The Control of Nature

John McPhee

Apr 2011 · Sold by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

About this ebook

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 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.

Ratings and reviews

As the 70's Chiffon commercial goes, "It's not good to fool Mother Nature"! John McPhee, award winning author of over 30 nonfiction works and contributing author to The New Yorker since 1963, would likely agree. His 1989 book, The Control of Nature is a series of three essays, each examining one example of humankind's ambitious endeavors to control Mother Nature. McPhee opens with his essay entitled Atchafalaya, in which he examines the efforts to control the flow of the Mississippi. He goes on and depicts a heated battle between some Icelanders and devastating flows of lava in his second essay appropriately titled Cooling the Lava. He concludes with his essay called Los Angeles Against the Mountains, which, as some may have cleverly deduced from the title, is about the ongoing efforts to preserve Los Angeles from the shifting the Santa Gabriel mountains. There is no question that McPhee is a master story teller and is capable of conveying complex material in a way that an average person can understand. However, some readers may find McPhee's organizational strategy confusing. Each of the three broad essays is cut into segments. He uses these divisions as transitions between different stories, therefore the content of one section may seem completely unrelated to the one that followed. Oftentimes he will jump around to different places and different periods of time. He did so to analyze a situation from multiple perspectives allowing the reader to see the events that caused the dilemma to develop, how it affected different regions, and what new problems have developed once the original one was resolved. While they do make it hard to follow at times and does slightly impact its readability, his many different anecdotes did serve the important purpose of adding depth to his point. Overall the benefits of his choice largely outweigh the costs. Although the topic of the first essay is indeed the threat of the Mississippi changing course, the purpose of the essays as a whole is not to merely recount the tale but to use it as a tool to teach the world a lesson. Rather than tell people that there are dangers to living on this planet, something most people already know, he chooses to warn the world of the unforeseen consequences of our actions. As seen throughout his book, just as people thought the primary concern had been addressed, a whole slew of other factors that were once overshadowed came into play. Some outcomes can be predicted but many, usually the negative ones, arrive unexpectedly or worse, go unnoticed. Having written these remarkable works many years after these problems were discovered and dealt with, McPhee attempts to remind the public that while it seems Mother Nature may have gone down this round, this is no time for complacency, because she is nowhere near being out for the count. And furthermore, it brings us to ask the question: Is it in humanity's best interest to ultimately win? Like a child poking an anthill, humans seem to have had no idea of the vastness that lay beneath the tiny earthly mound to which we devoted all of our attention. So, perhaps McPhee's central point was not the about the conflict itself between man and nature, but rather the underlying effects humans have that exacerbate the conflict. This period of mass global warming are perfect examples of how human actions such as carbon dioxide emissions, pollution and habitat destruction can have devastating consequences and shows that even in times of peace, McPhee's argument still holds true.

The stories were mildly interesting but the wiring was insufferable. Way too many forced metaphors and cheesy one liners. I would have rather read the Wikipedia entries for these events.

About the author

John McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and was educated at Princeton University and Cambridge University. His writing career began at Time magazine and led to his long association with The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1965. Also in 1965, he published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are, with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in the years since, he has written nearly 30 books, including Oranges (1967), Coming into the Country (1977), The Founding Fish (2002), Uncommon Carriers (2007), and Silk Parachute (2011). Encounters with the Archdruid (1972) and The Curve of Binding Energy (1974) were nominated for National Book Awards in the category of science. McPhee received the Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977. In 1999, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.