If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times: 19th-century Chicago thrived because it became the commercial crossroads of the nation. But have you ever heard that this happened in part because Lake Michigan runs north and south and not east and west like Lake Erie?
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Cronon has an ulterior motive. “The book is not an environmentalist tract,” he said in a recent interview, “but it is intended to make environmentalists think very hard about their assumptions.” He quashes both the romantic view that the rural midwest (or rural anywhere) is a genuine alternative to the city, and the equally romantic view, expressed in 1898 by novelist Robert Herrick, that the city is “a stupendous piece of blasphemy against nature.” “Country good, city bad” makes no sense after reading Nature’s Metropolis. You might as well try to decide which part of the intersection of State and Madison belongs to State and which part to Madison.
Railroads could go where rivers did not. More important, however, railroads created an incentive to use them. To ship by water all you needed was something that would float (as the young Abraham Lincoln learned when he and two friends hired out to build a flatboat and take it down to New Orleans in 1831). But to ship by rail you needed miles of steel rails, thousands of ties, and hundreds of locomotives and cars. They were expensive, and they cost about the same whether they were working or idle. Thus efficient use of the system made a much bigger monetary difference on the rails than it did on the water.
The Chicago Board of Trade solved this problem in 1856 with a set of regulations designating three categories of wheat–white winter wheat, red winter wheat, and spring wheat–and setting standards of quality for each. “In this seemingly trivial action,” writes Cronon, “lay the solution to the elevator operators’ dilemma about mixing different owners’ grain in single bins. As long as one treated a shipment of wheat or corn as if it possessed unique characteristics that distinguished it from all other lots of grain, mixing was impossible. But if instead a shipment represented a particular “grade’ of grain, then there was no harm in mixing it with other grain of the same grade. Farmers and shippers delivered grain to a warehouse and got in return a receipt that they or anyone else could redeem at will. Anyone who gave the receipt back to the elevator got in return not the original lot of grain but an equal quantity of equally graded grain. . . . the grading system allowed elevators to sever the link between ownership rights and physical grain, with a host of unanticipated consequences. . . .
Cronon does not address the more sophisticated view, held by some environmentalists, that the entire complicated system of buyers and sellers he’s described is based on a terrible error–the view that nature should be held sacred, not turned into commodities bought and sold for profit. But the avalanche of fascinating detail in Nature’s Metropolis makes his disagreement with this position pretty clear.
