One of the marvels of early Wisconsin was the Round River, a river that flowed into itself, and thus sped around and around in a never-ending circuit. Paul Bunyan discovered it, and the Bunyan saga tells how he floated many a log down its restless waters. No one has suspected Paul of speaking in parables, yet in this instance he did. Wisconsin not only had a round river, Wisconsin is one. The current is the stream of energy which flows out of the soil into plants, thence into animals, thence back into the soil in a never ending circuit of life.

Aldo Leopold in the essay, “Round River”

With apologies to about 70 years worth of Leopold scholars, I have to point out that the Round River was in Michigan, due west of Grayling in section 37, according to The Round River Drive, by James MacGillivray.  It was the first published Paul Bunyan Story, and appeared in The Detroit News July 24, 1910.  Mr. MacGillivray didn’t credit old Paul with much of an environmental ethic, either.

You see back in those days the government didn’t care nothin’ about the timber and all you had to do was to hunt up a good tract on some runnin’ stream — cut her and float her down. You was bound to strike either Lake Huron or Michigan, and it made no difference which, ’cause logs were the same price whichever, and they was always mills at the mouth of the stream to saw ‘em into boards. We’d placed our camp on the river’s bank—we didn’t know it was Round River then — and, we put in over a hundred million feet, the whole blame cut comin’ off one forty.

The loggers didn’t leave very much standing, but swarmed over the northern half of the state like giant, tree-eating locusts. There was no thought of sustainability or how cutting all the trees off of the land would affect the ecology (a word not coined until 1870) of the entire peninsula. There was a growing country that needed lumber, the Civil War was over and there was plenty of cheap labor willing to take on the dangerous job of felling trees and driving the logs to market. There were many casualties, and not just among the lumberjacks.

The fragile soil that had been developing since the retreat of the glaciers only 12,000 years before followed the logs downstream. The native Michigan Grayling required cold, clean streams and couldn’t survive the increase in water temperature caused by removing the trees that shaded the rivers, the sediment covering their spawning areas, the scouring of the rivers by Bunyan-size log drives, and the enormous commercial and “sport” fishing pressure that measured the catch by the barrel.

Other wildlife was left without suitable habitat, and then when giant fires ran through all of the slash that was left lying on the ground much of the remaining thin soils were burned off and washed away. Settlers would try to farm this poor but now-open country for a few years. Most of them were doomed to failure, and much of the land was abandoned, eventually reverting back to the state for delinquent taxes.

Everyone who has written about Michigan’s economy since European man first arrived here has pointed out that the notion of sustainability must have been bred out of us in favor of the “boom and bust” gene. First it was the fur trade and the over-harvesting of critters worth more dead than alive. Then the logging era that not only removed nearly all of the trees north of Lansing, but created conditions for the soil sterilizing fires that followed. The mines of the UP led the country in the mining of iron and copper ore, for about 50 years. Commercial fishing hung on but finally fell victim to the invasion of sea lampreys and alewife in the middle of the 20th century. Now we are seeing what may well be the end of Michigan’s manufacturing era, the economic engine that drove our state for most of the 20th century.

You’d think that someone would have picked up on the importance of sustainability somewhere along the line.

Didn’t everyone read The Tragedy of the Commons in High School?

JP

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