You have written a wonderfully informative and
energizing essay to accompany this reprint of Paul Errington’s classic Of Men and Marshes. What drew you to his
writing in the first place?
You can turn to almost any
page in Of Men and Marshes and become
instantly absorbed in the beauty of Errington’s ecological thinking, in his way
of seeing the drama and grandeur of the wetland world. It’s remarkable, really.
He has a way of conveying the spirit of the marshland ecosystem so that you
feel you are right there with him, waders on, field glasses in hand, sharing
his experience of the prairie wetlands. He’s never showy or flighty in his
descriptions, but at the same time he conveys a reverence for the ecosystem and
its creatures that makes you forget that this guy was not only a scientist by
training but also one of the most renowned wildlife biologists of his day.
Errington may have had a biologist’s field notebook, but he had a poet’s pen.
What can Of Men
and Marshes teach today’s conservationists and policy makers?
One of the most important
lessons Errington can still teach conservationists, policy makers, and the
population in general is that our wetland ecosystems, all ecosystems, have
value beyond their monetary worth. At one of my favorite points in the book
Errington writes, “We need not feel over-critical of man for looking out for
his own interests, including means of livelihood, but neither need we commend
his heavy-handedness in dealing with the exploited earth and with the other
living things that belong on the earth, too.” He’s reminding us that we are not
the only organisms who belong on this planet. We have a tragic history of
selfish and shortsighted exploitation, and Errington reminds us that if we
continue to view the world as simply a resource for supplying economic
interests we will awake one day to a land unfit for any species, ours included.
How does this book compare to other environmental
classics of its time?
Errington had been a friend
and colleague of Aldo Leopold, and he at times in letters to his publisher said
he wanted Of Men and Marshes to reach
the same general audience who so enjoyed Leopold’s 1948 Sand County Almanac. So, like virtually all of the works of nature
writing that followed in the wake of Leopold’s classic, Of Men and Marshes seeks a middle ground between the sometimes
less-than-accessible realm of environmental science and the more inviting genre
of nature writing. It’s a powerful mixture when done well. If you like
Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, Rachel
Carson’s The Sea Around Us (1951),
Joseph Wood Krutch’s The Desert Year
(1954), Loren Eisely’s The Immense
Journey (also published in 1957), and other similar books of that time, you
will love Errington’s Of Men and Marshes.
As with Carson’s sea books and Krutch’s Desert
Year, Errington takes as his subject an ecosystem that until then had been
largely overlooked, or even maligned, and invites us to reconsider its worth.
It’s a gesture that places Of Men and
Marshes within the best works of nature writing from that era. Errington
also goes into untrodden territory, for instance when he concludes the book by
juxtaposing an example of muskrat overcrowding in a marsh with the problem of
human overpopulation and overconsumption. The ideas in that section are even
more relevant today, and no less controversial. Errington, more so than some of
his contemporaries, was not afraid to hold a mirror up to humanity and show us
our blemishes.
