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In the Preface to Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, William Cronon explains how he will use the word “nature” in the text. He writes about how difficult it is to use the word “nature” while also trying to suggest “that the boundary between human and nonhuman, natural and unnatural, is profoundly problematic” (Cronon, xix). I think Henry is correct to say that Cronon’s argument only makes sense in light of his definition of nature. Cronon states, “Nature’s Metropolis and the Great West are in fact different labels for a single region and the relationships that defined it” (19). This wouldn’t make sense without allowing for human action as a part of nature (this is what Cronon calls “second nature”).
Based on the readings from the first section of The Great Wilderness Debate, I concluded that wilderness is necessarily uninhabited. I also considered whether or not nature has to be an uninhabited space since the definition of nature is related to definition of wilderness. Cronon’s argument convinced me that the line between the natural and unnatural worlds is not as distinct as I thought. Ian appropriately characterizes this blurry line by saying that Cronon “perceive[s] cities as the next evolution of a natural ecosystem.” I agree with Ian’s assessment of Cronon’s argument, but I have a visceral reaction to it–how can the big, scary, immoral city be an extension of the “first nature” world?
I think this is difficult for me to accept because I just finished reading Wendell Berry’s novel Hannah Coulter. The narrator, Hannah, describes her life as a farmer in rural Kentucky. Then, Hannah mourns for the loss of her way of life because her three children grew up, went away to college, and never returned to their hometown. This novel made me want to move back to northcentral Pennsylvania (where I grew up) and become a farmer, because the narrator is obsessed with belonging to a place. Despite my gut reaction that this can only happen in the country, maybe a person can truly belong to a city, too.
Cronon importantly brings time into the equation of Chicago’s history. “Before the city, there was the land,” Cronon writes (23). Using von Thünen’s Isolated State theory to help explain the continuity between urban and rural areas, Cronon explains the limitations of the theory: von Thünen “made no effort to place his city-country system in time. The lone city in the midst of the featureless plain had no history, and so poses real problems when one tries to apply it to the extremely dynamic processes that reshaped city and country in the nineteenth-century West” (52). I appreciate Cronon’s critique. Cronon helpfully places Chicago’s (and its hinterland’s) emergence squarely in time, allowing the reader to understand “the city’s place in nature” (8).