William Cronon
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William Cronon |
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"Landscape Legacies: Learning from Our History" |
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18/01/2005: 11:30 AM |
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WILLIAM CRONON is an historian who studies American environmental history
and the history of the American West. Cronon's research seeks to understand
the history of human interactions with the natural world: how we depend on
the ecosystems around us to sustain our material lives, how we modify the
landscapes in which we live and work, and how our ideas of nature shape our
relationships with the world around us. His first book, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983), was a study of how the New England landscape changed as control of the region shifted from Indians to European colonists. In 1984, the work was award the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians. "Gracefully written, subtly argued, and well informed, it is a work whose implications extend far beyond colonial New England." - Richard White, Michigan State University In 1991, Cronon completed a book entitled Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, which examines Chicago's relationship to its rural hinterland during the second half of the nineteenth century. It was awarded the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for the best literary work of non-fiction; it won the Bancroft Prize for the best work of American history, and was also on of three nominees for the Pulitzer Prize in History; and it received the George Perkins Marsh Prize from the American Society for Environmental History and the Charles A. Weyerhauser Award from the Forest History Society for the best book of environmental and conservation history. 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. He then edited an influential collection of essays entitled Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, examining the implication of different cultural ideas of nature for modern environmental problems, published by Norton in the fall of 1995. Former EPA administrator William Reilly praises Uncommon Ground: "One of the great and incomplete tasks confronting the generation of environmentalists is to effect a reconciliation of humans with their environment, of culture with nature. Uncommon Ground is a powerful and persuasive guide in this great cause." He is currently at work on a history of Portage, Wisconsin, that will explore how people's sense of place is shaped by the stories they tell about their homes, their lives, and the landscapes they inhabit. He is also completing a book entitled Saving Nature in Time: The Past and the Future of Environmentalism (based on the Wiles Lectures which he delivered at Queens University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in May 2001) on the evolving relationship between environmental history and environmentalism, and what the two might learn from each other. In July 1992, Cronon became the Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison after having served for more than a decade as a member of the Yale History Department. In 2003, he was also named Vilas Research Professor at UW-Madison, the university’s most distinguished chaired professorship. He has been President of the American Society for Environmental History, and serves as general editor of the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books Series for the University of Washington Press. During the spring of 1994, he organized and chaired a faculty research seminar on "Reinventing Nature" at the University of California's Humanities Research Institute in Irvine, California. In January, 1996, he became Director of the Honors Program for the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a post he held until 1998, and from 1997-2000 he served as the founding Faculty Director of the new Chadbourne Residential College at UW-Madison. He has served on the Governing Council of The Wilderness Society since 1995. Born September 11, 1954, in New Haven, Connecticut, 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 has been a Rhodes Scholar, Danforth Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, and MacArthur Fellow; has won prizes for his teaching at both Yale and Wisconsin; and in 1999 was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society. LECTURE SUMMARY What does Portage have to do with Portland? Landscape historian William Cronon kicked off the 2005 Illahee Lecture Series "How Cities Learn", and never even mentioned “cities.” Instead he asked us to stand on a bridge and look at a river. Cronon admitted that a talk based on his award winning book Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West would tie in much more clearly with this year’s theme, but he advocated persuasively for sharing his current work-in-progress, on the modest hamlet of Portage, Wisconsin. Cronon’s premise is that a place becomes a place through narrative, through the stories people tell about it. He began with a bridge over the obscure Fox River, a nondescript roadside picnic area with a couple of historical markers. Both markers tell brief, but different stories about this place, originally the site of Fort Winnebago. These historical markers are notable as much for what they leave out as for what they tell: the fort’s founder gets top billing, but nothing about his later failure; just a mention for a young lieutenant, Jefferson Davis; nothing about the motivations for building the fort, or about the original inhabitants. For some of those details we have the 1830 equivalent of the contemporary “blog” written by Juliet Kinsey, a cultured Easterner, who wryly observes the rough and ready life on the prairie. Her deft portraits support Cronon’s contention that the commonplace daily life of regular people are all too often untold by “History.” Along the way we learn about a surprising number of people who have shaped our concepts of history, wilderness, conservation and America’s heartland – Frederick Jackson Turner, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Zona Gayle – all called the Fox River home for some or most of their lives. These are the “important” people for which Portage might hope to be recorded in history, since it can’t hope to be known for being an important place, like New York or Rome, or part of an important event like Gettysburg or Waterloo. Or can it? Dig a little deeper into the landscape, and ask why the Fox and Wisconsin Rivers take such odd jogs so close to one another. And why was Fort Winnebago built in the first place? It turns out that the glacial geomorphology of Portage resulted in just enough relief to send the Fox River into Lake Michigan and the Wisconsin River into the Mississippi. So if you wanted to canoe from the Great Lakes and northeastern North America to the Gulf of Mexico you had to carry your canoe through Portage – for one and one-quarter miles. That’s not important now. But it was important for about 10,000 years. Portage was one of the continent’s key strategic points -a major trade and cultural nexus. History happened there. We just didn’t record it until fur trappers arrived. At this point, some 325 years ago, Portage would have become the subject of tense meetings in European courts and early American towns. Explorers and their financiers likely wore holes through maps, jabbing their fingers at this blank spot between the Mississippi and the Great Lakes. French, English and half a dozen Indian languages were spoken here. Portage in 1700 was the Midwest’s canoeing equivalent of O’Hare Airport. Eventually a fort was built there to finally establish, once and for all, sovereignty and control over this hub of travel and trade. And within a quarter century, with railroads spreading across the continent, Portage was leapfrogged. Now there were new, more pressing “key strategic points.” The fort burned; it didn’t matter. And Portage became important, to the extent that it is important at all, for other reasons: nationally, for the historians and conservationists and story-tellers who were nurtured there, and locally, for the stories that local people tell about their place. As William Cronon says, “History is not about the past, but the tales we tell about the past.” With Cronon telling its story, perhaps more of us will recognize how this little forgotten place shaped the history of a continent, and then receded. And perhaps Cronon’s audience will be inspired to look at another “Port,” bordering the Columbia River, itself a continental crossroad of trade for thousands of years. Cronon asks us to stop, stand still, and look closely at our place, a city that began as a rest stop on the way to more important places. Peel away the buildings and asphalt, and the “important event, important people” history, and ask what was here before? Why did people come? What was ordinary life like? What did the landscape offer? And with our eyes opened to reading the land, we might also ask, “What will future William Cronons see when they stand on a bridge and look at Portland 100, 500 or 1000 years from now?” The long-term future of our place may already be written by our landscape and by global events beyond our control, but all the same, what stories will we leave? Like Portage, our history will be written in roadside signs, in buildings, bridges and blogs, in the children we raise and the ideas we nurture. So, go stand on a bridge, look at a river. Read an online essay by William Cronon: Orion May/June 2003 'The Riddle of the Apostle Islands' |
