Cronon’s thesis is that neither the city of Chicago nor its hinterland can be understood independently of the other. More broadly, it is problematic to view “city and country [as] separate and opposing worlds . . . for they can only exist in each other’s presence” (pp. 17–18). Instead, “to understand a city’s place in nature,” one needs to trace out the journeys that goods and people take in and out of town.³ Cronon takes his readers on a number of journeys, following people, railroads, commodities—wheat, lumber, hogs— credit flows, and manufactured goods. Each journey adds a layer of insight to the traveler’s composite cartographic image of Chicago’s transformation from a settlement on a swampy portage populated largely by Native Americans prior to 1830 to the Great White City of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.

Given the book’s many topical strands, it is perforce a work of synthesis, which is not to say that Cronon’s research fails to provide sufficient detail about each of his chosen themes. He reaches out to urban historians and western historians as well as environmental historians and historians of technology. It is precisely because he ranges so widely into so many fields of inquiry, however, that specialists have found fault. Thus it was that environmental historians Richard White and Samuel Hays could refer to the book as “extraordinary” and as “innovating and exciting” while at the same time declaring Cronon’s “linkage of capital and nature . . . sometimes . . . problematic” (White) and his analysis “highly selective”(Hays).⁴ Urban historian Paul Barrett saw the book as making an “incontestably valuable and novel contribution,” though not through its presentation of “strictly new information.” Western historian Walter Nugent called the book “exhaustively researched,” yet found “some fuzziness” in Cronon’s discussion of what constitutes nature.⁵

The book’s first, and in some sense overarching, journey is laid out in the preface as “Cloud over Chicago.” It is a very personal journey. Here Cronon recounts his early memories as a “middle-class child of a nurse and a professor” driving from suburban New England to their summer home in central Wisconsin, contrasting his love of the green rural landscape to the “forest of smokestacks” with gray clouds “hovering over dark buildings,” what to his young eyes appeared as “an alien landscape” as they passed through the Chicago region (pp. 5–6). It is only with hindsight that Cronon is able to understand that “city and country are inextricably connected” rather than separate entities (p. 51). He is aware, almost painfully so, that his “autobiographical reflections” along this path from childhood to professional historian “will undoubtedly seem self-indulgent to some readers.” Indeed, they did seem self-indulgent to some readers. Southern and urban historian Howard Rabinowitz found that “Cronon’s ‘personal journey’ detracts from his historical ‘unified narrative’” and wished for “more nineteenth-century Chicago and less twentieth-century Cronon.”⁶ Peter Coclanis, an economic and social historian, and himself a native of the city and card-carrying member of Chicago Local 710 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, found the book not merely “self-indulgent,” but “disturbingly anti-industrial, and ultimately, misanthropic.”⁷ Surely all these diverse comments are suggestive of a provocative book.

In the epilogue, Cronon invites the reader back into the family’s station wagon with him as they drove to his grandparents’ summer cottage, a pastoral retreat in Green Lake, Wisconsin, to escape the heat and congestion of city life. Blissfully unaware at the time of the connections his grandparents’ small-town Wisconsin hardware store had with the urban entrepôt that was Chicago, he reflects now on “intricate systems” of the city that sustain his current urban life. “We are consumers all, whether we live in the city or the country.” Urban and rural landscapes “are not two places but one” (p. 384). In Cronon’s view, “We all live in the city. We all live in the country. Both are second nature to us.” Because of this, he believes we are “responsible” for both, that “we can only take them together and, in making the journey between them, find a way of life that does justice to them both” (p. 385). This concluding remark is indicative of the theme Cronon set forth in his subsequent and widely read—and controversial—essay, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” in which he argued for doing away with the dualism that artificially separated wild “first nature” from those other rural, suburban, and city “second nature” places most of us call “home.” In all these places we need to “get on with the unending task of struggling to live rightly in the world. . . .”⁸

This theme also needs to be read in the context of Cronon’s 1993 presidential address to the American Society for Environmental History, “The Uses of Environmental History.” Therein he argues against seeing environmental history as dualistic and in favor of seeing it as one of interdependencies. He also suggests we view history and the stories we as historians write as “parable[s] about how to interpret what may happen.” He believes that “by telling parables that trace the often obscure connections between human history and ecological change”—in this case the journeys in and out of Chicago—“environmental history suggests where we ought to go looking if we wish to reflect on the ethical implications of our own lives.”⁹ In fact, he is quite explicit about this goal in the preface, where he states that he intends his stories of Chicago “as parables for our own lives” (p. xvii). Read in the context of Cronon’s larger corpus of work and his approach to writing history, the autobiographical reflections in Nature’s Metropolis, which Cronon feared might seem self-indulgent, may still feel that way to some readers, but their inclusion should at least be understandable.

