Nature's Metropolis

I have previously posted my thoughts about how William Cronon described the White Pine lumber industry in Chapter 4 of this book, so I re-opened that from the archives so people could read it for free. But as I’ve begun reviewing my archive of posts, I discovered I have never posted my review of the whole book. So I’m rectifying that error now.

Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, by William Cronon, is one of the foundational books of Environmental History. Although he is a pillar of the discipline, Cronon only really wrote two monographs (he did publish anthologies of his many articles and essays). Changes in the Land (1983) was based on work Cronon originally did at Oxford and Nature’s Metropolis came out in 1991, a year after Cronon received a PhD from Yale University.

The basic thrust of most of Cronon’s writing is that nature and humanity (and also ecology and economy, country and city) are are not merely two sides of the same coin, but are parts of a whole that has been obscured and hidden by both market and anti-market (romantic) forces.  Nature’s Metropolis uses the history of Chicago and its hinterlands to illustrate this point.  Beginning and ending with his personal story of a childhood journey from New England to Wisconsin that took him through the city, Cronon concludes “We fool ourselves if we think we can choose between [country and city], for the green lake and the orange cloud are creatures of the same landscape.” (385)  The text is a series of increasingly fine-grained illustrations of this point.

Cronon uses several interpretive frames to explore Chicago’s history and points out some of their limitations.  Frederick Jackson Turner’s idea that the frontier “recapitulated the social evolution of human civilization” and provided the “source of American energy, individualism, and political democracy” (31) fails to account for the rapid, booster-driven growth of Chicago as an urban center.  Turner did not give enough credit, Cronon says, to the market as an agent of both rural and urban change.  “Urban-rural commerce,” he says, “was the motor of frontier change, a fact that the boosters understood better than Turner.” (48)  I think Turner had to ignore the role of capital, precisely because it undermined his evolutionary, democratic vision of the frontier and America.

Similarly, Cronon uses Johann Heinrich von Thünen’s “Isolated State” theory and more recent “central place theory” to complicate and partially correct Turner’s perspective.  Von Thünen’s idealized economy created a series of concentric rings around processing centers based primarily on transportation cost.  While acknowledging the heavy qualification necessary to apply this model in the real world, Cronon says it fits Chicago to a certain degree.  Certainly, by focusing attention of rail transport (which not only lowered costs but more importantly eliminated risk and smoothed seasonality), the model explains some of the features of Chicago’s western hinterland.  But, as Cronon says, both theories are “profoundly static and ahistorical.”  Worse, like Turner, they are inaccurate: “Far from being a gradual, bottom-up process...nearly the opposite was true.  The highest-ranking regional metropolis consolidated its role at a very early date, and promoted the communities in its hinterland as much as they promoted it.” (282)  Since the west was the result of  symbiotic, simultaneous growth of city and country, neither place can claim historic precedence as a basis of moral or social superiority.  The arguments of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson don’t apply -- at least not in the straightforward ways their proponents had hoped they would.

Throughout the book, Cronon uses ideas of “‘First Nature’ (original, prehuman nature) and ‘Second Nature’ (the artificial nature that people erect atop first nature)” that he attributes to Hegel and Marx. (xiv) Cronon’s use of this distinction is complicated by his recognition of the complexity surrounding the term “nature” (“traced most subtly,” he says, “in the work of Raymond Williams”), so he keeps it on a relatively allusive level.  In several places, he conflates these ideas with the commonplace sense of a way of thinking becoming “second nature” -- and this connection seems to make sense and work.

As readers familiar with Cronon would expect, he is always quick to point out ecological and historical backgrounds all too often elided by others.  The Western Frontier was not “free” as Turner had said, Cronon reminds readers.  It was taken in conquest from the previous residents.  Nor was it pristine: western prairies were the product of Indian burning and hunting practices (as demonstrated by the rapid incursion of oak and hemlock on ranches and homesteads once whites suppressed fire).  Similarly, Cronon regularly begins descriptions of regions like Wisconsin timberlands or western rangelands with surveys of their ecological histories going back to the ice age.  This nod to “big history” not only helps reinforce the ecological sensibility underpinning his argument, it serves as an antidote to the alienation Cronon says is produced by separating economic production from consumption.

Chicago, says Cronon, cannot attribute its rapid growth in the last third of the nineteenth  century to being a central place.  It is a central place now (of a much smaller hinterland than it possessed in its heyday), but it grew as a gateway.  Beginning with a typically Crononesque description of the many ways Chicago stood at the boundaries of ecosystems, continental watersheds, glacial termini, rural and urban society, railroad “trunk and fan,” (90) and “natural and cultural landscapes,” (25) Chicago grew by bridging the gap between the east (primarily New York) and the west (all the way to the Rockies).  In Chicago, eastern capital met western raw materials and consumers.  Railroads, finance, and information gave Chicago temporary, “second natural” advantages.  Boosterism, the Civil War, and momentum added to Chicago’s lead; which the city held until newer technologies (air travel and cargo), population changes, and the problems of success ended its predominance.

Along the way, Cronon tells fascinating and compelling stories about the standardization of time (74-8), the growth of organization and capitalism in the railroads (80), the abstraction of commodities into Currency (116), the conversion food to industry (246-56),  and the creation of the familiar consumer world (338-40).  Each successive story highlights the market’s increasing and ironic tendency to “obscure the connections between Chicago’s trade and its earthly roots. (264) “The geography of capital,” Cronon says, “produced a landscape of obscured connections.” (340)  But he doesn’t really explain the process behind this progressive attenuation of producers from consumers, so it’s unclear whether this was unique to Chicago, or a symptom of a more universal alienation.

I think Nature’s Metropolis proves its case with only occasional reservations.  Perhaps Cronon de-emphasizes the temporary nature of Chicago’s advantages to some degree.  The Civil War trade (which allowed Chicago to pull ahead of Cincinnati in meat packing) and the closing of New Orleans (which devastated rival St. Louis) may have been given less credit than they are due, for Chicago’s rapid rise to preeminence.  Agrarian resistance is mentioned primarily in the context of the Granger Laws, with a few suggestive references to Chicago-published papers like the Prairie Farmer.  And once or twice, Cronon seems to reach too far into an allusive moralizing, such as when he describes the commodity exchange known as the Chicago Board of Trade as “boxes within boxes within boxes, all mediating between the commodified world inside and the physical world outside.” (146) 

The most important feature of Nature’s Metropolis for me is Cronon’s story of the actual historical rural and urban development of the middle west (rather than an abstract or theorized rural and urban world) as a single, interdependent process.  While earlier Eastern settlement may have followed a different path, the growth of the middle west as a single unit is crucially important; especially when we are evaluating the politics and cultural construction of rural/urban relations in the Populist and Progressive eras.

Critical reviews were remarkably mixed, for a book that won the Bancroft Prize.  Cronon was accused of being pompous, pushing the “green line” too far, and writing a “misanthropic” book.  I was more sympathetic to some of the comments about balance (yeah, it didn’t seem to me like the deaths of the bison herds and the growth of Armour and Swift were as inextricably linked as he said.  And yeah, I was bored by the White City) than the complaints about self-reference.  I didn’t feel particularly condescended to, as some of the critics apparently did.