"Whenever you try to control nature, you've got one strike against you." pg. 13
This book tells 3 informative true stories of man's attempts to control nature. The Mississippi River, a massive lava flow in Iceland, and the incredibly powerful debris flows of the San Gabriel Mountains.
The first story describes in vivid detail attempts to control the Mississippi River from taking a new course... Atchafalaya. If the river takes this new route, say goodbye to New Orleans, B.F. Goodrich, E.I. du Pont, Uniroyal, Monsanto, Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, Shell and Union Carbide just to name a few. Four major floods in 10 years and 32 disastrous crevasses in a single spring weren't enough to suggest to the Army Corps of Engineers that levees alone might never be able to handle the job of controlling the river!
The second true story involves Heimay, a volcano that dumped enough lava in 1973 alone that would have been enough to envelop New York's entire financial district, with only the tops of the World Trade Center towers sticking out like ski huts! Will pumping 11,500,000 gallons of sea water a day on the flow be enough to save the harbor from being closed off? Find out! Also find out what I mean when I say McPhee decided to "pissa a hraunid"! :) The ending to this story will surprise you in more way than one!
The last story involves the mighty San Gabriel Mountains, with average slopes of 65-70% grade, climbing faster than almost any mountain chain in the world, and dumping 7 tons of regolith each year, that threaten Angelinos (L.A.)! Drought, fire, and flood; The real seasons in Los Angeles, and instead of the occasional storm, we get the occasional Earthquake! Will more than 2,000 miles of underground conduits, concrete-lined open stream channels, and an army of debris basins be enough to stop the beast? If it does it does it at the expense of the beaches! If it doesn't?... It does it at the expense of the beaches anyway! Find out why in this great book!
You'll learn of lot of interesting facts while at the same time get a great story of the battle of all battles! Man against nature!
Only problems with the book: There is no such animal as a mudslide. Mud flows! And Earth is not spelled with a lower case and it isn't "the Earth", its just Earth. You don't say "the Mars" or "the Jupiter", so why say "the Earth"?! My worthless pet peeves... :)

3 stories of human attempts to tame the forces of nature as we build our towns and cities in volatile geologic zones. humans survive and thrive in louisiana parishes with certain floods as the mississippi morphs with the atchafalaya. humans fight lava floes from icelandic volcanoes with cool water and see their geography completely altered within weeks. and stubborn los angelenos keep putting houses up in regular paths of destruction, suing cities when those houses are engulfed in debris flows.

"Atchafalaya. The word will now come to mind more or less in echo of 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."

Reading a book in the year 2020 that was authored in 1989 on the topic of natural disasters is quite interesting. I had little context and certainly zero life experience regarding the three scenarios McPhee discusses in his book. Reading the exciting tails of man against nature generated a sense of drama, one that continued after completing the book because there were still an additional 30+ years that had since been added on to the story. It was fascinating to read about the Mississippi river, for example, and find that since 1973 there had been major floods in 2011 and 2019 to again test the strength of the Old River Control structure. If only I had read this book a year earlier I could have had a deeper appreciate for the March 2019 flooding!

The stories McPhee tells are extremely interesting and cover topics that I would not have otherwise been aware of. I'm grateful that I now have a deeper appreciation for the flow of the Mississippi, the plight of a sinking New Orleans, and the folly of buying a home in sediment flow prone portions of California. McPhee tells the stories in a compelling way with an artful and pleasing pace. He gathers the perspectives of many relevant people to help develop the story from many different angles. I feel enriched for reading the book.

My only complaint is that occasionally the writing was too artful and required me to re-read several portions to ensure I properly understood the meeting. This arrested my progress like millions of gallons of water falling on a lava flow. One example that tripped me up:

"The fate of the project had depended on the low sill, and it was what people meant when, as they often did, they simply said "the structure."

McPhee also has a tendency to liberally use dashes (-) where commas might be more appropriate. Minor complaint though when you also get ironic gems like below, describing a church that tried to sue the city for not sufficiently protecting their property from a predictable land slide.

