Control of Nature, John McPhee. (Hardcover 0091745381)

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Control of Nature
Author: John McPhee

While John McPhee was working on his previous book, Rising from the Plains, he happened to walk by the engineering building at the University of Wyoming, where words etched in limestone said: "Strive on--the control of Nature is won, not given." In the morning sunlight, that central phrase--"the control of nature"--seemed to sparkle with... more » unintended ambiguity. Bilateral, symmetrical, it could with equal speed travel in opposite directions. For some years, he had been planning a book about places in the world where people have been engaged in all-out battles with nature, about (in the words of the book itself) "any struggle against natural forces--heroic or venal, rash or well advised--when human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth, to take what is not given, to rout the destroying enemy, to surround the base of Mt. Olympus demanding and expecting the surrender of the gods." His interest had first been sparked when he went into the Atchafalaya--the largest river swamp in North America--and had learned that virtually all of its waters were metered and rationed by a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' project called Old River Control.

In the natural cycles of the Mississippi's deltaic plain, the time had come for the Mississippi to change course, to shift its mouth more than a hundred miles and go down the Atchafalaya, one of its distributary branches. The United States could not afford that--for New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and all the industries that lie between would be cut off from river commerce with the rest of the nation. At a place called Old River, the Corps therefore had built a great fortress--part dam, part valve--to restrain the flow of the Atchafalaya and compel the Mississippi to stay where it is.

In Iceland, in 1973, an island split open without warning and huge volumes of lava began moving in the direction of a harbor scarcely half a mile away. It was not only Iceland's premier fishing port (accounting for a large percentage of Iceland's export economy) but it was also the only harbor along the nation's southern coast. As the lava threatened to fill the harbor and wipe it out, a physicist named Thorbjorn Sigurgeirsson suggested a way to fight against the flowing red rock--initiating an all-out endeavor unique in human history. On the big island of Hawaii, one of the world's two must eruptive hot spots, people are not unmindful of the Icelandic example. McPhee went to Hawaii to talk with them and to walk beside the edges of a molten lake and incandescent rivers.

Some of the more expensive real estate in Los Angeles is up against mountains that are rising and disintegrating as rapidly as any in the world. After a complex coincidence of natural events, boulders will flow out of these mountains like fish eggs, mixed with mud, sand, and smaller rocks in a cascading mass known as debris flow. Plucking up trees and cars, bursting through doors and windows, filling up houses to their eaves, debris flows threaten the lives of people living in and near Los Angeles' famous canyons. At extraordinary expense the city has built a hundred and fifty stadium-like basins in a daring effort to catch the debris.

Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strategies and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking in his vivid depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those who would attempt to wrest control from her--stubborn, often ingenious, and always arresting characters.

ISBN-13: 9780091745387
ISBN-10: 0091745381
Publication Date: 9/6/1990
Pages: 272
Rating:

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Publisher: Trafalgar Square
Book Type: Hardcover
Other Versions: Paperback, Audio Cassette
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Wade R. reviewed Control of Nature on 7/5/2006 + 91 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 2

John McPhee is a great writer, and here captures human hubris, governmental ego and overspending, in the face of resolute nature.
Especially relevant is the section on the Corp of Engineers and work on the Mississippi river, in light of hurricane Katrina.

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John O. (buzzby) - , reviewed Control of Nature on 6/29/2014 + 6062 more book reviews

Apparently, all 3 parts of this book were articles in the New Yorker. I've alwasys enjoyed his writings on science, this one includes a look at the San Gabriel mountains near where I live, which is good, since I still haven't forgiven him for short-shrifting Southern California in "Assembling California." I get the impression he didn't find the San Gabriel mountains very interesting.

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J.T. P. (JTP) reviewed Control of Nature on 7/14/2008 + 8 more book reviews

Recommend this author highly. He is one of the best non-fiction writers of all time and this is one of his best.

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Elizabeth E. reviewed Control of Nature on 12/11/2005 + 41 more book reviews

McPhee is an excellent communicator and naturalist...this is another accomplishment of his.

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John O. (buzzby) - , reviewed Control of Nature on 6/29/2014 + 6062 more book reviews

Three New Yorker-length articles (that's where they were first published) on the Atchafalaya River in Louisiana, Iceland's Heimay volcano, and the San Gabriel Mountains. His books are crying out for maps, but for some reason, he doesn't add any photos or maps (some drawings of Icelandic houses, which seem very tangential to the main story), fortunately, we live in the age of Googleearth, so I was able to find most (but not all) places he mentioned.

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