Chicago – American Environments to 1893

May 4, 2014

My Interpretation of Environmental History and Nature

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Looking back on this past semester, I realize how little I knew about environmental history before I began this class. I have never been to a state park, and I only went on my first hike, to the top of “Arthur’s Seat,” when I was abroad. I had always thought of the definition of “natural” as something untouched by mankind, mysterious in its sheer expanse, and beautiful. I looked at nature the way Henry David Thoreau viewed nature, as something mystifying and necessary:

We need the tonic of wilderness… at the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. (From Walden: Or, Life In the Woods)

This class and the works that we have read, however, have completely changed my perspective on how I view nature and the wilderness. Nature does not encompass solely the peaceful and tranquil sceneries I once associated with the term, but now I include devastating tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanoes, storms, and floods as natural. To me now, nature includes things not touched and touched by man, because we as humans are as much a part of this natural ecosystem as any other animal. We interact with our environment, affect it, change it, help it, and hurt it, just as other creatures of this world. The environment influences us in the same ways. Our interaction with nature often impacts our decisions, our lifestyles, and our future. Whether the environment dictates military strategy of the Civil War or makes scholars wonder why Los Angeles was placed in a danger zone, mankind’s balance with nature tips back and forth throughout time. This tipping of the scale is certainly natural.

But to what extent? Will there ever be a point where we as humans will tip the scale too far in our direction and forever upset the world as we know it? Will there be a point at which we cannot go back, when nature is forever affected without the capability to recover? These questions are a few that environmental historians study as well as wonder if, perhaps, we have already crossed over the point of no return. Mike Davis believes there is no helping Los Angeles from disaster. William Cronon studies the rise of Chicago as a metropolis and its positive contribution to our American way of life.

American capitalism and market economy contributes to our destruction of our wilderness, yet also contributes to our survival. The line remains blurry between protecting our environment and protecting our American values and way of life. Justin’s comment, that “the environment has the potential to destroy humans as well,” resonates with me because many of the conversations we hear are one sided, placing mankind as the “evil” destroying “good” nature. This course has taught me that there is no duality when it comes to environmental history. Historians analyze this gray area and determine at what points in history men or nature have tipped the scale. I will forever look at nature and study environmental history with a more encompassing and expansive definition while trying to answer who the actors at play are and who appears to be at “fault.” This course has taught me that the answer to that question might not ever be solved, but that environmental history can help us make better and more intelligent decisions about how we interact with the world around us.

April 28, 2014

Steinburg Does It All

Ted Steinburg’s all-encompassing book Down to Earth: Nature’s Roll in American History is a sweeping environmental history of America. This is worth pointing out as a merit because this is the first we’ve read with so broad a scope, seeking to include pretty much all of the themes we have examined in American environmental history thus far. I like how he begins the book with a geological history of the land spanning back to the formation of North America out of Pangaea, which shows how our landscape is made up of the same stuff as the other continents. This is also cool because Steinburg takes us from there to the BP oil spill.

I would agree with Manish that space is an important theme in both Steinburg’s work and in this course. We saw in Nature’s Metropolis how capitalism spawned the first skyscrapers in Chicago and annihilated space and time to increase efficiency. In Steinburg this has also come to include waste management, which is still an issue of space today (168).

April 7, 2014

Chicago’s Purifying Flames

In “Faith and Doubt: The Imaginative Dimensions of the Great Chicago Fire,” Carl Smith discusses how two clusters of beliefs arose from the flames of Chicago’s great fire of 1871. From it came a belief in Chicago’s transcendent purpose as a sort of divinely sanctioned landscape with boundless potential and a special place in history. The other belief was a worry that at any moment, places like Chicago could explode into anarchy if the social order weren’t carefully guarded. After the Chicago fire occurred, residents and interested parties across the country recognized the needs for a city to have stable society. For many concerned citizens, the fire was an act of God purifying the city of sin and allowing those left to start anew on moral high ground.

This reading is strongly related to Henry’s in that natural disasters came to be an indication of God’s judgment in the American conscience. Though Smith didn’t mention it, I thought that Henry’s point about Bradford’s “City upon a hill,” and American exceptionalism would have been pertinent. Indeed some citizens believed Chicago to be this “City upon a hill.”: “Bright, Christian capital of lakes and prairies/Heaven had no interest in the scourge and scath;/Thou wert the newest shrine of our religion,/The youngest witness of our faith” (135). In this line of thought, Chicago is no longer unique, and the Great Fire fits into a larger narrative about the relationship between God and America rather than God and Chicago.

