Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon

“One long-term result of this new network was a basic change in the American diet, and in that of people in many other parts of the world as well. Another was a growing interpenetration of city and country. With it, seemingly, came an increasing corporate control over landscape, space, and the natural world, so much so that by the end of the century the new meat-packing companies had nearly freed themselves from dependence on any single location—including Chicago. The growing distance between the meat market and the animals in whose flesh it dealt may have seemed civilizing to those who visited the Exchange Building in the 1860s, but it also betokened a much deeper and subtler separation—the word ‘alienation’ is not too strong—from the act of killing and from nature itself.”
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”The ability of the market to construct and obscure relationships has been expanding for a long time now. The market existed long before there was a Chicago, and although it attained new complexity in that city, it has since gone on to become a fact of life in most places, no matter how urban or rural. We are consumers all, whether we live in the city or the country. This is to say that the urban and the rural landscapes I have been describing are not two places but one. They created each other, they transformed each other’s environments and economies, and they now depend on each other for their very survival. To see them separately is to misunderstand where they came from and where they might go in the future. Worse, to ignore the nearly infinite ways they affect one another is to miss our moral responsibility for the ways they shape each other’s landscapes and alter the lives of people and organisms within their bounds. The city-country relations I have described in this book now involve the entire planet, in part because of what happened to Chicago and the Great West during the nineteenth century. We all live in the city. We all live in the country. Both are second nature to us.”

-William Cronon, 1991