Nature’s Metropolis – American Environments to 1893

April 28, 2014

Steinburg Does It All

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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).

March 30, 2014

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

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.

February 16, 2014

America: Stepping Up in the World

Richard L. Bushman’s The Refinement of America offers a very thorough and diverse analysis of the various manners in which American culture blossomed into more of a “gentilian” based society borrowed from Europe. As Bushman describes in his work, starting in the early 17^th century, American people, specifically in the South, began to covet the “high society” lifestyle and culture that existed with numerous European countries. One such way that Americans began to acculturate themselves to this style of life was through “conduct books.” As Bushman describes, these pieces “codified polite society” by giving discrete steps on how to portray respect, bodily restraint, and correct emotional expression (38). Generally reserved for those of the upper echelon of society, these books targeted those who would never appear in a European Court, but dreamed of the life style (38). Through the lessons of these books, the status quo of the gentile based hierarchy was reaffirmed, as individuals were taught to heed way to their superiors, continuing the dynamic through the generations (41).

Honestly, when reading about these books I had to laugh a little bit, because they seemed so unnecessary and ridiculous. Through my laughter and perception of our cultural superiority compared to 17^th-19^th century America, I came to the conclusion that my humor was actually in vain, as our own society institutes similar works. Though not as direct, the “X for Dummies” series of books is a perfect example of “how to manuals” that we ascribe to when we need to learn how to act in a certain environment. These works may not be as corrective in terms of our everyday life as the conduct books, but they are indicative of our continued reliance on this genre of literature to guide us in our daily ventures.

Though this book extremely diverse, portraying aspects of gentility from discussions on artwork to the addition of gardens to one’s house for visual perception, there was minimal analysis of humanity’s interaction with the environment. One of the only instances that nature played a significant role in Bushman’s argument on the gentrification of American Society was in relation to the West. Surprisingly, it was believed that the West was a threat to gentility, as it promoted the primitive lifestyle vs. the cultured one of the East (383). One would think that as Western expansion was a prime directive of the United States that it would fit within the upper echelons views on expanding their culture. However, as many believed that gentility was actually a threat to republican ideals, promoting a class based society instead of an egalitarian; it makes more sense why this goal of the United States threatened those who perceived themselves as the aristocracy. Bushman acknowledges this tension in the closing remarks of his piece, noting the culture of gentility was not and never would be strong enough to overcome that of republican idealism (447).

As no one has posted yet this week, I thought it would be a good idea to tie in last week’s reading of Nature’s Metropolis to Bushman’s piece. As we discussed in class this week, many Anglo Americans believed that Native Americans were below humanity, which made their removal that much easier in terms of morality. This perception that Cronon expresses offers a possible explanation for the West’s threat to gentility that Bushman acknowledges in The Refinement of America. The West was where the Native Americans prominently resided during the 18^th and 19^th centuries, which would be considered a primitive environment if these people were so inferior to humans. This “primitive” society resided within close proximity to the more genitilian orientated Eastern half of the United States which created an understandable tension. As more people pushed West during the 18^th and 19^th centuries into these unknown lands, resorting to extreme measures to survive, it was not clear if the gentility of the East would follow them or be overrun by the believed less sophisticated cultures of the West.

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).