ENVIRONMENTALISM IS A kind of religion, and that�s OK, William Cronon told an audience of 150 at the Chicago History Museum in late November. Just don�t get fundamentalist about it. To put it another way, Joni Mitchell was wrong: there is no garden, we can�t get back to it, and trying to do so will just make it harder to protect nature.
Cronon teaches history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He�s no stranger to the museum, formerly the Chicago Historical Society, having camped out in its library researching his 1991 blockbuster Nature�s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West.