I just pulled William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis off the shelf and came across this paragraph, on p. 340: "The paradox of nineteenth-century Chicago was that the same market that brought city and country ever closer together, giving them a common culture and fostering ever more intimate communication between them, also concealed the very linkages it was creating, The geography of capital produced a landscape of obscured connections. The more concentrated the city's markets became, and the more extensive its hinterland, the easier it was to forget the ultimate origins of the things it bought and sold. The ecological place of production grew ever more remote from the economic point of consumption, making it harder and harder to keep track of the true costs and consequences of any particular product. Even as Chicago's markets reshaped the landscape of the Great West, one did not 'naturally' place the city in that larger context. One thought instead of the busy hive, the huge building selling commodities to an entire nation from the heart of the city's downtown. Visualizing Chicago's markets form the opposite direction was much harder because the images were so much more diffuse: millions of families around the country with dog-eared Ward and Sears catalogs sitting at their kitchen tables, innumerable dinner table conversations about possible purchases, countless gadgets in kitchens and farmyards and bathrooms and barns for making life a little easier in so many different ways. Hive and catalog were different sides of the same coin, and yet it was second nature not to see them upon their common landscape, as links in a long chain stretching from metropolis to hinterland and finally to nature itself." Doug
