ditch digging and land-booming set in. The marsh was grid ironed with drainage canals, speckled with new fields and farmsteads” (pg.106).
A main issue Aldo Leopold touches on is the beauty of nature through the seasons, in all different forms. He talks about species after species of plants and animals and why certain animals chose to live in sand counties and what their cycles are. In this excerpt Aldo Leopold mentions a marsh and how humans decided to settle on it, building their farmsteads, drainage canals and even cleared land for new fields. With these farms they hoped to grow crops and earn money. Aldo continues on in this section to mention that the frost made it so the crops could not grow and the drainage canals became useless, putting these people into a large amount of debt. Does it seem like he was mentioning this as a subtle point stating that man should not clear land produce goods, that man should not spend all of this time disrupting areas to build farms and drainage canals only to have them become useless, thus, ruining the land for nothing? Or does it seem like he just mentioned this case to express how nothing could really grow or succeed in this area due to the large amount of frost in the area at that time? I believe you could look at it either way. The first would make sense because he is an environmentalist and an ecologist so he may have strong feelings towards humans and the disruptions they’ve caused.