Cronon’s approach is to tell “a series of stories,” many of them tied to particular commodities, rather than attempting to write a complete urban biography of Chicago. As such, he divides his study into three main parts. Part 1, “To Be the Central City,” begins in the early 1830s, when local Potawatomi Indians ceded title to their lands in the Chicago area, and then carries on through the dreams and visions of early boosters who believed there could be but one great western “metropolis” and sought to promote Chicago in that role. Here Cronon briefly introduces the notion of central place theory, most notably that of the economist Johann Heinrich von Thünen (1783–1850) in which an idealized “isolated” central city reached out through zones of influence—agriculture, forestry, grazing—to extend its control over the surrounding hinterland. Cronon does this to remind his readers of the links between city and country and the “market relations [that] profoundly mediate between them.” At the same time he warns readers not to apply von Thünen’s model too literally to Chicago, for the city was a much more dynamic capital-intensive marketplace than it was an isolated state. In Cronon’s view “Frontier and metropolis turn out to be two sides of the same coin” (p. 51).

Cronon has been faulted, most notably by Louis P. Cain, for not drawing fully on the work done by economic historians in industrial location theory, preferring to limit himself to central place theory as a way to explain urban-industrial location and hierarchy.¹⁰ Perhaps this is fair criticism, but it is equally likely that Cronon chose to adopt von Thünen less to contribute to theoretical understanding on this point than to make use of an admittedly simplistic model to set up his argument for Chicago as a “gateway” to the hinterlands surrounding it. He primarily wanted to make the case that Chicago is “the place where eastern and western journeys met,” but “less from being what the boosters called central than from being peripheral” (pp. 61, 90). “Reading Frederick Jackson Turner backwards,” as he puts it, Cronon views Chicago not as “the end of the frontier” but rather as a transformative beginning point.

What established Chicago in this role were the railroads—“trunk” lines to the east and “fan” lines to the west and south—but also, in season, water routes across the Great Lakes. Cronon nicely develops a nontechnical overview of these developments, noting that the lesson to be learned was that “all roads led to Chicago,” providing it economic influence over an extensive hinterland, which after 1869 stretched to the Pacific. Railroads “broke radically with nature” to enable Chicagoans to break free of earlier environmental constraints, thereby giving them greater and speedier access both to the east and to the west than had the earlier land- and water-based transportation systems. The railroad at once “became the chief device for introducing a new capitalist logic to the geography of the Great West,” while at the same time creating a new “geographical orientation” with Chicago located at the “break point” between east and west (pp. 81, 83). Cronon convincingly points to this intersection as “the essential geographic fact of Chicago’s location: more than anything else, it constituted the second, constructed, nature that the railroads had imposed on the western landscape.” It was this link that positioned Chicago not as the continent’s central city but as the dominant “gateway city to the Great West” (pp. 90, 92). With the new geography of transportation and capital largely in place by mid-century, Chicago was poised to take full advantage of its hinterland—“first and second nature mingled to form a single world” (p. 93).

Cronon illustrates this transformation in three chapter-length case studies—on grain, lumber, and meat—in part 2, “Nature to Market,” which constitutes the core of the book. This middle section was praised by reviewers at the time of publication and is the section that has held up best, as evidenced by frequent citation in the work of others. Louis Cain called these essays “brilliant,” and other reviewers variously referred to the case studies as highly and impressively detailed. The chapters chart the movement into Chicago of “the wealth of nature,” both first and second nature—grain, lumber, and animals (first bison, then cattle and hogs), and, following technological transformation into more saleable products, their corresponding journeys back out of the city.

It is important to note that, although the terms first nature and second nature were not originally his, Cronon introduced them to the wider environmental-history community. They are admittedly somewhat slippery. But, put briefly, first nature refers to nature without humans, while second nature suggests various levels of human influence laid on top of or replacing first nature. These can range from limited effects on the landscape that semi-sedentary native peoples might have introduced through the use of fire to reduce underbrush and enhance hunting as a result, to commercial agriculture and grazing of domesticated livestock, to consciously shaped recreational parks and preserves, and even to suburban development, all of which would constitute varied levels of second nature. Richard White noted in his review some of the conceptual ambiguity of the terms, especially that of a pure first nature, but suggested Cronon needed such a category to support his contention that nature itself creates value. In this way Cronon is able to argue that “much of the capital that made the city was nature’s own” (p. 151).

In the first of his cases, “Pricing the Future: Grain,” Cronon shows how the natural fertility of tall-grass prairie lands was transformed into wheat fields, and wheat in turn became commodity “futures.” This transformation was enabled by mechanical reapers and the railroad, but even more centrally by the technical innovation of steam-powered grain elevators, linked in turn to the establishment of a standardized grading system “to simplify the natural diversity” of wheat types and qualities. In this way individual sacks of grain grown by many farmers could be conjoined and transformed into liquid-like “golden streams” and in turn more efficiently traded and shipped back out of town in freight cars. By the beginning of the Civil War, Chicago’s elevators, grading system, and a regulated central market governed by a Board of Trade had revolutionized this commodity trade to include a futures market. In Cronon’s view, an artificial partitioning of a second-nature field crop had transformed the economic landscape such that both farmer and consumer were becoming ever more tied to the urban marketplace.

