WC: Although I’m an environmental historian to my core, I’m even more a historian. I’m fascinated by certain kinds of historical phenomena in the last quarter millennia of places where new technologies produce collective actions by human being, where thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people all make choices—they all have agency, it’s not a determinism—and yet the collective decisions are so piled up that it’s kind of hard to imagine how it might have been anyhow else. Many environmental problems of today can find the explanation for their causes in history. These explanations can take examples from somewhat peculiar cases like commodity flows between a city and its country. Yet such linkages essentially explain the impacts that first nature takes from the interventions of second nature. Cronon (1991) takes on the project of explaining how first nature and second nature mutually shape each other in example of nineteenth century Chicago. In doing so, he remarkably contributes to the literature as he urges the readers to negate the imaginary city-country boundary and rather see the both as components of a single big process wherein both shape each other in reciprocity.

An eastern-oriented economy “naturally” looked across the lakes to Chicago as the westernmost point of cheap water access to the agricultural heartland of the interior. Just as “naturally,” easterners saw Chicago as the logical place in which to invest funds for encouraging the flow of trade in their direction. By defining the boundary between two railroad systems that operated within radically different markets — even as both sought to meet the same fundamental problems of fixed costs and minimum income — Chicago became the link that bound the different worlds of east and west into a single system….Chicago became the principal wholesale market for the entire midcontinent. This cores on the relationship between country / city. And especially the 19th century USA druthers and intersections. Disapproving some theories? Maybe just slanted them slightly? Cronon’s main argument is that the rise of a great metropolitan city like Chicago cannot happen without the support of a vast, tributary rural empire feeding resources and services into the city, an area he calls the “hinterland”. At the same time, however, all the small rural, farming communities of that make up that hinterland could never exist without a great metropolitan city in which to sell their goods. In essence, the whole idea that a city and the rural communities around it could exist as separate, individual entities is wrong. They are all part of a single, economic system in which both parts are vital. “A rural landscape which omits the city and an urban landscape which omits the country are radically incomplete as portraits of their shared world.” (51) To prove his point, the author focuses on the economic commodities of grain, lumber, and meat, as well as lines of credit. The flow of these commodities between Chicago and its hinterland show how interconnected and, ultimately, how reliant all these communities were on each other. In the Exchange Building that was erected next to the yard, men came to buy and sell the animals that were butchered in the yard. In its plush, even luxurious environs, they build an intricate network of trade that abstracted them from the killing happening right outside the door.

How will the colour really look in your home?

It is about Chicago as the most visible embodiment of a city-country system that, even as it succeeded, hid its connections. It was — and still is — possible, he notes, to buy a piece of lumber in Chicago without considering the forest it came from. To eat a steak without thinking of it as once in the body of a steer. Agents of the French government who came through this area — Louis Jolliet in 1673 and Robert Cavelier de La Salle in 1682 — recognized the significance of Mud Lake, as well as the clumsiness of those six miles of portage. Their solution: a canal cut through the marsh to link the Chicago and Des Plaines Rivers, and, through them, the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.

All were about buying and selling, about city and country confronting each other to discover their common ground in the marketplace. All were about capital, which was itself not a thing but a relationship. The geography of capital was about connecting people to make new markets and remake old landscapes. It is a reminder to us today that we are in the same partnership with nature. That our actions have consequences. That our relationship with the natural world is, at heart, a moral one. WC: One of the things I actually love about the discipline of history is that historians are narrators. I honestly think we are the last explicitly narrative discipline left in the American academy (with the journalists, as well). Storytelling is no longer, in most disciplines, regarded as a serious undertaking. I believe that storytelling is inherently a moral activity. It’s about organizing events and characters and landscapes and settings so that a series of events becomes explicable in the sequence of relationships that are unfolding over the course of the narrative. And almost always the narrative has some lesson in mind. One of the beauties of history is that, although there have been moments in which historians have argued with each other about whether they are objective or not, objectivity is actually not the phrase most historians use the describe what they do. Our goal, it seems to me, is to be fair to the people whose lives we narrate. That means trying to see the world through their eyes.

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Having now finished this book it is obvious why Nature’s Metropolis has the legendary status it holds. More fun example: Chicago's market dominance in the railway era led to the peculiar fact that Iowa, an area with rich agricultural land and a burgeoning population, never developed a large population center to market its goods - by the time of Iowa's growth, rail links to Chicago stretched across the entire state and any merchandise from wheat to live hogs could be in Chicago within 18 hours.