Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West.

• Author: Sachs, Aaron

Chicago was built on a swamp. Known today for its biting winds, the early Chicago grew famous for its mud. Mid-19th century propagandists did their best to play up the natural advantages of the young metropolis: it was conveniently linked to the busy markets of the East by the Great Lakes waterway, and it was also on the border between the fertile, black soil of the western prairies and the north country's thick forests of pines. But, as one 1848 visitor noted, Chicago could hardly hope to become a center of commerce as long as all the roads leading into town were "little less than quagmires."

Half a century later, then, after the world's first skyscrapers had risen up from Chicago's muddy byways, the city came to symbolize the ultimate triumph of human will. "Chicago," wrote the novelist Robert Herrick in 1898, "is an instance of a successful, contemptuous disregard of nature by man."

Today, many urbanites still think of nature as an obstacle that human ingenuity has overcome. According to the environmental historian William Cronon, however, such citified folk, in their seeming isolation from the natural world, have developed a skewed sense of human "success." No city-dweller, Cronon argues in his most recent book, Nature's Metropolis. Chicago and the Great West, can successfully disregard nature, because urban development is inherently dependent on the depletion of natural resources: city and country, humanity and nature, are one, a union of interdependent parts. Chicago's early propagandists had it right when they downplayed the town's muddiness and emphasized its access to waterways, prairies, and forests. The city on the lake could "seem to break free from the soil and soar skyward as a wholly artificial creation" only because it enjoyed a steady flow of grain, lumber, and meat from its rich hinterlands.

In Nature's Metropolis, which won Cronon the history profession's Bancroft Prize last year, the story of Chicago becomes a case study illuminating the broader history of urban-rural commerce. Tracing the flow of natural and manufactured goods between country and city, Cronon tells the story of a changing economic landscape and cites all the sure signals of American success - urban growth, the dissemination of labor-saving devices in rural areas, improved communication. But this story goes hand-in-hand with another, more ambiguous story, about a changing ecological landscape. While Chicago rose to heights of fame and fortune, Cronon...