March 30, 2014

Dislocation in Nature’s Metropolis

I enjoyed reading Parts II of William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. His exploration of the process of grain, lumber, and meat becoming commodities was fascinating, especially when he showed the distinct roles grain elevators, fences, and stockyards played in those processes. I had never considered that animals (along with alcohol) are easier to transport than plants: “pigs (along with whisky) were generally the most compact and valuable way of bringing [farmers’ corn crops] to market” (226). Not only is this an interesting idea, it is also an example of the geography/transportation of capital. Cronon quotes from one source, “‘Corn thus becomes incarnate; for what is a hog, but fifteen or twenty bushels of corn on four legs?'” (226).

One of Cronon’s conclusions in Part II is that “once within the corporate system, places lost their particularity and became functional abstractions on organizational charts” (259). Cronon carries the theme of dislocation into Part III. After carefully connecting Chicago to its hinterlands/rural areas to their Metropolis through the three commodities in Part II, “Nature to Market,” Cronon commences a different investigation in Part III, “The Geography of Capital.” Through a clever investigation of individuals’ estates at bankruptcy or death, Cronon composes a series of maps that illustrate Chicago’s position as the “gateway city” and why it beat St. Louis for the title. A gateway, though, is hardly a place in itself because it isn’t a destination. As goods are entering and exiting, the gateway is a place of dislocation. The examples of Montgomery Ward and Company’s mail-order catalogs and the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair further demonstrate the dislocation. The mail-order catalogs, Cronon writes, “offered its readers a map of capital, of second nature.” “The most remarkable thing about the catalog, like capital itself, is how thoroughly it obscures these relationships [between metropolis and hinterland]” (339). Similarly, Cronon refers to Henry Adams’s analysis of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Adams called the fair a “Babel of loose … unrelated thoughts and half-thoughts” (344).

Initially, I thought the book was only about Chicago, so I didn’t expect to encounter so much dislocation. Since the story is about the rise of Chicago and the West, it makes more sense: the whole thing is about dislocation. It’s weird that moving goods around was/is essential to the process of creating capital.

I, like Wade, am interested in the relationship between second nature and capital. I don’t think second nature (refresher: “the artificial nature that people erect atop first nature” [xix]) is the exact same thing as capital, but I wish Cronon would have clarified their relationship. Maybe the difference between second nature and capital is that there is a way to have second nature without creating capital, such as the example of a self-sufficient pioneer.

March 30, 2014

Nature’s Place as a Product

William Cronon’s Parts II and III of Nature’s Metropolis analyze the commodification of various goods which became national commodities through Chicago as a major trading center. Through these two sections, Cronon describes the standardization of grain production, the significant rise in the trade of lumber, as well as the development of the intercontinental meat packing industry, all of which passed through Chicago as a bridge into the national market of the USA.

One of the most interesting chapters of Cronon’s Part II is his work on the growth of the lumber industry in Chicago, specifically in the way humans used natural forces to their advantage. In describing the seasonality of the lumber industry, Cronon indicated that loggers often flooded skidways with water, which then froze, allowing them to easily move the enormous loads of logs from point A to B (156). This tactic seemed incredibly innovative to me and represented both humans “using” their environment, as well as shaping it. In terms of using it, the loggers knew that water naturally froze when cold enough, which it often is during the winter months of Chicago, so they took advantage of this natural occurrence for their benefit. Meanwhile, they also altered their environment by flooding and freezing a region that would not have faced these conditions without human alteration. Though Cronon does not mention any negative effects of this change, it would be interesting to see how the transportation methods of the Chicago logging industry in the 1870s effected the environment and its natural inhabitants (outside of humans).

Again on the topic of water, Cronon makes similar claims compared to Theodore Steinberg regarding the pollution of water through its usage to dispose of waste. In his description of the waste from the Chicago pork packers, Cronon indicates that they used the water to dispose of these materials, taking on the perspective of “out of sight, out of smell, out of mind” (249). Steinberg, in his work of Nature Incorporated indicated that New Englanders also took on this ignorant perspective regarding their effects to the environment. The similarity between the ideologies of these two areas provided an answer for me regarding our question in class about country wide claims we could make about water politics. It seems that across the country, Americans in the 19^th century viewed water as their tool for whatever they deemed fit, instead of a natural resource that could be destroyed. Through their negligence, both the purity of the water in New England and Chicago was diminished through the dumping of waste.

