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What seems to be characteristic in all the posts made thus far in response to the Cronon piece entitled “Nature’s Metropolis” is a questioning of the legitimacy of juxtaposing city and country. This questioning has taken the form of an interrogation of the natural vs. unnatural dichotomy where the notion of humanity and its naturalness is explored. Catherine Schmidt articulates the debate between those that would have us believe that all things are nature and those that would have us believe that nothing is nature. She sides with the former explaining how ultimately humanity and its creations are in a sense natural. Sherwood Callaway makes a similar point, albeit in a different manner, our view of the city as unnatural stems from an unprecedented “newness” in a sense. According to Callaway, the drastically unprecedented product of progression, in the form of industrialization and urbanization, caused us to see the city as at odds with the country. While these are valid points and important ideas, I fear we may be taking a more-narrow minded approach.
The real question here is why do we feel the need to separate country and city, and most importantly why do we ascribe to them adjectives of morality? In the beginning of Cronon’s piece it becomes clear that the dominant narrative would hold the country as good, pure, and beautiful, while the city is described as evil, dark, and almost mystical in nature. When one enters the city he or she is aware of all the bad, men that try to steal belongings and the polluted air that fills the lungs, that transpires here, however they are entranced by its strength as an almost prophecy for the future of human “triumph over nature.” Here is where we find the key to this debate and the answers to the aforementioned questions. For centuries man has crafted a narrative wherein he, the protagonist, battles with nature in an ongoing fight to control his own existence. Man creates houses to mitigate the effect of temperature and weather change on his ability to live. Man creates farmland as a way to coax the earth into yielding greater supplies of food in a sustainable fashion in order to further control his ability to live. Man creates air-conditioning, weather-proof building plans, unsinkable ships, state-of-the-art airplanes, all in an effort to control the conditions under which he lives in order to make them more favorable.
In this manner, the city and the country are essentially the same, as other students have so astutely pointed out. They are both monuments to this great struggle between man and nature; examples of man bending nature to his will. The only difference between the two is that one appears to be more drastic than the other, but this is a superficial distinction at best. But when we examine this great struggle, a new development in the ramifications of the newest development becomes clear. Although the struggle is essentially the same, there is a small difference in the interpretation of what these new developments means. Agriculture can be characterized by man struggling with nature causing it to yield more of its bounty to us in the form of foodstuffs. City development can be characterized by man struggling against nature, putting a concrete barrier between human and Earth privileging his creation over “hers.” From this springs interesting questions about creation. In his piece Cronon states, “to see one’s world as a self-created place opened the doorway to heroic achievement, but finally denied any other Creator be it Nature or God.” From this realization stems discomfort. If we have finally “done it” so to speak, then what does that mean for the things we have yet to control like death, some forms of disease, poverty, or discrimination? The city then becomes a symbol for despair in a way that the country does not. Perhaps this is where the narrative of the good country, where God remains supreme, and the bad city where man reigns unchallenged comes from. However, it is clear that the root of this debate is a human discomfort with encountering environments that would appear to be engineered entirely by us.