"The First English Evangelical Lutherans sued the Los Angeles County Flood Control District for twenty million dollars. The judge threw the case out of court - followed, moments later, by the collection plate. Since the act in question was God's, the defendant might as well have been the plaintiff, and the Plaintiff the target of the suit"

From time to time all hell will break forth from the mountains. To the question “Why, then, do people live there?” the answer seems to be that... they would rather defy nature than live without it.

This is a very interesting book that looks at three different locations where people have tried to “control nature” and live where history and perhaps common sense says they probably shouldn't:

— The Mississippi River has an enormous flood plain. People have been building levees for at least a couple of centuries, but that has the unintended effect of just sending more water to those who live further downriver. The Army Corps of Engineers built and maintains a river control structure that particularly protects those living in the Atchafalaya and New Orleans area, and keeps the end of the river from moving to another place.
Atchafalaya. The word will now come to mind more or less in echo of 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... I put [a green-and-white sticker that said “ATCHAFALAYA”] in a window of my car. It has been there for many years, causing drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike to veer in close and crowd my lane while staring at a word that signifies collision.

— When the ground split open and started spewing red-hot lava into the sky above Heimaey, the largest island of Vestmannaeyjar in Iceland, some were more worried about protecting the harbor than the homes. When the lava flow started getting close, they began spraying water on it in an attempt to halt it in its tracks. But the lava had to go somewhere.
Even in something as primal as a volcanic eruption, the component of human interference could apparently enter the narrative and, in complex and unpredictable geometries, alter the shape of succeeding events. After the human contribution passed a level higher than trifling, the evolution of the new landscape could in no pure sense be natural. The event had lost its status as a simple act of God. In making war with nature, there was risk of loss in winning.

— The San Gabriel Mountains on the east side of Los Angeles are some of the steepest in the world due to plate tectonics. But in addition to earthquakes, the residents have to deal with fires and floods. And not just floods of water, but debris flows full of boulders, some larger than cars.
“It’s a fantastic place to be in a storm. You hear a sound like giant castanets—boulders clicking together. They’re not pebbles. And there is a scent, which is absolutely heavenly, of the crushed chaparral plants. It’s so fragrant and beautiful it’s eerie to have it associated with something so terrifying. And, God knows, it is terrifying.”

Although the book is a bit dated (first published in 1989), it's still a very interesting read. John McPhee has a clever way with words and it's kind of a pleasure to read, but he's also rather long-winded and frequently sarcastic. He often seems to disparage people for living in such places, even using the word "dingbats" in a couple of odd places. But he also seems to recognize the beauty of these locations. Overall, the book was an enjoyable read and fascinating to consider the power of nature, especially in the face of our hubris to try to modify and control it. However, throughout the book, I couldn't help but think of a quote from Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders of quantum theory, who reminds us that we are part of nature, too:

“In classical physics, science started from the belief—or should one say, from the illusion?—that we could describe the world, or at least parts of the world, without any reference to ourselves.”

Debris Flows

In the beginning of the Bible, God told the first people to take dominion of the Earth, and we've been doing a bad job of it ever since. In this book, John McPhee describes three instances of human action against natural forces, instances where the complicated web of unintended consequences at times seems to overwhelm the ostensible goals of the projects. In "Atchafalaya" McPhee details the attempt to prevent the Mississippi river from creating a new route to the sea; although the effort is heroic, the prospect of failure is almost certain. "Cooling the Lava" is an account of the Icelandic town of Heimay, and the citizen's battle with a flow of lava; this time, the people seem to have come out of the fight victorious. "Los Angeles Against the Mountains" describes the most audacious of all these attempts at subduing nature; we are told of the fight against the ever-rising San Gabriel mountains and Los Angales' unwillingness to idly let plate tectonics take its course.

McPhee never passes judgement on the actions of people described in this book; he merely presents an account of what happened. But there is a deep sense that humanity is overmatched. Will we ever learn to sit by and let nature have its way? If we did so, would that be an abandoning of our mandate to "take dominion"?

