Natures Metropolis – Chicago & the Great West (Paper): Chicago and the Great West

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Chicago exploded onto the world in the mid-19th century, rising in a few decades from a lonely frontier outpost to an economic behemoth that, except for New York, exerted more influence and flexed more power by far than any other American city. 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: 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. This is a suggestive but not entirely new way of looking at cities. Lewis Mumford, one of the founders of urban history, insisted that cities could be understood only as part of an interdependent regional economy and ecosystem. City and country have "a common life," he wrote in a largely ignored essay of 1956. They are "one thing, not two things." By studying the city and its region as an organic unit, Mumford argued, we would come to a closer appreciation of the environmental consequences of urbanization. Mumford called this then unnamed field of study "the natural history of urbanization" and predicted its development would reorient the way we interpret the world. There is in the life of any great city a moment when it reaches its maximum potential as a center of power and culture, when it becomes fully conscious of its special place in history. For Chicago that moment was 1893, the year it held the World's Columbian Exposition, which commemorated the 400th anniversary of Columbus's voyage to the New World and served to celebrate Chicago's role in the progress of American civilization. In that year the world's first skyscraper city had a population of over one million people, and among them was an early settler who remembered it as a desolate trading post of some 30 souls living between a swamp and a sand-choked river. Without ever leaving Chicago, this old man had moved, by 1893, from the country to the city, from an agrarian to an industrial America, and had lived, in the process, through the entire history of his still growing city.

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Book Genre: American, American History, Cities, Economics, Environment, Geography, History, Literature, Nature, Nonfiction, North American Hi…, Urban, Urban Planning It never actually reached Chicago, except, in a way, through a later agreement with the Illinois Central. But Cronon notes that, like the canal, the Galena and Chicago and the other railways that followed had an immediate impact on the way people in the city and its trading region lived and how they did business. Nature's Metropolis is that rare historical work which treats nature and the moral force we derive from it seriously…The roots of the modern environmental predicament are plainly visible in the economic dynamism that brought about the rise of Chicago in the mid-nineteenth century, which is a captivating story in its own right." The New Yorker - Verlyn Klinkenborg I shall never forget the feeling of dismay with which . . . I perceived from the car window a huge smoke-cloud which embraced the whole eastern horizon,": so Hamlin Garland described his first train ride to Chicago. That perpetual cloud, Garland recollected being told, "was the soaring banner of the great and gloomy inland metropolis, whose dens of vice and houses of greed had been so often reported to me by wandering hired men." Theodore Dreiser, Frank Lloyd Wright and other young villagers hungry for the city's excitement and opportunities found

River and lake apparently refused to fulfill their destiny as a harbor and Chicagoans cut a deep new channel and built piers extending hundreds of feet out into the lake to make a decent harbor. Another natural feature of Chicago landscape was bad drainage to which the second nature responded by raising the city from four to fourteen feet. Similarly, while earlier linkages of the countryside to the city were seasonal and spanned over days, the making of the Illinois and Michigan Canal in 1848 followed by the railroads in 1850s changed the movement patterns, temporality, and speed which in turn changed the linkages between the city and the countryside. Yet important to note here is that the later development of railroads caused relative decline to the preceding Illinois and Michigan Canal. This offers the epochal evidence wherein unnatural instrument replaced a previously enhanced natural resource but still helped the city meet its natural destiny. This mutual dependency, enhancement and annihilation, compromise and conflict, and inherent linkages provide the overarching argument of how nature and man, or city and country work together (Cronon 1991, 55–93).It is an economy of energy as much as capital. Once cattle could be moved to market using cheap coal calories instead of carefully shepherded beef calories, grazing could be done in arid rangelands formerly occupied by bison. This transition made it profitable for graziers to fence the short-grass prairie. The advent of coal-powered transportation was thus not simply an energy subsidy, but a qualitative change that enabled the imposition of a cultural land use ideal that brought serious changes to the ecology of the area. I think this kind of thing is so damn neat, and there is a ton of it in this book. Investors, settlers and boosters took advantage of these boundaries by cutting the canal, linking the Chicago River with the Illinois River (another tributary of the Mississippi) and suddenly turning Chicago into the corridor — or gateway — between the two sides. 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.