William Cronon Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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William Cronon is one of the most distinguished and influential contemporary environmental historians, receiving numerous honors for both his research and teaching. He is currently the Vilas Research Chair and the Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Born September 11, 1954, in New Haven, Connecticut, William Cronon received his B.A. (1976) from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He holds an M.A. (1979), M.Phil. (1980), and Ph.D. (1990) from Yale, and a D.Phil. (1981) from Oxford University. Cronon’s earliest book, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (1984) documented the differences in ecological practices between Native Americans and European settlers. Contrary to common perceptions at the time, he argued that the introduction of European farming techniques impoverished the land through the cutting of forests, stripping of topsoil, and changes to waterways. In addition, Old World animals took more than they returned to the land. This analysis is counterposed to Native American practices.

Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991) examined the economic and ecological relationships between Chicago and the region from Wisconsin to the Pacific, arguing that Chicago’s location made it an ideal gateway city between the West and the industrial and financial centers of New York and the east coast. He focuses primarily on three commodities-grain, lumber, and meat-and documents Chicago’s role in the ecological degradation of the western frontier. He also links the decline in Chicago’s processing industries to the pushing back of the frontier. In 1992, he co-edited Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, a collection of essays on the prospects of western and frontier history in American historiography. In Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (1995), a collection edited and introduced by Cronon, his approach shifted from an economic history of people/nature interactions to a cultural and symbolic history of people’s perceptions of the environment. He specifically critiques the concept of “wilderness,” showing why it was important in forging the identity of the western frontier, and also how and why this concept changed through history. The concept of wilderness was constructed as an “other” to civilization and a realm of pure nature, fueled by a romantic quest to escape the confines of industrial capitalism. Cronon documented its symbolic place in North American history, but also pointed out its ironies and its misleading role in framing contemporary environmental practices. One its most ironic implications was the fact that national and state parks, viewed by urbanites as sites of sublime wilderness experience, were constructed through expelling Native Americans from those areas, often violently. The collection has therefore been influential for anthropologists studying conservation issues, especially from a historical perspective.

Most recently, Cronon’s research has centered on a history of Portage, Wisconsin, exploring how people’s senses of place is shaped by their narratives about their homes, lives, and the landscapes they inhabit. In the process, he has written a number of articles on the role of oral history in understanding peoples’s senses of place and space. He is also finishing a book titled Saving Nature in Time: The Past and the Future of Environmentalism on the changing relationships between environmental history and environmental movements, and what the two might learn from each other.

Bibliography:

William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (Norton, W. W. & Company, 1995);
William Cronon, Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (Norton, W. W. & Company, 1995);
William Cronon, Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past (Norton, W. W. & Company, 1994).