Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

Cronon’s Preface and Prologue underscore three important themes addressed in his book. First, it provides necessary philosophical context by questioning the relationship between the human and the nonhuman. Second, Cronon highlights the significant role that rhetoric plays in urban growth and the development of the American West. Finally, he provides a parallel narrative by presenting the historical rise of Chicago and the American West within the context of his own philosophical discovery of the relationship between city and country.

The question at the heart of Cronon’s research is: What is nature, and how do human beings fit into it. He seeks to explain how humans manipulate nature, and how nature manipulates humans. This raises the further question of whether humans are part of or distinctly separate from nature. These questions have been debated by scholars from biblical times to the present. The 19th-century context that Cronon provides is significant in that the views of nature at the time were rapidly changing. Pre-19th-century journals kept by explorers and settlers established nature, or the wilderness, as the antithesis of human survival, and that to carry out biblical scripture meant to subdue and conquer it. The Paradise Myth, or the idea that the earth would provide all the necessary sustenance in abundance and serve as a Garden of Eden, pervaded early American thought. The biblical passage in Joel 2:3 asserts that “the land is the Garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness.” However, mythological stories of grotesque, heathen monsters born from nature, as well as scripture itself, promised that the wilderness would pose significant threats to the survival of human beings. Creatures that howled and roamed the wilderness needed to be cast out. Indigenous people, as early journals claimed, were savages serving as the agents of the devil. Roman Poet Titus Lucretius Carus, in his first-century BCE work De Rerum Natura, asked humans to “consider now the wild beasts’ fearsome breed, Enemies of mankind by land and sea, Why does nature feed them? Why do the seasons bring Diseases? Why does death untimely stalk abroad?”

Pioneers, regarded as heroes tasked with the biblical duties of facing and conquering nature head-on, were championed for their willingness to sacrifice themselves for the development of their future villages. Establishing a nonhostile environment where villages could thrive was ideal. Conquering the land continued into the 19th century, when Manifest Destiny gave the president the right to force the removal of Indigenous people to the west of the Mississippi. Indigenous people were forced from fertile, valuable land and relocated to less desirable terrain.

By the mid-19th century these attitudes began to change. Cronon writes, “To see one’s world as a self-created place opened the doorway to heroic achievement, but finally denied any other Creator, be it Nature or God” (45). Writers and philosophers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau presented the wilderness as a place where people could recharge and convene with a higher power. It was a Godly place, where people could escape the hectic life of the developing cities. The city, and specifically Chicago, represented two important views:

For those […] who feared Chicago, nature became the symbol of a nonhuman creation damaged and endangered by the city’s growth. For those […] who loved the city, nature became the nonhuman power which had called this place into being and enabled its heroic inhabitants to perform their extraordinary feats (41-42).

Rhetoric plays a powerful role in shaping attitudes toward 19th-century urbanization and nature. The power of 19th-century rhetoric becomes one of the book’s central themes, and Cronon uses the Preface and Prologue to lay out the necessary context. While Cronon highlights the relatively negative images of Chicago set forth by Hamlin Garland and others, he also notes that Garland’s descriptions invoke awe and wonderment. In literature, narratives of nature’s power to rejuvenate and bring change to communities characterized the works of famous American Romantics like Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. These works of literature urged a new individualism and self-reliance by, as Emerson suggests, forging a relationship with nature. Through its idealized visions of the West, Romanticism became a venue for social commentary about industrialization, slavery, Indian removal, and war.

Lastly, Cronon invites readers to understand the development of the city in relationship to the country as one historical narrative. The idea of a narrative suggests the power that urban development in the West holds. In doing this, Cronon provides a parallel narrative of constraints, opportunities, and new ways of thinking. The narrative of the American West as one of hardships and symbiotic relationships between both rural and urban areas mimics Cronon’s own awakening. He writes, “If we are to take moral and political responsibility for the ecological consequences of our own lives, then we need to examine the link between the commodities of our economy and the resources of our ecosystem” (13).