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After reading Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis, I now see the big connection between the city and country. Throughout my life, I have always appreciated the city lifestyle; I loved how everything was really fast-paced and how all local industries were just right around the corner from where you needed them to be. As far as the development of the United States, however, I never looked at how important the rural countryside played in the development of the industrious city side we see today. The way how Cronon first described Chicago was depressing, when he was talking about the gloomy atmosphere and noting how “Chicago represented all that was most unnatural about human life. Crowded and artificial, it was a cancer on an otherwise beautiful landscape (Cronon 7.”) Referring back to the negative aspects, it is amazing to look at the sacrifices that were made for the development of such prosperous cities, including Chicago. Nature was truly in the hands of the people at the time and it still is today. Even though nature eventually became limited, society in the city was able to prosper; Garland stated, in his metaphor, how the city was similar to the ocean, where fresh streams would flow into and become salt (Cronon 13.) What Garland meant to say was that in order for society, which is the city in this case, to meet new horizons, then sacrifices must be made. In @mvanderdussen’s post, it reflects Popkin’s work on how history is a complicated field of study, looking at the past from new angles. By looking at the past from new angles, we are able to experience what drove these people to do what they did in tearing up what used to be a beautiful piece of land and transform it the industrious society that we all know today.