This grading system in turn allowed for ownership rights to be severed from the physical grain itself. The trade became further regulated and homogenized with a standardization of different grades of wheat. It was a liquid that flowed from the train cars to the grain elevators. No longer was grain a solid object, sold in bags connected to a particular farm. Grain was sold in bags from specific locations, but this changed with the spread of the railroad and the invention of the steam powered grain elevator. The land was then made marketable through a grid pattern for selling public lands.

Farming first abstracted the prairie, transforming a diverse ecosystem into a few cash crops. One of the most interesting chapters shows the increasing commodification and abstraction of wheat. The railroads made Chicago dominate the region’s trade, and made it the gateway city to the Great West. Through this second nature, Chicago became the link that bound the eastern and western railroads-becoming, essentially, “where the West began” (91). It created a new sense of time, tied to the cycles of the technology rather than of first nature. For Chicago in particular, the railroad became the chief device for introducing a new capitalist logic to the geography. The city grew together with the countryside, forming a single commercial system.Ĭronon stresses the importance of the canals and railroads. Cronon also turns Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis on its head: frontier growth began with the city instead of ending with it. The dream of Chicago embodied what many Americans wanted to believe: the expansion and progress of the US and its Great West. Yet Cronon debunks some of the reasoning behind this geographical determinism. Part of their reasoning drew on perceived natural advantages, such its harbor and canal corridor. In the first chapter, “Dreaming the Metropolis”, Cronon describes the boom of Chicago as partly due to boosters: speculators, newspaper editors, merchants and politicians who, for various reasons, confidently proclaimed the future growth of major cities. One method Cronon uses to do this is to refer to original, prehuman “first nature”, and the artificial nature that people erect on the first nature as “second nature”. His aim is to show that the boundaries between natural and cultural, and between city and country, are problematic. The work, published in 1991, shows precursory development of Cronon’s intellectual disagreement with the idealized view of wilderness and the nature-culture boundary.

Cronon deals with the connection of the environments of Chicago and the Great West, all through the lens of economic interaction and commodity flows. William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis is one of the best known works of environmental history for good reason. Recovering the country in the city: Nature’s Metropolis, chapters 1-4

Nature's Metropolis by William Cronon