• I must say that I was slowly absorbed by this book.

• problem sets and projects were punted in the course of finishing this read.

• One of the issues that Cronon's book raises is the link between technologies and abstractions, which we can get at through the question of antithesis between city and country. set up his thesis that the isolation of country from city is an illusion

• I thought it was clever of Cronin to begin his preface and end his epilogue with his own stories of journeys to Chicago. It allowed me to relate with the author

• I also thought that the links that Cronon was able to make between his thematic chapters, particularly in parts one and two, greatly assisted the reader in understanding the broader context (more so than Bray achieved).

• The beginning and ending in his parents car entering and exiting Chicago are beautiful. It adds a personal touch to his research which many historians shy away from because it could be seen as making their work seem less scientific, less objective and therefore not as good. Yet, in my mind this autobiographical part quenches our curiosity with regards to the question of "how did he come up with this brilliant idea".

• One of his main goals in this book is to try to blur the dichotomies which we are so used to working with. Where does the boundary lie between natural and artificial, nature and nurture, city and country, good and bad, male and female, indigenous and foreign, the social and the biological? All these categories which are so hard to define hold such an important place in our worldviews that it becomes very difficult to tease out the assumptions lying within them.

• I found there were some instances that he waxed a bit too poetically about urban and rural stereotypes.

• In Nature's Metropolis, Cronon takes up the metropolitan thesis, and argues very convincingly that it also better characterizes the American frontier than does the Turnerian frontier.

• You can't expect me to believe that Chicago didn't even have one lousy indoor plumbing story worthy of inclusion in this book?

• He simultaneously makes a very strong argument in environmental history, against the romantic distinction between the rural-and-natural and the urban-and-artificial.

• Similar to the frontier discourse, Cronon also holds that the energy of the newly developed Mid West region was gained as it stood at the foremost front of the East's power. Unlike Turner, however, Cronon believes that it was the penetration of capital rather than civilization that enabled this energy. In other words, Chicago was a gateway of capital instead of civilization.

• Cronon describes Nature's Metropolis as a series of historical journeys, primarily the journeys of goods and services to urban Chicago from the vast rural area to its west. it is motivated by a more general question: how a city's life and markets connect to the countryside around it (p.384).

• While Cronon frames his argument in the realm of capital flow and economic influences, one could just as easily frame the argument completely in a spatial context, which he alludes to do in his chapter on meat-packing and the "annihilation of space." Cronon ultimately links the economic and technological changes to changes in the perception and creation of space and form (which is why architects love this book).

• The city did not grow from its own population's market need; it grew as a critical node of a nationwide interconnected network of material flow.

• The integration of primary source material seemed particularly successful, and more so than in the previous books we have read.

• Thomas Hughes proposed the concept of a technical system as an organic whole constituted of various heterogeneous elements. In 'Nature's Metropolis', a similar concept is extended from a technical system to an ecological-economic system: a symbiosis of nature and culture.

• One thing that I was most struck by was Cronon's intensely negative reaction to Chicago from his childhood trips. His experience is diametrically opposite of my own which had a similar power in forming my ideas about the city and my own role within it.

• I was disappointed in the few images that were included in the book.

• Therefore it is meaningless to separate the urban from the rural. It is equally meaningless to have an absolute distinction between the natural and the artificial: the Illinois cornfields, the Texas cattle yards, or the Michigan lumber forests were no less man-made than Chicago's board of trades, slaughter houses, or cargo markets. All of them were elements of a huge dynamic system of economic activities and material flow. To grasp the commodities in downtown Chicago's big departmental stores as the representations of the city's connections to its great hinterlands does not work only in poetic sense; the phenomena indeed embodied the entangled relations of production between Chicago and the Great West.

• Second nature is never absent, and Cronon's depiction of the management structures of the meat packing industry perhaps parallel that of the city as impersonal, a product of human work, perceived as abstracted from but still a part of nature.

• Visual images, sounds, smells, memories, poetry and journeys all combine to absorb the reader into this world of not very sentimental events like urbanization, exchange, business, expropriation, work and building.

• I think this is a great, provocative history of technology claim, that the introduction of a particular technology can undo one's relationship with her environment, and can provoke an uncoupling between 'types' of environments (here, city and country).

• It is interesting to speculate on the ways this idea [hinterlands] could be adapted to discuss any region or indeed group of people whose historical fortunes have been seen to have been intimately connected or even determined by a larger more powerful region or group. The idea of a hinterland, carrying as it does the sense that there is an organic connection between the identities and positions of the more and less powerful, goes a long way past the centre/periphery model, or even the Self/Other opposition. Cronon's more ecological understanding of interrelationships stands out as a 'take-away' for me from this book.

• [Cronon] refutes the separation of city and nature, rather describing them as interdependent. He is successful in doing perhaps because his definition of first nature is not a pristine wilderness but a landscape that has already begun to be modified by humans. Could first nature be in fact be more accurately described as rural nature?

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