Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126
Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127
Blog Post 4 (for Thursday, 2/6)
Sarah Walters points out in her post that “as a child, Cronon inherently called the rural farms “natural” and the city “unnatural.” Except for the sake of tradition, it doesn’t seem to make sense that urbanity is constantly juxtaposed with nature. We’ve touched on this in class— if cities are made by humans, and humans are natural, aren’t cities also natural? William Cronon identifies this problem in his book Nature’s Metropolis, writing: “putting the city outside nature meant sending humanity into the same exile” (8).
Perhaps we juxtapose urbanity and nature because the notion of “naturalness” with regards to one’s surroundings was much less prominent before the industrial revolution. This period of capitalism, technological advancement and urbanization created unprecedented environments. Smoggy and crowded, industrial era cities did not resemble anything that had existed before.
It was much easier to recognize cities during the middle ages or early modern period as part of a “natural” trajectory of human progress than it was for industrialized cities. Basically, these new cities were considered mutated versions of the cleaner, less crowded urban environments that existed before.
The urbanity/nature juxtaposition, it seems, is not for distinguishing between cities and non-cities, as it is usually used, but rather for distinguishing between industrial era urban environments and whatever preceded them.
Undermining this juxtaposition, Cronon suggests that the city itself is maybe a natural entity for other reasons that its association with humanity: “by massing the combined energies and destines of hundreds of thousands of people, the city, despite its human origins, seemed to express a natural power” (13). The massive, growing, energized urban environment seemed to posses a mind of its own. Furthermore, it seemed to be out of human control in the same way that natural forces are out of human control: “it seemed at times to radiate an energy that could only be superhuman” (13).
So perhaps the city is unjustly opposed to nature after all.
Aside: what makes a rural environment any more “natural” than an urban one? Both places have been shaped in ways that do not represent a natural state. Cronon describes the rural landscape surrounding Chicago as “yielding not grass and red-winged blackbirds but wheat, corn, and hogs” (7). These symbols of cultivation demonstrate that, in the making of both rural and urban environments, the landscape has been transformed— though perhaps unequally.