I believe Chelsea’s comment about capital dominating human life defines my comments about the way both Cronon and Steinberg indicated American perceptions of water. Rather than water as a natural commodity, something for everyone to enjoy, it seems that people only saw it for the benefits it could provide them in terms of financial gain. With the Chicago Meat Packers, water for them was an easy and free way to dispose of waste, saving them money but costing the environment. Similarly in New England, the industrialists also took on this ideology, while also viewing the water as a controllable energy source to provide them power for their factories. Though I agree with Chelsea’s description, I believe her statement about humanity’s priority of financial gain only sometimes effecting nature needs to be expanded in order to truly incorporate all the effects that human monetary decisions have had on the environment, specifically in the 19^th century. The killing off the buffalo for robes and leather, the laying of the railroad throughout the land, and the establishment of cities into the west all were based off economic growth, each effecting the environment in a number of ways. I would love to be wrong about this, as it would reflect a better humanity, but our past large scale economic decisions seemed to have affected the environment in a number of lasting ways.

March 30, 2014

The Domination and Geography of Capital in the Industrialization of Chicago

William Cronon, in Parts II and III of Nature’s Metropolis, discusses the movement of natural materials to market and the movement of capital, products, and people within the context of industrializing Chicago. Grain, lumber, and meat become major natural materials to pass through Chicago. Cronon writes about the importance of farmers to Chicago and that without the farmers, there would be no city. With the help of the railroads, farmers transported and provided efficient access to new areas. The creation of the elevator caused technology to replace individual workers. With these railroads and new technology, access to wood became easier and more expansive. People began to look towards Chicago for lumber. Essentially, nature was transferred to capital. And, more importantly, not “wasting” land, meat, or capital was priority. This idea of the movement of natural materials emphasizes one of Cronon’s main theses in his work on the rise of Chicago: The geography of capital was as important as the geography of nature.

Cronon also discusses the importance of Chicago as a “Gateway City.” Not only was it a gateway city for the West, but also for the eastern cities attempting to benefit from the commodities and flow of exchange from the West. Because of Chicago’s exchange between what Cronon refers to as “first” and “second” nature, “the commodities that flowed across the grasslands and forests of the Great West to reach Chicago did so within an elaborate human network that was at least as important as nature in shaping the region.” (264) Cronon also argues that Chicago as a new metropolis revealed the importance of railroads, elevators, and refrigerator cars to the West (265). Although competing with surrounding cities like St. Louis, Chicago flourished as the gateway between the Northern/European capitalist economy and the colonizing West. (295) Mail-order catalogs in 1872 allowed for the technological combinations of “railroads, urban manufacturing, wholesaling, improved postal service, and advertising” to be delivered anywhere. (333) With Chicago’s rise as a metropolis, Cronon argues, the geography of capital was about connecting people to make new markets and remake old landscapes and therefore “capital produced a landscape of obscured connections.” (340)

In the Epilogue, Cronon argues that Chicago caused its own demise as a metropolis in some ways. For example, opening a market in the region encouraged human migration, environmental changes, and economic developments that gave rise to other great cities, diminishing its competitiveness. Reading about Chicago and its rise as a great city dependent on the exchange between nature and capital made me think about our discussions of nature and changing landscapes. I am solidified even more in my opinion that humans allow capital to rule their lives and that sometimes the environment is affected by such decisions completely dependent on attempting to gain as much capital as possible from the endeavor. This reminds me of a comment Justin made last week about how “industrialization consumes American lives.” “Wasting” capital appeared to be more important than “wasting” nature, such as the white pine, though they were so intertwined in the development of the industrializing city. Eventually, however, the pursuit of capital experienced its limits and Chicago, as a gateway city, no longer fulfilled that status. I agree with Cronon’s view that we fool ourselves when we think of choosing between the city and the country and that we often forget how they fully shape each other. We must understand both the city and the country to realize they are one and we as humans are a part of one entity.

February 15, 2014

Supplementary Reading-The Nation’s Nature: How Continental Presumptions Gave Rise to the United States of America

James D. Drake’s work, The Nation’s Nature: How Continental Presumptions Gave Rise to the United States of America, offers a chronological perspective on the evolution of continental thought in the mainland British colonies. In his book, Drake proposes that early British colonists became inundated with continental presumptions that in turn influenced political views, infiltrated political rhetoric, and induced political action.[1] Drake’s essential argument is that the burgeoning idea of the British colonists as a continental people made the American Revolution possible and in the war’s aftermath led to the drafting of the Constitution. In order to make his claim, Drake begins with the mainland British colonies in the late seventeenth century.