Not only did second-nature field crops contribute value to the grain market, and hence to Chicago’s growth as a city, but so too did the “stored sunshine” of first-nature forests, further adding to the commodities flowing in and out of town. In Cronon’s second case, “The Wealth of Nature: Lumber,” Chicago’s lumberyards and associated sawmills, linked by lake to the North Woods of the upper Midwest, quickly became the “natural” marketplace that transformed white pine into graded and standardized lumber—in particular, the ubiquitous two-by-four so widely adopted for “balloon frame” building construction made famous in the region.¹¹ If lumber typically arrived via Lake Michigan, it more often than not was transhipped by rail—95 percent of the time by 1880—most of it moving westward to the largely treeless prairies, which nicely balanced the eastward flow of grain crops. Cronon views this transformation of nature’s wealth as a “kind of theft.” In his view, “a sizable share of the new city’s wealth was the wealth of nature stolen, consumed, and converted to human ends” (p. 206). Whether one agrees with Cronon that nature’s “stored sunshine” had been “stolen” or not, his discussion of its transformation makes clear that the boundaries—geographic, environmental, and economic—between board-feet of timber and stick-frame prairie housing, indeed of Chicago’s wealth, were, if not illusory, certainly opaque.

In the third case, “Annihilating Space: Meat,” Cronon assesses yet another institutionalized boundary area “where western nature met the Chicago market,” that of the city’s stockyards. Again mediated by the railroads, a third type of “natural” resource—first bison and later western-grown livestock, cattle and hogs—was transformed on the “disassembly lines” of Chicago’s slaughterhouses and subsequently transhipped east in refrigerated rail cars, yet another example of the transformative “interpenetration of city and country.” Transformed were the animals themselves, the prairie landscapes on which they grazed, and the American, if not the world, diet, including its seasonality, as well as the meatpacking industry and its expanding reach. Of these, Cronon suggests that the most visible change was to the landscape. In his view, corporate meatpacking was a systematization of that market with the goal “to liberate it from nature and geography.” Geographic places had come to matter little—“time had conspired with capital to annihilate space” (p. 259). Eventually, as with the lumber industry when it moved south to the Mississippi Valley yellow pine forests, Chicago lost its centrality to other meatpacking centers. Contributing to the shift was the decentralizing role of the diesel truck, which increasingly undermined the centripetal force of the railroad.

The central section of Cronon’s assessment of nature’s commodification does not include all Chicago-area industrial developments—as several of his reviewers, including Carl Condit in this journal, noted.¹² Missing is any significant attention to the clothing industry, tobacco-products manufacture, the railroad supply industry, or coal mining and iron and steel manufacturing. However, Cronon was not attempting to provide a comprehensive history of all possible industrial developments in and around Chicago that were tied to its hinterland; rather, he sought to explicate illustrative examples of how “much of the capital that made the city was nature’s own” (p. 151). Admittedly, grain, lumber, and meat as examples of agricultural-commodity processing fit his argument more neatly than do the apparel manufacturing and railroad-car fabrication businesses, but most reviewers found, and most readers continue to find, this appropriate for a work primarily focused on “environmental relationships and transformations.”¹³

That said, it would be interesting to speculate on how a historian of technology might approach these same topics in terms of the varied technologies so deeply embedded within them, technologies that Cronon tends to black-box rather than fully unpack for their social constructedness. Indeed, a historian of technology might well have entitled the book “Technology’s Metropolis.”¹⁴ It is not that Cronon is arguing for an environmental determinism, but more a matter of him wanting to emphasize the importance of nature, previously underappreciated, in understanding Chicago’s rise. Clearly he wants to persuade his readers that it is the special combination of geographic location, environmental endowment, and technological development—in particular, the role of the railroad—that combined to “inextricably connect” city and countryside. It was how all this came together in the second half of the nineteenth century that made Chicago the “gateway to the Great West.” Cronon’s choice of Chicago is no accident because of its immense importance in the nineteenth century, but the same argument about city and countryside being “two sides of the same coin” can be made about all major urban areas, indeed perhaps any urban area. Cronon certainly recognizes this when he notes in the epilogue that while “Chicago really does deserve that overused word ‘unique,’” it also “stand[s] as a representative for cities and markets more generally . . .” (pp. 383–84).

A major topic on which Cronon does focus extensively, one that made Chicago an especially important place, was the flow of capital in and out of the city. This is the topic he addresses in part 3, “Geography of Capital.” In “Gateway City,” the first of three chapters, he literally maps the flow of capital—which he is able to do because he delved deeply into bankruptcy court records for 1873–74 in order to understand who in Chicago owed what to whom and where, and the reverse. The resulting maps reveal the details of Chicago’s credit connectedness to other cities and, coupled with banking data, show why Chicago had far greater financial hinterland reach than Saint Louis or other midwestern cities. As a historian of technology and the environment, I initially found this material harder to navigate and seemingly less germane than the sections that precede it. Perhaps reviewers also felt this way, as few commented explicitly on this material—an exception was economic historian Cain. Over multiple semesters of teaching this book, however, I have found myself appreciating more and more not only the prodigious research that went into the mapping but also the ways in which it complements Cronon’s thesis about the economic, technical, geographic, and environmental hybridity of Chicago’s connections to its hinterland.

