ROADS versu WILD-LIFE.

Forest and Bird, Issue 48, 1 May 1938, Page 4

ROADS versus WILD-LIFE.

To build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs. A roadless marsh is seemingly as worthless to the alphabetical conservationists as an undrained one was to the empire-builders. Solitude, the one natural resource still undowered of alphabets, is so far recognised as valuable only by ornithologists and cranes. Thus always does history, whether of marsh or market-place, mice or men, end in paradox. The ultimate value in these marshes is wildness, and the crane is wildness incarnate. 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 nothing left to cherish.

Some day, perhaps in the very process of our benefactions, perhaps in the fulness of geologic time, the last crane will trumpet his farewell and spiral skyward from the great marsh. High out of the clouds will fall the sound of hunting horns, the baying of the phantom pack, the tinkle of little bells, and • then a s'lence never to be broken, unless perchance in some far pasture of the Milky Way. —Aldo Leopold, in “American Forests.”