This is one of my favorite works by John McPhee. It precedes his series on North American earth sciences by a few years, but deals with some of the same themes. It is typical of his style, in that he tries to understand a science or field of study by getting to know people who are practicioners in said field. His books become just as much about them as their work.

the Control of Nature is a meditation on the efforts of man to control and manipulate his environment on a grand scale. These monumental works of man dot the globe, but his book deals with three case studies: The San Gabriel Mountains in Los Angeles, the Mississippi River, and Iceleand's efforts to redirect lava.

I think I have read this book 5 times. I keep going back to it. It gives me a bit of sense of human huburus, ingenuity, and our relationship with our poorly-understood planet.

Ironically named book that recounts three episodes where humans have tried to resist the mighty forces of nature:

1. It's a natural phenomenon for a river to change course. Natural or man-made obstructions come and go, but the water still has to get from here to there. About every 1000 years, the mouth (outlet) of the Mississippi River changes course. Silt builds up and begins to slow the flow into the Gulf. A slower flow deposits more sediment, and the process accelerates. Eventually, the water finds a steeper path to the gulf, and the river's course changes.

Around 1950, scientists realized that the Mississippi was getting ready to relocate a few hundred miles west. That would have left New Orleans without a port or drinking water. Ditto Baton Rouge. The Army Corps of Engineers was directed to make sure that didn't happen. They have succeeded (for now) but with an unending comedy of fixes to fixes to fixes. For example, they might build a three foot levy to prevent flooding. But the former flood plain, denied water and sediment, subsides. So the levy now has to be six feet or nine feet to keep the river in its banks. That it does, but... unintended consequences follow.

2. A volcano in Iceland erupted. The lava flow threatened to fill in Iceland's only southern port. Civil defense authorities fought the lava flow by pouring millions of gallons of water on the leading edge of the lava. The idea was to cool it enough to harden and form a dam, stopping the lava from overflowing the port. Did it work? Well, there's still a port there. But the town got wiped out by the redirected lava.

3. The San Gabriel mountains in southern California are having a growth spurt. They are thrusting up at a lightning pace, at least in geologic terms. Boulders become exposed to the elements and gravity. Periodic wild fires turn the mountainsides into playground slides. When a heavy rain comes, debris flows (like wet cement spiced with Volkswagen-sized boulders) slide down the hills and invite themselves into the homes at the bottom of the mountains. Engineers design basins and drainage canals to catch the debris flows, but they need to be emptied continuously, and where do you put this stuff?

The author has a dry sense of humor and resists the urge to be snarky. His point is clear: If it's human ingenuity against nature, put your money on nature.

If you asked me a week ago, or before I read this book, if I thought this would be a five star book I would have thought you were crazy. Her? This book? I would have probably told you I might never even read this book and that it made me bored to just read the copy on the back. And I can't even tell you why I started to read this. I was just sitting around my apartment, reading n  Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible!n, and I had about thirty pages left and I got restless and it was still light out, actually it was about 7 pm, and it's summer so that meant I still had an hour or so of light, and it was nicer outside than it was in my stuffy apartment so I decided to go outside and read, but I got afraid that I'd zip through the not-so-hilarious re-tellings of bible stories and after standing in the middle of my apartment looking in every direction trying to figure out which book to read next, I just grabbed this one, I don't know why, partly because it was on one of my little cardboard shelves and it was easy to see from where I was standing and I thought I'm not going to care too much about this, I'll be able to give it away when I'm done! And it's only 272 pages long, with sort of big print! Let's go read  about the control of nature.

But I was so young and foolish and stupid then, a week ago, last Sunday.

This book is so good!

I can't do any justice to the book by trying to explain what it is about.

If you goto this edition of the book you can read a fairly good description of what the book is about: here!

