Abe Frank's Reviews > Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

Spongebob exhaling pic.
this was really 380 (massive) pages with over 100 pages of notes.

I first read Cronon as a freshman. His essay "The Trouble With Wilderness" rocked my world, but also confused me. My midway developed prefrontal cortex and barely there critical thinking skills thought Cronon was being overly complex and struggled to have my worldview challenged in such a multilayered piece.
Anyways...
I read him later as a junior, reading the introduction and Annihilating Space: Meat chapter for a class on the city. And that had a powerful impact on me. I wrote in my diary: It melted my brain. I was freaking out and wanted to crawl on the walls and howl at the moon. He was describing how the city and the countryside are juxtaposed (hate that word) as opposites, one natural and one manufactured, when in fact they are in equal part the result of human intervention. I was appalled, and yet in so few words he was making perfect sense [insert lengthy quote]..... I wrote in the margins "agh!! Amazing!"
And now that I have all the time in the world and my grade in school doesn't have a name, I thought it was time to visit this guy on my own terms.

And wow! Super thorougly researched. It is deep and wide. I kept wondering how he found the time to find all this stuff. The chapters are almost all 50 pages, which is too long for me.

His thesis here (funny how I buried that so deep in this review) is that the relationship between city and country is problematic. The two create each other and cannot exist without the other, in spite of animosity or spirit to the contrary. He continues that the relationship is obscured (we don't see the animals killed for our meat, the trees cut for our building materials, the people who pack our Sears and Roebuck catalogue orders, etc.) which makes it especially challenging to understand the relationship between urban and rural.
But you just kept waiting and waiting for him to bring up this false binary, chapter after chapter. There is a 50 page chapter about the development of grain trade that contributes to his argument, but man is it boring. He really only discusses the binary for a page at the end of every chapter (which i guess rhetorically makes sense but as a reader the content and context were at times way too boring and not convincing enough for me).
I do think some of the book is farfetched. Imagine explaining the city and country are the same thing to a 5th grader. I think he could have discussed why we have this divide and what is so attractive about othering.
The last two chapters are where he really digs into the dichotomy, when he discusses the worlds fair (historians vs not bringing up the worlds fair, the historians are going to lose every time) and the ensuing social relations. I thought these were the best chapters. It's just a matter of reading 300 pages to get there.


So many quotes!:
“Because railroads ran more quickly and reliably, and could carry more people and goods over greater distances, they changed this irregular sense of time.”
“Wherever the network of rails expanded, Frontier became Hinterland to the cities where rural products entered the marketplace. areas with limited experience of capitalist exchange suddenly found themselves much more palpably within an economic and social hierarchy created by the geography of capital. At it’s best, the new geography meant that westerners could now sell the products of Nature and human labor much more reliably than before… on the other hand, that same geography also left many people nervous about their growing dependency on the metropolis and the faceless institutions like railroads that seemed to serve its interests. Hinterland residents found that they now had little choice but to sell it in Chicago's Marketplace if they wished to participate in the economy that revolved around it…. more and more of the Great West would be drawn into that landscape, and more and more of Western nature would become priced capitalized and mortgaged as the new capitalist geography proliferated.”
“As Natural ecosystems became more intimately linked to the urban marketplace, they came to seem more remote from The Busy places that's so impressed tourists who visited chicago. this was the Alchemy of the elevator receipt, converting wheat into a graded abstraction, and of the refrigerator car, separating the killing of an animal from the eating of its flesh. the easier it became to obscure the connections between Chicago's trade and its Earthly roots, the more readily one could forget that the city Drew its life from the natural world around it.“
”By using speed to lower the cost of space, the new technology of rail Transportation made it possible for urban markets to extend the reach not just geographically and economically but culturally as well.. the lessons of the Urban Market were about newness. the merchandise one could buy was new, the way when thought it was new, the life one could live with it was new. buying from the city meant participating in the progress of the age. it meant becoming modern.”
“Once a product had been processed, packaged, advertised, sold, and shipped within the long chain of wholesale retail relationships, its identity became more and more a creature of the market. the natural roots from which it had sprung and the human history that had created it faded as it passed from hand to hand. wherever one bought it, that was where it came from.”
“However much City and Country might oppose each other in rhetoric of moral economy, however much reformers and protesters might try to use the one as a tool for criticizing the other, neither had a monopoly on ideals or moralizing visions. that their descriptions often appeared in counterpoint, to underscore which each needed of the other's world, suggests as much about their Unity as about their differences. Grange cooperatives in rural improvements sought to bring the advantages of Metropolitan living to the heart of the countryside, just as Urban parks in the Suburban Bungalows sought to bring in the virtue of rural openness to the heart of the city…. despite the ease with which rhetoric could set the two against each other as warring visions of the good life, the habit of seeing them in opposition was a big part of the moral dilemma they seemed to pose. regarding them is distinct Inseparable obscured they're in dispensable connections. each had create the other, so their Mutual transformation in fact expressed a single system and a single history.”