Louis Cain also lauded “The Busy Hive,” a chapter which draws its title from a Montgomery Ward catalog cover and tracks the manufactured-product flows out of the city. In a reversal of market direction, compared to the flow of natural commodities coming into Chicago to be processed, Cronon seeks to “open the [outgoing] boxes” in order to “see the objects inside. Then ask where they came from, who brought them here, who will buy them, and where they will go next.” His instructions are to “follow the seller, follow the buyer,” again, in and out of town (p. 310). To do so, Cronon looks not only at the catalog merchandiser, but also at McCormick reaper sales and the careers of two merchants—grocer John Burrows, operating in the pre-railroad era, and Charles Brewster, a dry goods merchant active after the arrival of railroads. Collectively, in Cronon’s view, these four cases, along with the preceding chapter’s credit maps and the earlier commodity analyses, “all were about capital, which was itself not a thing but a relationship. The geography of capital was about connecting people to make new markets and remake old landscapes.” However, as “the ecological place of production grew ever more remote from the economic point of consumption,” this very “geography of capital produced a landscape of obscured connections” (pp. 339, 340). This was undoubtedly true for many, perhaps even most, urban dwellers, but one still has to wonder whether those grain and hog farmers ever really forgot the natural origin of their produce, to say nothing of their own role therein, even when opening an enticing package ordered from the Monkey Ward Wish Book.¹⁵ Nonetheless, Cronon’s cartographic overview, even if not entirely new in its detail, is in its bird’s-eye view a magisterial perspective, and the book could well have ended at this point.

The final chapter, “White City Pilgrimage,” treats yet another journey, that taken by so many individuals and families to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. They were mostly ordinary folk, and mostly from Chicago and its hinterland. Historians have generally viewed the White City extravaganza as a bookend to Chicago’s nineteenth-century greatness and role as “gateway to the Great West,” as well as simultaneously reflecting much that was wrong with the city, “the beginning of the end.” Cronon is no exception in this regard. He views the “chaotic collections” of the fair as representative of the incoherent “jumble that was Chicago itself ” at century’s end despite the “apparent unity” of both (pp. 342–43). Once again, it is the unity of White City and countryside of which Cronon seeks to convince his readers. Fair enough—pun intended! Yet his fair summary adds little to what was already known and, more to the point, could be seen as unintentionally directing attention away from the main argument of the book as a whole. That this chapter did not stand out at the time of publication is reflected in the brief mention by most reviewers, or a neglect to mention it at all.

In summary, this was an excellent book when it was first published nearly twenty years ago, and it was amply rewarded: winner of a Bancroft Prize in 1992 and in that same year recipient of the George Perkins Marsh Prize from the American Society for Environmental History and a nominee for the Pulitzer Prize for History.¹⁶ It has certainly held up well since then, its continued popularity for classroom assignment and the frequency of its citation being only two of several factors attesting to its classic status.17 Whether one is a historian of technology or the environment, or an economic or urban or western historian, there is still much to ponder in this geographic mapping of nineteenth-century Chicago and its wide-reaching hinterland.

1. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, pp. xxv + 530, was published in New York by W. W. Norton in 1991. It is available from Amazon.com in paperback for $13.57 and in a Kindle edition for $9.99. The quoted phrase is on page xix; page citations for quotes are henceforth indicated parenthetically in the text and refer to the paperback edition.

2. For a collection of essays reflecting Envirotech’s approach to technological and environmental history, and consciously building on Cronon’s work, see Martin Reuss and Stephen H. Cutcliffe, eds., The Illusory Boundary: Environment and Technology in History (Charlottesville, Va., 2010).

3. Cronon had explored this concept earlier in Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983) and subsequently expanded on it in “The Paths Out of Town,” in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, ed. Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin (New York, 1992), which examined the copper-mining community of Kennecott, Alaska.

4. Reviews by Richard White, Environmental History Review 16 (1992): 85–91, quotes on 85 and 89, and by Samuel P. Hays, Journal of American History 79 (1992): 612– 13. In the American Historical Review 97 (1992): 939, Roderick F. Nash remarked that Cronon was “to be applauded for writing a book that is both scholarly and relevant to understanding and solving serious contemporary environmental problems.”

5. Reviews by Paul Barrett, Journal of Urban History 20 (1994): 577–84, quote on 579, and by Walter Nugent, Western Historical Quarterly 23 (1992): 75–77, quotes on 75 and 76.

6. Howard N. Rabinowitz, “The New Western History Goes to Town, or Don’t Forget that Your Urban Hamburger Was Once a Rural Cow: A Review Essay,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 43 (1993): 73–77, quotes on 77.

7. Peter A. Coclanis, “Urbs in Horto,” Reviews in American History 20 (1992): 14–20, quotes on 14 and 18. Urbs in Horto, “City in a Garden,” is Chicago’s official slogan.

8. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. Cronon (New York, 1996), 69–90, quote on 90.

9. William Cronon, “The Uses of Environmental History,” Environmental History Review 17, no. 3 (1993): 1–22, quotes on 17 and 20.

10. Review by Louis P. Cain, Journal of Economic History 52 (1992): 503–4.

11. Historians have traditionally viewed 1833 Chicago as the time and birthplace of the “balloon” or “stick” frame building technique using large numbers of smaller-sized pieces of lumber, thereby increasing the ease and speed of building while reducing its costs. This mode of construction quickly expanded out onto the largely treeless prairies. However, Edwin H. Cavanaugh has argued that its origins were much earlier and lay elsewhere, in the Franco-American settlements along the Mississippi River. See Cavanaugh, “Who Designed Your House? A Technological and Cultural History of Conventional Wood Construction, 1790–1880” (Ph.D. diss., Lehigh University, 2002).