The easy response to just about any of the three stories that make up the basis for these essays (Man Versus The Mississippi River and it's natural inclination to 'move' to a more efficient route to the Gulf of Mexico and it's propensity to flood places like New Orleans, which is just asking for it; Man Versus slow moving lava and mountain (a fucking mountain, a moving fucking mountain on lava. And not an existing mountain, but a new mountain that didn't already exist, how awesome / twisted / mind bending is that? A big fissure opens in the ground, lava starts seeping out, big fire shit shoots into the sky some other geological stuff happens and from the side of a mountain comes another mountain that is moving and some guys with water pumps are trying to stop it) that are threatening to destroy a harbor on an Icelandic Island; and Man Versus millions of tons of rocks and boulders that come sliding off of mountains on the edge of Los Angeles when the conditions are right and destroy everything in their path), as I was saying, the easy response to these is 'well that's what you get for building / living there. But of course, like just about everything in life, when you start to find out more about the situation the easy response isn't so easy. Yeah, people don't need to have million dollar homes on the edge of mountains just waiting for the right combination of wildfire debris, big rains and loose ground from the very active mountains that are still in the process of rising to send rock slides, which can easily pull an automobile along with it, heading towards the expensive homes (and then these people, have the gall to try to sue for property damage they suffer, and sometimes apparently they even win (but sometimes rationality prevails and they don't and they are told, well you knew the risks)), but what do you do now that they are living there? And that they are living there and they are quite possibly extremely litigious? And then what do you think of the situation when you find out it's not just rich idiots living in those homes, but also pretty much the entire geology department of Cal Tech lives in this danger zone, the people who study what is going on here, and who know all of the dangers better than probably anyone else in the world, and they chose to live there. Can you imagine how great the area must be to knowingly risk having your home wiped out in seconds by raging rocks?

My favorite part of the book was the Volcano essay that made up the center of the book. It was just amazing, and it didn't even need to rely on some of the silliness that Americans provide with their 'I'm going to sue you!' mentality that the very excellent "Los Angeles Against the Mountains" essay had going on it (it was very very good besides some of the silly stories). I don't know who is reading this right now, but you should read this essay, it's called "Cooling the Lava" and I can't put into words how great I thought it was. I'm sort of a bit in love with volcanos after reading it. I'll even cut this review short so that you can go find a copy of this book, or the essay and read it, and hopefully you wont think I steered you too wrong.

The rest of this review would have just been gushing about how much I loved the book, or me saying something like "why are people in Los Angeles so dumb?!?", now go away and read the essay.

There was about a 6-week break in the reading time. I had to return it to the library on 9/7/21, then I checked it out again in late October. This was a book club book, and it was tough. First, it's "old," written in the 80s. Second, the writing was sometimes dense and sometimes tangential. I was never quite certain if he was trying to pick a side or was simply reporting.
There are only three essays but, again, sometimes dense, though I found the subjects to be very interesting. The whole point of the book is to provide these three examples where humans are trying to control nature: the Mississippi River, volcanic eruptions, and mountain debris flows.
The river one had me repeatedly whispering 'hubris' to myself. The volcano one actually had it in print, and the mountain one, which was about LA where I live, felt the same. We (humans) spend millions and millions of dollars to 'tame' a natural force that inevitably breaks out of whatever container we've created for it, thus costing millions and millions more dollars to clean it up and then build a new container. There are commissions and committees and scientists and regular people and politicians involved at almost every level. It made me shake my head a lot, especially when I realized how much worse it's probably gotten since he wrote the book. Still, I got a decent poem written inspired by the volcano essay.

Love Love Love this book. All three parts. Inspiring stories of ingenious people doing ultimately sad and terrible things to control their powerful natural terrains in order to continue living there. John McPhee's congenial journalistic style and dry clever sense of humour make this book the sort you want to pass around to the naturalists in your life (if they haven't already passed it to you.)

A book of yesteryear's, it carries extra weight today. While future historians have the advantage over current affairs, eerily I found this book on ecology/environment control was more insightful and objective. Two of the three cases discussed in the book (Mississippi delta flood control and Los Angeles mountain "debris") are ever more present. Can we control it? I feel that's the wrong question though. Can we mitigate and adapt to it, absolutely yes.