A textbook describes the New England landscape encountered by Puritan settlers as 'untouched wilderness prior to European colonization.' Based on Cronon's argument in Changes in the Land, what is wrong with this characterization?
ANew England was too cold to support significant human habitation before European contact
BThe landscape had been actively managed by indigenous peoples through fire and cultivation, making 'untouched wilderness' a Eurocentric misreading of a human-made environment
CThe settlers were wrong that the land was wilderness, but for economic rather than ecological reasons
DThe term 'wilderness' is inherently value-laden and should be avoided in historical writing
Cronon's central argument in Changes in the Land is that the landscape European settlers found was not pristine nature but a managed environment. Native peoples had used fire systematically, encouraged game habitat, and cultivated specific plant communities. European observers could not recognize this as land management because it didn't look like European enclosed agriculture. Interpreting the managed landscape as empty and uncultivated — 'wilderness' — was both an ecological misreading and the ideological foundation for claiming the land was available for the taking.
Question 2 Multiple Choice
Cronon's concept of 'second nature' in Nature's Metropolis refers to:
AThe pristine wilderness that exists outside human settlement and economic activity
BThe ecological systems of the American interior before European colonization
CThe built, transformed environment — railways, warehouses, commodity markets — that capitalism constructs on top of first nature
DThe natural instincts that shaped how indigenous peoples managed their land
'Second nature' names the middle ground where most of historical life occurs: the built, organized, capitalist environment that humans construct on top of 'first nature' (the given ecological world). In Nature's Metropolis, Chicago's railways, grain elevators, lumber yards, and commodity exchanges are second nature — the human infrastructure that organized the extraction and processing of timber, grain, and meat from the prairie hinterland. Cronon's point is that this built environment is also an ecological relationship, not separate from nature.
Question 3 True / False
According to Cronon, the development of commodity markets for grain and timber in Chicago brought those products into a closer relationship with the specific ecological places from which they came.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: False
Cronon argues the opposite: the commodity market abstracted grain and timber from their specific places of origin, making them exchangeable as generic, fungible units. A bushel of wheat from Wisconsin and one from Illinois became identical on the Chicago Board of Trade. This abstraction severed the connection between product and place, enabling the systematic large-scale extraction of resources from vast hinterlands while erasing the ecological specificity of each particular forest or prairie. The commodity form produced ecological distance, not proximity.
Question 4 True / False
Cronon argues that the boundary between human history and natural history should be treated as a historical product rather than a methodological given.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: True
This is Cronon's central methodological contribution. Rather than starting with a given separation between human history (culture, economics, politics) and natural history (ecology, climate, species), Cronon insists that where we draw that line — what counts as 'nature' versus 'culture' — is itself produced historically. Colonial land use created landscapes; capitalism created commodity chains that are also ecological relationships. Following the story across the human/nonhuman boundary is what makes environmental history analytically powerful.
Question 5 Short Answer
How did European colonizers' failure to recognize indigenous land management as 'agriculture' contribute to colonial land appropriation, according to Cronon?
Think about your answer, then reveal below.
Model answer: Indigenous peoples managed the New England landscape through systematic burning, selective harvesting, and cultivation — but these practices didn't resemble European enclosed, fenced agriculture with permanent fields. European observers used their own land-use categories and read the managed landscape as uncultivated, empty, and therefore legally and morally available for appropriation. This perceptual failure — rooted in Eurocentric definitions of what counts as 'improving' land — rendered existing indigenous management invisible, transforming a political dispossession into an apparently natural and empty landscape waiting to be settled.
Cronon's analysis shows that 'ecological imperialism' operated not just through military conquest but through categories of perception and knowledge. Defining certain kinds of land use as non-use created the ideological permission for taking. This is why the history of colonialism is also a history of how nature was defined and misread.