Parts II and III of William Cronon\u2019s Nature\u2019s Metropolis <\/i>expand upon Cronon\u2019s telling of the story of Chicago from an environmental history perspective.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In part III, Cronon looks at Chicago geographically, discussing the importance of the city\u2019s location and how the expansion of industrialization westward affected the growing frontier.\u00a0 I found the organization of these two parts, and his book as a whole, effective.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
I found Cronon\u2019s further discussion of the railroad impact in the west interesting and a valuable expansion of his discussion in part I.\u00a0 He discusses the railroad\u2019s 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He also compares the pre and post railroad worlds in the west, showing how the railroad helped merchants in many ways and wasn\u2019t overwhelming the frontier country but instead bringing them closer together.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t love this definition after reading part I, and still don\u2019t after reading parts II and III.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 While this is a clear example of humans \u201cdominating\u201d 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Parts II and III of William Cronon\u2019s Nature\u2019s Metropolis expand upon Cronon\u2019s telling of the story of Chicago from an environmental history perspective.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In part III, Cronon … <\/p>\n