12. Review by Carl Condit, Technology and Culture 33 (1992): 591–93; see Coclanis, 17, as well. Condit also lamented that Cronon had failed to mention Chicago’s symbolic culture—the Chicago Symphony, Field Museum, and Newberry Library, among others. Graciously, he did not mention Chicago’s historic role in the erection of skyscrapers, which he himself had written about so extensively and so well. But here again, it seems misplaced criticism for a book not primarily intended to be a complete urban history. Interestingly, Donald C. Miller would shortly publish his City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America (New York, 1996), which covered the same nineteenth-century period and included many of the topics Condit found wanting in Nature’s Metropolis. Read together, these two works complement each other very nicely. Miller briefly refers to Nature’s Metropolis and generally follows Cronon’s argument regarding the city–hinterland interplay.

13. White (n. 4 above), 87. On p. 91, White also suggests “this is a book which will for the foreseeable future set the agenda for environmental history.”

14. I am indebted to Martin Reuss for his suggestion on this point.

15. This is a point to which Cronon alludes but does not fully develop (see p. 339). I am indebted to Silas Chamberlin for his insight on this question.

16. Two Bancroft Prizes are awarded annually by Columbia University to books in American history or diplomacy. The American Society for Environmental History’s George Perkins Marsh Prize is for the best book published in environmental history during the preceding two years.

17. Amazon lists over 230 book authors who have cited Nature’s Metropolis in one way or another; see http://www.amazon.com/Natures-Metropolis-Chicago-Great-West/ dp/book-citations/0393308731/ref=sid_dp_av?ie=UTF8&citeType=cited#cited (accessed 1 March 2010). As but one example of its continued influence, Clay McShane and Joel Tarr, in The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore, 2007), make explicit reference to Cronon’s city–hinterland thesis and use it to frame much of their argument. The Cram101 Textbook Reviews series includes an outline volume for Nature’s Metropolis which consists of detailed, chapter-by-chapter glossaries of terms and concepts introduced in the book, but no further discussion or analysis beyond the definitions themselves.

Stephen H. Cutcliffe is chair for the Department of History at Lehigh University. He is coeditor with Martin Reuss of The Illusory Boundary: Environment and Technology in History (2010). He thanks Joshua Britton, Silas Chamberlin, Robert C. Post, Martin Reuss, and Roger D. Simon for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this essay.

©2010 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Richard White once observed that Worster sought to place “environmental history at the point where the natural and the cultural intersect and interact with each other,” a scenario that in no way ignores technology.{3} Worster treated technology as an expression of culture, one that had steadily enlarged its power to reshape the earth. He did not view technology as an independent, driving force so much as a set of tools and techniques that magnified and accelerated the environmental impacts of human occupation rather than determining the path or nature of those impacts. Farmers thus were viewed as businessmen who turned to machines to maximize profits, often by ignoring the natural limits of a particular place.{4}

To Worster, capitalistic culture was the essential factor underpinning the Dust Bowl. By distorting human relationships with the land, capitalism made the aggressive employment of agricultural mechanization an irresistibly attractive option. Such farming practices exacerbated the destruction of the native sod that had evolved on the Great Plains, which in turn led to the devastating dust storms of the 1930s. In Worster’s view, science and technology had never represented the solution to such problems. Neither new and improved technologies nor increased scientific understanding of Great Plains ecology offered protection from the recurrence of similar environmental calamities, he warned, so long as capitalism’s values, norms, and priorities dominated. Capitalism trumps all other suits in Worster’s story. No talk of progress here. In fact, it is quite the reverse.{5}

Fig. 1 The federal government commissioned photographers to document the hardships and conflicts faced by farmers in the Dust Bowl. The original Farm Security Administration caption card for this 1938 Dorothea Lange photograph reads: “Leveling hummocks in dust bowl, thirty miles north of Dalhart, Texas. Farmer: ‘Every dime I got is tied up right here. If I don’t get it out, I’ve got to drive off and leave it. Where would I go and what would I do? I know what the land did once for me, maybe it will do it again.’ Son: ‘It would be better if the sod had never been broke. My father’s broke plenty of it. Could I get a job in California?’” (Source: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, reproduction number LC-USF34-018264-C.)

The roots of Worster’s work on this topic ran deep. He openly acknowledged his personal attachment to the southern plains—an expanse of grasslands spreading over 100 million wind-swept acres in the states of Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas. The hardships associated with the Dust Bowl eventually drove his parents from the region. They perched temporarily in California—where Worster was born—before resettling in western Kansas as soon as conditions improved. Worster stated that the book’s origins sprang from a longing to revisit the plains, to “take another look at the land and people who gave me so much to start with” (p. vii). This emotional attraction to the subject did nothing to blur his vision or dull his critique, however. Indeed, he knowingly predicted that his conclusions would displease many plainsmen.