The first reason that Drake offers for the development of continental thought in the mainland British colonies is the scientific attacks of Europeans, which were meant to demean the New World and its species, including humans. European intellectuals, among whom Comte de Buffon was one of the most notable, proposed and offered evidence in support of a demeaning attitude toward the North American continent. Buffon and others held that North America was either a new continent or a continent that had undergone a geologic disaster. In both cases, the European intellectuals claimed the result was a degenerating effect on species in the New World. The implications of such a claim were clear to all. If the New World had a degenerative environment, then its inhabitants would never be able to rival the nations of Europe. [2]

Drake compares this crisis to the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union almost two centuries later. The attack of European intellectuals effectively intertwined science and national pride for the mainland British colonists. Such an attack served to bind disparate colonists together.[3] All those with a scientific inclination living in the mainland British colonies sought to find evidence to counter Buffon’s claims. This in turn provided inhabitants of different colonies with a common goal. Rather than viewing themselves as Pennsylvanians, Virginians, or New Yorkers, this inquiry united all colonists as North Americans. Essentially, this newfound scientific trend led colonists to see themselves in a continental light.[4]

Drake highlights the Seven Years’ War as another turning point in fostering continental presumptions among mainland British colonists. Drake claims the Seven Years’ War caused colonists to view themselves as members of a young but inevitably continental society, one fully capable of prospering on its own.[5] Prior to the conflict, colonies had irregular interactions with one another and it could be argued they shared stronger commercial ties to the West Indies, Britain, and Europe than to one another.[6] Each colony seemed more concerned with internal matters than with continental issues. The threat presented by the French and Native Americans served to alter this mindset. As the potential for war increased, so too did the calls for unified action among the colonies. The most prominent example was the Albany Plan of Union, proposed by Benjamin Franklin. If implemented, the Albany Plan would have given control of the colonies’ military defense to representatives elected by colonial assemblies, working with a president appointed by the Crown. Though the Albany Plan was rejected, it demonstrated the continuing shift from the traditional thought of the colonies as independent dominions.[7]

Following the victory in the Seven Years’ War, Britain chose as its spoils of war North American land claims previously belonging to France and Spain, even though the two European powers had more profitable colonies elsewhere. Drake proposes that this decision by Parliament illustrated an overlap of geographical and political thought. The notion that the entire North American continent was suited for rule by one power appeared on its way to becoming reality following the Treaty of Paris in 1763. Adding land in North America only contributed to the British colonists’ sense of importance and increased their desire for continental expansion.[8] Drake argues the colonists interpreted the treaty as a sign of how much Britain valued the North American colonies. In addition, these developments further ingrained a continental awareness among mainland British colonists. Not only did they consider the vast potential of North America, but also the possibility that its future may lay outside the empire of Great Britain.[9]

The emerging idea of North America as a continental society, which is fundamental to Drake’s work, raised questions about representation in Parliament. British North Americans questioned the validity of political representation at a distance, largely because of their unique geographical relationship to Britain. Furthermore, mainland British colonists altered the source of their most cherished rights from their status as Britons to the nature of the continent. This claim inherently challenged whether British North Americans were actually Britons at all.[10] Drake offers further evidence of depictions of colonists as a continental people in the form of British political cartoons at the time. Increasingly, North America was presented as a united continent rather than a motley collection of colonies with differing interests.[11] In addition, Drake claims that memories of sacrifice in the Seven Years’ War added to a feeling of community among the colonists. The war provided just the most recent example of mainland British colonists suffering collectively for a common cause.[12] All of these elements coalesced in Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense, which claimed the artificial establishments of the British Empire should be replaced by continental institutions.[13] It was these beliefs that led to the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775.

Following the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, Americans were still faced with the challenge of establishing a nation capable of utilizing the vast potential of the North American continent. Delegates to the Constitutional Convention assembled in Philadelphia to remedy this situation. Drake notes that proponents of the Constitution constantly referred to the continent’s destiny of political unity, a driving factor in the outbreak of the American Revolution. If America failed to realize this destiny, it would betray the purpose of the Revolutionary War. Additionally, proponents of the Constitution argued that the new federal government would help the nation achieve its continental goals. Furthermore, to ease Anti-Federalist fears, the Federalists contended that the sheer size of North America would prevent the federal government from gaining too much power.[14] Clearly, Drake argues, continental assumptions were a major factor in the ratification of the Constitution. Also, when discussing westward expansion, it was common for American authors to downplay obstacles such as the Appalachian Mountains. At the same time, many authors emphasized the waterway system that connected America. Often times the British, Spanish, and Native Americans were depicted as merely temporary obstructions.[15] With these examples, Drake demonstrates the effort to portray North America as suitable to rule by one nation.

