R. McCabe Transcript from UW Archives in
A Niche in Time, unpublished manuscript, p. 241

I wonder if you realize that the conversion of the University Bay marsh into a boat harbor, which you advocate in your Friday issue, has important bearings on conservation:

One of the fundamental premises of conservation is that marshes are an important part of the organism we call land, and as such are not to be lightly ‘amputated’ from the landscape.  Land, like any other organism, consists of interdependent parts.  It is a fallacy to think we can amputate one part and retain normal health in the land as a whole.

If you doubt this, I suggest you listen in on the Hydro-biological Symposium being held on the campus next week.  It is ironical that the university faculty should be telling the world about the indispensability of marshes during the very week that the city of Madison is arranging the demise of the University Bay marsh.

I admit at once that the University marsh is a small place, and that its demolition will have no measurable physical effect on the land-health of the county or the region.  But the sum total or cumulative effect of these small demolitions is another matter.   One of the effects has been the ruin of five counties in central Wisconsin.

University Bay is a moral, rather than a physical issue.  If the university expects Wisconsin farmers to tend to heed its advice to be cautious about demolishing marshes, it had better watch what example it sets on its own campus.

An esthetic issue is also involved.  The university marsh, which you call ‘one of the few uninviting spots on Lake Mendota,’ is the sole bit of natural landscape remaining on the campus.  If, in the eye of Wisconsin citizens, ‘dockage and sightly buildings’ are more inviting that [sic] a natural marsh, then we had better spend our money, if we have any, on a new department of esthetic education, rather than on new dockage for boats.

I am heartily in sympathy with the proposal to encourage boating on the lake.  If University Bay is the only possible place for dockage, then I suppose the marsh will have to go.  But let the sacrifice be made sadly rather than gladly, and let it [be] made clear that we sacrifice this area not because it is a marsh, but despite the fact that it is.  And finally, let the university, in token of its regret, set up a research fellowship for marshland conservation, or some other concrete evidence of its attitude toward the fast-vanishing marshlands of the state.

return to Aldo Leopold