As a socially caused ecological calamity, the Dust Bowl has been surpassed in magnitude only twice in human history, according to Worster: by the Chinese in around 3000 b.c.e., when upland deforestation triggered centuries of severe flooding and silting, and later by the brazen overgrazing of Mediterranean vegetation that led to the erosion and impoverishment of this once quintessentially fertile territory.{6} In comparison to these earlier landscape degradations, which resulted from generations of human activity, the Dust Bowl occurred far more rapidly and could not “be blamed on illiteracy or overpopulation or social disorder.” As Worster explained:

It came about because the culture was operating in precisely the way it was supposed to. Americans blazed their way across a richly endowed continent with a ruthless, devastating efficiency unmatched by any people anywhere. When the white men came to the plains, they talked expansively of “busting” and “breaking” the land. And that is exactly what they did. Some environmental catastrophes are nature’s work, others are the slowly accumulating effects of ignorance or poverty. The Dust Bowl, in contrast, was the inevitable outcome of a culture that deliberately and self-consciously set itself that task of dominating and exploiting the land for all it was worth. (p. 4)

Prior to Worster, few authors had drawn connections between the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression of the 1930s. He argued that these events were inextricably intertwined and that they revealed “fundamental weaknesses” in American culture, both ecological and economic. During the 1920s, the Great Plains had been “extensively plowed and put to wheat—turned into highly mechanized factory farms that produced unprecedented harvests. Plains operators, however, ignored all environmental limits in this enterprise, just as Wall Street ignored sharp practices and a top-heavy economy.” Perhaps in other, more forgiving ecological circumstances such agricultural practices might not have been so destructive, but on the southern plains there was little to buffer the impact of commercial farming on the course-grained soils, and little to prevent farmers from assuming the risks they were “willing to take for profit” (pp. 6–7). It was, Worster argued, “the work of man, not nature” that created the Dust Bowl.

Admittedly, nature had something to do with this disaster too. Without winds the soil would have stayed put, no matter how bare it was. Without drought, farmers would have had strong, healthy crops capable of checking the wind. But natural factors did not make the storms—they merely made them possible. The storms were mainly the result of stripping the landscape of its natural vegetation to such an extent that there was no defense against the dry winds, no sod to hold the sandy or powdery dirt. The sod had been destroyed to make farms to grow wheat to get cash. (p. 13)

Throughout much of the country’s mid-section, Worster noted, “great phalanxes of clanking, smoking machines [remade] the face of the earth,” grinding under its rural culture in the process (p. 58). Landowners who received federal agricultural assistance often purchased tractors and displaced their tenants. Despite the drought and depression, tractor ownership increased dramatically during the 1930s in the southern plains. Farm mechanization changed farming patterns and pushed people off the land.{7}

The ecological and geological history of the Great Plains owes much to the Rocky Mountains, which cast a vast rain-shadow over most of these lands and contributed to their immense flatness. As the mountain range’s rocks and soil gradually eroded, they formed an enormous alluvial fan that slowly obliterated the region’s topographical features under layer upon layer of sediment. The climate in this semiarid region was extreme and unpredictable. Rainfall averaged twenty inches or less per year. Worster explained that

[a]gainst these powerful forces organic nature had struggled over millions of years, determining by trial and error what would flourish best in this dry corner of the good earth—now losing ground, now gaining it back. Nothing was fixed or permanent; man did not come into a perfectly stable or finished world on the plains. . . . All the living things needed each other, depended on each other, to withstand the harsher side of climate. (p. 66)

The earliest human settlers understood and respected that interdependency. Their successors did neither. With periodic droughts a normal occurrence, grasses were among the few plants that possessed the resilience needed to survive under such conditions. Plowing those grasses on a scale measured in tens of millions of acres—a process begun in the late nineteenth century—was a recipe for disaster. It was an act that caused the sand-laced land literally to fall apart.

Comparing the development that took place between 1910 and 1930 to previous activities on the Great Plains, Worster observed how technology intensified society’s environmental impact. Cowboys and sod-house farmers of that earlier era had adopted traditional approaches: “herding animals by horseback, walking behind a plow and team.” As America embraced the success of “long assembly lines turning out automobiles, trucks, and tractors,” the grassland also “was to be torn up to make a vast wheat factory: a landscape tailored to the industrial age” (p. 87). The post–World War I recovery in Europe provided a huge financial incentive for wheat production in the southern plains. Millions of acres were planted in winter wheat, and the increased use of farm machinery drove down the per-acre labor requirements. Gasoline-powered tractors were the main transforming technologies, especially when coupled to the one-way disk plow, and they were complemented on the Great Plains by the combined harvester-thresher, or “combine,” as the innovative contraption was more commonly known.

The new machines cost money, and this raised the capital investments needed to farm. The new machines also allowed for economies of scale, an encouragement for farmers to invest even more in equipment and land. Speculators could move their specialized machines from field to field, becoming “suitcase farmers.” Technology, Worster wrote, “made possible, and common, an exploitative relationship with the earth: a bond that was strictly commercial, so that the land became nothing more than a form of capital that must be made to pay as much as possible” (p. 93). From 1925 to 1930, farmers plowed under 5,260,000 acres of native grasses in the southern plains. Without this indigenous vegetation in place when the drought and winds came, there was little to stop the earth from blowing in the wind. “When the black blizzards began to roll across the plains in 1935, one-third of the Dust Bowl region—33 million acres—lay naked, ungrassed, and vulnerable to the winds” (p. 94).

