Natures Metropolis – Chicago & the Great West (Paper): Chicago and the Great West

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Still, Cronon relies heavily on Johann Heinrich von Thünen’s concentric circle analysis, from 1826, of the zones that surround a city, from intensive agriculture closest to the city to wilderness at the farthest extent. More important, he helps lay the groundwork for a vital new field of scholarship: the history of the natural environment and its relationship to human society. The way loggers created ice trails to move logs in the winter, and floated them downriver in the spring floods (a seasonal bottleneck that caused vast and dangerous logjams). However, the long accounts of credit, lumber shipments, and other economic activities are more fun to think about than to read about.

It is also a fine work of interpretation, for a large part of Cronon's argument revolves around his attempt to define exactly what is rural, and what is urban, and how the two interact to create a novel economic force. Similarly, these processes operated through individual bodies sorting individual kernels of corn, but it was also composed of commodity flows where markets traded on the futures of those aggregated commodities.

And Cronon’s exclusion of African Americans from his later chapter examining motivations for rural residents to migrate to the city is curious indeed. In a historical narrative of Chicago, one of the most successful American cities, Cronon traces the roots of 19th-century ecological and economic thought that turned the western frontier into a central metropolis. The Manifest Destiny school of city-boosters asserts that Chicago must be great precisely because of this perfect distribution of resources and transit systems. Nature’s Metropolis makes for beautiful reading because of the laser-focused acuity that Bill lavished on every sentence, paragraph, section, and chapter (not to mention each endnote, data routine, and mortgage map). The roots of the modern environmental predicament are plainly visible in the economic dynamism that brought about the rise of Chicago in the mid-nineteenth century, which is a captivating story in its own right.

When labor-time becomes a number—the product of time worked and wage rate, for example—it could then be moved over great distances at rapid speeds. Many years after my initial foray into this justly treasured book, its crystalline quality continues to impress me as the wellspring of its many wonders.William Cronon presents in Nature’s Metropolis an assertion of the fundamental interconnectedness of the city and the countryside. Cronon navigates a path between the followers of Frederick Jackson Turner, author of the thesis that American character was shaped by the experience of the frontier, and revisionists who sought to suggest that the rugged individualism Turner depicted as a creation of life in the West was little but a fiction. Part history, part sociological study, part economic analysis, and part ecological survey, William Cronon examines the growth of Chicago by studying the city’s 19th Century relationship to the larger “Great West” (more or less the once-sparsely settled regions between the Ohio River Valley and the Pacific). The way railroads stopped near Northern lakes to refill refrigerator cars with ice cut from lakes thawed months before.