Lumber – American Environments to 1893

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Parts II and III of William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis expand upon Cronon’s telling of the story of Chicago from an environmental history perspective. In part II, Cronon tells the stories of the production, commodification, and transportation of grain, lumber, and meat and how they evolved along with the evolution of Chicago. In part III, Cronon looks at Chicago geographically, discussing the importance of the city’s location and how the expansion of industrialization westward affected the growing frontier. I found the organization of these two parts, and his book as a whole, effective. Cronon tries to tell the story of a city with his book, and the fact he was able to do so while not telling a chronological story is impressive, and in the end made the work more effective as a work of environmental history.

I found Cronon’s further discussion of the railroad impact in the west interesting and a valuable expansion of his discussion in part I. He discusses the railroad’s impact on Chicago and the surrounding areas in depth in part I, but in part II he writes that the railroads helped instigate the destruction of the bison, something we have already read about in this class. The railroads made going out and hunting the bison easier, and having a metropolis to bring the bison back and make money only motivated people further to hunt the bison and accelerate their destruction, and at the same time negatively impact Native American life. He also compares the pre and post railroad worlds in the west, showing how the railroad helped merchants in many ways and wasn’t overwhelming the frontier country but instead bringing them closer together.

Throughout his work, Cronon looks at nature as two types, first and second nature, with first nature being what would exist without any outside intrusion and second nature being the world build upon first nature. I didn’t love this definition after reading part I, and still don’t after reading parts II and III. In part II, Cronon does a good job of showing how nature and humans interacted through Chicago with the commodification of elements of nature, but in doing so he weakened the notions of first and second nature. For Cronon, first nature would be trees in a forest, and humans collecting the trees for lumber and using it commercially would be a result of second nature. While this is a clear example of humans “dominating” nature and theoretically fits into his classification of nature, as Ian mentioned below, humans worked in harmony with nature in the transportation of the lumber. By separating nature into two separate spheres, it ignores the concept of humans working in harmony with nature, even if in the example Ian presented humans shaped the environment. I also agree with Wade in my complaint about this definition, as using first and second nature works in some cases, but it leaves no room for something in between (or Cronon fails to do so) like when something natural becomes a commodity.

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.

Tag: Lumber

Chicago’s Place on the Frontier, and Looking at First and Second Nature

Nature’s Place as a Product