Today, few films are screened more frequently in history-of-technology courses than Pare Lorentz’s 1936 documentary, The Plow That Broke the Plains.{8} Its argument that technology was the cause of the Dust Bowl and that technology—if redirected in the beneficent hands of the New Dealers—offered the best solution to the problem has drawn a sound rebuke from Worster: “Explaining the plow that broke the plains requires one to explain the powerful expansionary and autonomous thrust of American society” (p. 96). It is the cultural force of capitalism that truly explains this event, he insisted: “The attitude of capitalism—industrial and pre-industrial—toward the earth was imperial and commercial; none of its ruling values taught environmental humility, reverence, or restraint.” Especially on the southern plains, “where the grass had always struggled to hold the land against powerful winds and recurrent drought,” in a place situated—in Worster’s words—“on the edges of the fertile earth,” Americans seemed to find it most difficult to express “all the cooperative, self-effacing, cautious elements” needed to sustain the land (p. 97). “Living within the ecological order requires knowledge, of course, and appropriate technology,” he wrote, “but more important is the capacity to feel deeply the contours of that order and one’s part in it” (p. 164).

Responses to the dirt storms of the 1930s varied widely. The U.S. Department of Agriculture clung tenaciously to its longstanding goal of increasing crop production, particularly through the use of farm machinery, fertilizer, pesticides, improved seed, and irrigation. The pervasive belief that more was better hamstrung effective conservation-reform efforts, totally sidestepping the environmental limits of the Great Plains. Ecologists offered yet another perspective. Granting the unfeasibility of moving people off the southern plains, they urged that land use strive for a steady state (or, in today’s parlance, “sustainability”), which generally meant working to adapt oneself to local conditions. Reform spurred by ecologists was limited, however. They tended to provide ecological insights and then back off rather than propose solutions to alter human behavior on the Great Plains.

Agronomists formed a third group of New Deal conservationists. Led by the newly established Soil Conservation Service, they stressed the importance of farming methods, or technique. Accepting that their contribution would be to adhere to the prevailing political economy, which called for using land for cash crops, they attempted to persuade farmers to use the right tools to grow the right crops. The mantle of science helped strengthen their message. Unlike the ecologists, the agronomists contended that sod-busting was not the problem; the trouble rested with the subsequent agricultural practices, they said. The harrowing impacts of the Dust Bowl could be rectified, and the land made whole again, by technology. Echoing the conclusions of The Plow That Broke the Plains, the agronomists pushed “salvation through technique” and promised “recovery through scientific manipulation of the land” (p. 211). In the end, conservation agronomy proved to be the most popular of the reform alternatives, but like its competitors, it left untouched the underlying economic system.

As shown by subsequent events, the agronomists’ prescriptions for reworking the Great Plains brought little lasting protection. From 1954 to 1957, the rain stopped falling and the wind started blowing again, doing damage to a wider swath of land than in the 1930s—the result of having even more land under the plow. The results would have been worse than during the 1930s save for the fact that the rains returned. Technique was neither the solution nor the problem. The cause of the Dust Bowl, in Worster’s analysis, was the motivation of capitalistic farming: the quest for extracting as much profit from the land as possible. And the situation was aggravated by the government’s continual willingness to clean up the worst of the messes whenever they occurred. With such an economic formula, making more money requires taking more risks, and that has spelled trouble for semiarid regions like the southern plains where the land has continued to be perceived as a commodity. Government officials had “offered farmers a technological panacea for ecological destructiveness, when the root issue was motivation and values—a deeply entrenched economic ethos” (p. 229).

For historians of technology, Worster’s highlighting of the fundamental role of capitalism in creating “natural” disasters offers a framework for engaging the most notable of Melvin Kranzberg’s “laws”: that “technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”{9} At the micro-level, land use (and the use of technology to work the land) involves individual assessments of risk-taking, and these decisions can vary from person to person. On a macro-level, however, clearer patterns emerge, shaped by the overpowering currents of culture and the political economy, as was so painfully evident in coastal Louisiana and Mississippi following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005.{10}

Historians of technology have often been drawn to the social and political dimensions of their topics. It is worth recalling therefore the milieu within which Worster wrote Dust Bowl. The 1970s witnessed the coming of age of the environmental movement, with heightened knowledge of ecological problems and an insistence that society address them. The merging of political activism and the involvement of scientists helped raise awareness of the earth’s limits and the responsibility of nations around the world to adapt accordingly. Technology was frequently suggested as the cure-all for problems, with mixed results, as documented now by many historians. Themes such as these saturate Dust Bowl, offering lessons about understanding limits and about scrutinizing more carefully proposals for quick reform.{11}

History, Worster tells us, involves more than human society (of which technology and politics are parts). It also involves place: that context of the physical and biological world where stories unfold. Technology has shaped the contours of those stories, of course, but so too has nature. This insight, this truth, has been increasingly pursued by a range of scholars committed to examining the intersections of technological and environmental history, an effort spurred in part by Worster’s exemplary analyses.{12}

In Worster’s case, the history of place provides lessons also useful in interpreting the present condition of that same region. Since the severe drought of the 1950s, farmers on the southern plains have redoubled their reliance on technology to fend off the threat of future dust storms. They have done so largely through sophisticated irrigation projects fed by galaxies of efficient, deep-well pumps tapping into one of the world’s largest subterranean lakes, the Ogallala aquifer. This immense irrigation enterprise has nurtured crops that have anchored the soil, and advancements in water-conservation technologies (such as center-pivot sprinklers and drip irrigation systems) have greatly reduced the percentage of fossil groundwater lost to evaporation. Nevertheless, the Ogallala is being mined at rates vastly exceeding the meager pace of replenishment, which means that this vital and virtually nonrenewable resource is diminishing precipitously, making all but inevitable the reassertion of the region’s environmental limits on society.{13} Technology will surely be called upon to help forestall the forces of nature. As Donald Worster teaches us, the history of the region suggests that culture, money, human choices, and—above all—place will also play a role in directing the outcome.