The importance of the land in the development of a civilization is a theme of Drake’s work that is similarly explained by William Cronon in Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. Just as British North Americans recognized the potential of the continent, Cronon claims that in the early 1830s prospectors saw Chicago for its prospective development into a metropolis in the center of the continent rather than for what it actually was.[16] This tendency to look toward the future and imagine the effects of development caused lots in Chicago to increase in value from $33 in 1829 to $100,000 in 1836.[17] This speculation occurred before a canal was constructed or the first railway ties had been laid. While such predictions did not always prove true, they certainly did for the city of Chicago. Thanks to its location between the established eastern cities, such as New York, and the expanding western frontier, Chicago became the gateway between East and West.[18]

Another element present in both books is the importance of waterways in the early Republic. The British North Americans viewed the expansive waterways as a means of connecting the continent. The waterways helped unite the continent and in turn supported the belief that North America was destined for rule by one nation. Without its extensive system of rivers and lakes, North America would have appeared to mainland British colonists as much too vast for the successful rule of one power. Likewise, in Nature’s Metropolis, Cronon references the importance of Chicago’s vicinity to Lake Michigan, the Chicago River, and the fertile Illinois prairie. These factors loomed large in the decision of settlers to establish a city at Chicago. Cronon goes on to argue that people play a significant role in the establishment and rise of a city. For example, humans add canals and railroads to improve transportation. Nevertheless, the natural qualities and resources of the land factor heavily into where people choose to settle and construct cities in the first place.[19] In this sense, both America and the city of Chicago have the land to thank for the developments that made them what they are today.

[1] James D. Drake, The Nation’s Nature: How Continental Presumptions Gave Rise to the United States of America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 3.

[2] Drake, The Nation’s Nature, 18.

[3] Drake, The Nation’s Nature, 22.

[4] Drake, The Nation’s Nature, 18.

[5] Drake, The Nation’s Nature, 70.

[6] Drake, The Nation’s Nature, 71.

[7] Drake, The Nation’s Nature, 81-83.

[8] Drake, The Nation’s Nature, 99-102.

[9] Drake, The Nation’s Nature, 107.

[10] Drake, The Nation’s Nature, 109.

[11] Drake, The Nation’s Nature, 125.

[12] Drake, The Nation’s Nature, 133.

[13] Drake, The Nation’s Nature, 144.

[14] Drake, The Nation’s Nature, 261.

[15] Drake, The Nation’s Nature, 269-270.

[16] William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991), 34.

[17] Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 29.

[18] Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 91.

[19] Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 55.

February 15, 2014

Chicago and Its Hinterland

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).

February 14, 2014

Chigaco: Another Forest of the Wilderness

William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis Chicago and The Great West he introduces an interesting set of theories referred to as “booster theories.” These ideas comment on the fact that Chicago would become a great city because of its natural resources, thereby making it the center of trade for the region, its extensive natural routes of transportation, and finally, the global climatic forces that mysteriously made great cities (36). The existence of these theories and the way they are framed by Cronon illustrates an interesting argument for cities being a part of nature. Through these theories, it seems as though it was pre-destined for a city to inhabit these regions, alluding to an idea that God or some other force(s) crafted the region for this specific purpose. It all falls back to the question of if cities are a part of nature, just another “natural” development, or if they are something alien? Through Cronon’s descriptions of these theories, further elaborating on the perfect natural setting for a city, it seems as though he casts his hand with those who perceive cities as the next evolution of a natural ecosystem.

Cronon makes an interesting statement in his description of the rise of Chicago, one which frames the city as something almost organic. In relation to the countryside around the city, Cronon states that it would be “tributary” to give Chicago its new empire (43). I found it a little odd to describe the city in such a way, but when positioning this statement with Cronon’s previous ideas on the city as the next ecological evolution, it makes sense. If the city is part of nature, then it is in fact a “living” piece of the ecosystem, one which requires the resources to continue its existence. From this perspective, the vast country side that surrounds this great metropolis seems only logical as the “food” to help this city grow. Though many would disagree with this interpretation of a city, it is not too far off from our common conceptions of nature, where we often cast the neutral force as evil or against human existence.

I think by looking at Henry’s post on Cronon’s definition of nature, we gain a more concrete understanding of why he frames Chicago as something part of nature. After reading through Henry’s comments, I completely agree with his assessment of Cronon’s perception of natural as “something that seems to be in its normal place” (Henry). 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. Though a city is a massive technological feat, with numerous components encompassing its complex, it can still just be viewed as the next step along ecological evolution, just like the human creation of the boat. If the land around Chicago made it a viable location for the construction of a city, who is to say that this is wrong or against nature? By using nature’s resources for various purposes, could it not be said that humans are simply doing as other animals doing in providing sustenance and shelter for their existence? Though I am sure these questions will lead to numerous amounts of critiques, it is something to think about when articulating a moral argument against human “alteration” of nature.