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William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis provided a new take on nature that other scholars we have read thus far have strayed away from, that the growth of cities and existence of nature can coexist. I found William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis especially interesting because it expanded on some of the questions I posed as a discussant for The Great New Wilderness Debate. The first two questions I posed were “Is the ‘concrete jungle’ of cities its own form of wilderness?” and “Is modern society and western culture artificial or just advanced/evolved nature?” After reading the first part of Nature’s Metropolis it seems apparent that Cronon does believe that Chicago’s metropolis is a “concrete jungle” and that modern society (not necessarily the artificial aspects) is an advanced form of nature.
As Ian stated below, many of Cronon’s points have to be positioned around the idea that cities are the next step in ecological evolution, and that premise alone indicates that Cronon believes that the ‘concrete jungle’ is just a new form of nature. However, he does not believe that it is artificial. Cronon’s belief that the surrounding nature and ideal location of Chicago makes the city’s growth an ecological evolution contradicts with the idea that I initially proposed, that a city was artificial. This goes to Henry’s point below, and how one defines nature. Henry brings together a key element of Cronon’s argument well: “People generally take nature to refer to features of the earth that are there independent of any manmade processes. However, to Cronon, saying that something is “natural” means it is referring to something that seems to be in its normal place.” By this definition, nothing in a city is artificial because it is a system of interconnected pieces, and because something is composed of elements initially derived from nature, it is just a further ecological expansion.
Ian makes a good point building off of this, that “So many perceive nature to be something void of human contact and interference, yet there is probably no location on Earth that has not been inhabited by humans at some point in time.” It is this point that really helps me buy into the idea that a metropolis and nature do not have to be exclusive. Humans are a part of nature, and the fact that they have advanced further than other natural elements (and have started to use those elements in ways that harm parts of nature) doesn’t make modern society unnatural. Humans should try and preserve the nature they are harming, but as culture has evolved so has nature, even if for the worse.