{1} For a discussion of this trend among environmental historians, see Richard White, “Environmental History, Ecology, and Meaning,” Journal of American History 76 (1990): 1115.

{2} Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York, 1979); the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, with an eleven-page afterword by Worster, was published by Oxford University Press in 2004. Worster’s influence in helping to revitalize Western history can be seen in such works as: Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York, 1987); Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman, Okla., 1991); Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin, eds., Trails: Toward a New Western History (Lawrence, Kan., 1991); William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991); William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, eds., Under a Western Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past (New York, 1992); William G. Robbins, Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West (Lawrence, Kan., 1994); and Frieda Knobloch, The Culture of Wilderness: Agriculture as Colonization in the American West (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996). For examples of Worster’s subsequent contributions to environmental history, see: Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York, 1985); Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (New York, 1992); The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New York, 1993); An Unsettled Country: Changing Landscapes of the American West (Albuquerque, N.M., 1994); and A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (New York, 2001).

{3} White, “Environmental History, Ecology, and Meaning,” 1111.

{4} For a discussion of how Worster treated technology and human history in his later book, Under Western Skies, see Hal K. Rothman, “The Sky’s the Limit? Technology and the American West,” Technology and Culture 35 (1994): 168–73. For a survey of the historical literature on American agricultural technology, see Deborah Fitzgerald, “Beyond Tractors: The History of Technology in American Agriculture,” Technology and Culture 32 (1991): 114–26.

{5} For a comparison of the trajectory of Worster’s narrative with that of a more traditional account of the Dust Bowl, see William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Journal of American History 78 (1992): 1347–76.

{6} Jared M. Diamond’s best-selling book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York, 2005), drew widespread attention to the extent and diversity of human-created ecological calamities across history.

{7} Farm mechanization, soil exhaustion, and a depressed agricultural economy were already contributing to rural out-migration—even from the Great Plains—during the 1920s. See James N. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York, 1989) and Walter Nugent, Into the West: The Story of Its People (New York, 1999). For an engaging treatment of the struggles endured by those who remained on the southern plains during the “dirty 30s,” see Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Boston, 2006).

{8} The Plow That Broke the Plains and Pare Lorentz’s follow-up New Deal documentary, The River (1937), both included original scores by Virgil Thomson, and both came to be considered landmark documentaries. In January 2007, Naxos released a one-volume DVD (catalogue no. 2.110521) containing the two films, each of them featuring newly recorded soundtracks. For an insightful discussion of Lorentz’s work as well as how other photographers and filmmakers addressed the interactions of nature and technology on the Great Plains during the 1930s, see Finis Dunaway, Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform (Chicago, 2005). The Dust Bowl images most deeply seared into the American consciousness, of course, were created by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath (New York, 1939), which was adapted the following year for the big screen by 20th Century Fox.

{9} Melvin Kranzberg, “Technology and History: ‘Kranzberg’s Laws’,” Technology and Culture 27 (1986): 545.

{10} For thought-provoking essays commissioned by Technology and Culture (vol. 47, January 2006) on the natural/unnatural nature of these storms, see: Craig E. Colten, “The Rusting of the Chemical Corridor,” 95–101; Todd Shallat, “Holding Louisiana,” 102–7; and Carolyn Kolb, “Crescent City, Post-Apocalypse,” 108–11. See also Martin Reuss, “Searching for Sophocles on Bourbon Street,” Technology and Culture 47 (April 2006): 349–56. For a more sweeping assessment of the question in general, see Ted Steinberg, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (New York, 2000).

{11} For Worster’s reflections on the nature and development of environmental history, including the significance of its emergence during the 1970s, see Donald Worster, “Doing Environmental History,” in The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, ed. Donald Worster (New York, 1988), 289–308.

{12} For a survey of this literature, see Jeffrey K. Stine and Joel A. Tarr, “At the Intersection of Histories: Technology and the Environment,” Technology and Culture 39 (1998): 601–40.

{13} See John Opie, Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land, 2nd ed. (Lincoln, Neb., 2000) and John Opie, “The Drought of 1988, the Global Warming Experiment, and Its Challenge to Irrigation in the Old Dust Bowl Region,” in A Sense of the American West: An Anthology of Environmental History, ed. James E. Sherow (Albuquerque, N.M., 1998), 261–89. For an assessment of land use on the Great Plains based on county-level census data from 1870–2000 in which technology is credited with helping farmers maintain a general level of stability in this region, see Geoff Cunfer, On the Great Plains: Agriculture and Environment (College Station, Tex., 2005).

Dr. Stine is curator for environmental history and chair of the Division of Medicine and Science at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.

Volume 48 Number 2 (April 2007) | Copyright© 2007, the Society for the History of Technology