Quotes from William Cronon

As we gaze into the mirror it holds up for us, we too easily imagine that what we behold is Nature when in fact we see the reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires.

Sas soon as we label something as "natural", we attach to it the powerful implication that any change from its current state would degrade and damage the way it is "supposed" to be

As soon as we label something as "natural", we attach to it the powerful implication that any change from its current state would degrade and damage the way it is "supposed" to be.

The dream of an unworked natural landscape is very much the fantasy of people who have never themselves had to work the land to make a living.

Resources, waterways, and climatic zones loom so large in their writings that one can almost forget that people have something to do with the building of cities.

T]he people of plenty were a people of waste.

Killing was a relatively simple matter--a blow to the head, a knife to the throat--complicated only by how much one cared about the pain or terrors animals felt in dying.... The animal also died a second death. Severed from the form in which it had lived, severed from the act that had killed it, it vanished from human memory as one of nature's creatures.

The trouble with wilderness is that it quietly expresses and reproduces the very values its devotees seek to reject. The flight from history that is very nearly the core of wilderness represents the false hope of an escape from responsibility, the illusion that we can somehow wipe clean the slate of our past.

What farmers could profitably raise at any given location would depend on two key variables: how much people in the city were willing to pay for different crops, and how much it cost to transport those crops to market.

Repeatedly in the nineteenth century, western cities came into being when eastern capital created remote colonies in landscapes that as yet contained relatively few people. Movements of capital helped explain why large cities developed so much more quickly in the West than Turner's evolutionary frontier stages suggest.

By what peculiar twist of perception, I wondered, had I managed to see the plowed fields and second-growth forests of southern Wisconsin—a landscape of former prairies now long vanished—as somehow more "natural" than the streets, buildings, and parks of Chicago? All represented drastic human alterations of earlier landscapes.

How did things get to be this way?

The special task of environmental historians is to tell stories that carry us back and forth across the boundary between people and nature to reveal just how culturally constructed that boundary is -- and how dependent upon natural systems it remains.

We need to discover a common middle ground in which all of these things, from the city to the wilderness, can somehow be encompassed in the word "home."