Travels In and Out of Town: William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis (New York, 1991) is one of the most important books seeking to understand and explicate the symbiosis, if not unity, of city and countryside. Its thesis is that neither the city of Chicago nor its surrounding environmental hinterland can be understood independently of the other, "for they can only exist in each other's presence." Cronon's "series of stories," which track the flow in and out of town of people, commodities (wheat, hogs, and lumber), and capital have held up well over the course of the book's nearly two decades in print, and the work is widely cited in the literature where environmental and technological history intersect.