“We told them the story of fire and rain.
We said, If heavy rain starts, you've got fifteen to thirty minutes to get out.” Norouzi told them they were so heavily threatened that no amount of sandbags, barricades, or deflection walls was ever going to help them.
"There is nothing you can build that will protect you."

John McPhee's "The Control of Nature" is a masterful exploration of humanity's relentless struggle against the formidable forces of nature. This compelling work presents three vividly detailed vignettes, each chronicling a different battle between human ingenuity and geological might. McPhee's journalistic skill is evident with his ability to weave together a rich tapestry of perspectives, balancing the voices of everyday citizens living against these forces of nature alongside the insights of various experts dedicated to understanding and mitigating these geological threats. This diverse range of viewpoints that McPhee was able to find is rather impressive, providing readers with a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of each situation. The writing is, of course, in the classic John McPhee style: compelling and complex, but never feeling long-winded or unnecessarily verbose. Each paragraph introduces a new facet of the story or a fresh perspective, giving as much or as little space as needed to faithfully present the idea. I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys non-fiction essays or wants to understand any of the three topics they cover.

Really lovely writing, and a style of nonfiction that makes it feel more novel than essay. A little random and unstructured and it's probably not for me but really really solid nonetheless. Somehow, found the lava and debris flow sections soo interesting and the mississippi section a terrible drag. Who knows why!

Great writing as usual by John McPhee. I got a little bogged down in the middle with the Icelandic names and lava issues, but the strong characters in the other two chapters bring the book’s theme out vividly. And troublingly.

McPhee is careful not to imagine that control of nature is ever complete. The first chapter, written in the 80s about the levees and locks north of New Orleans, has the memory of Katrina looming over it. The last chapter—on the landslides, floods, and fires in the mountains around Los Angeles—was particularly disturbing today.

Blah blah blah man’s hubris truly knows no bounds blah blah blah we are a doomed race blah blah blah

4.2/5

There are three extended essays herein about disparate places where humans insist on settling, sometimes - oftentimes - just for the view; but the land has a different idea. Man and his abode face disaster in these stories. Man could move, of course; and some do. But others try to control nature. As if. One real river pilot - meaning not Mark Twain - is quoted here: Mother Nature is patient. . . . Mother Nature has more time than we do.

I knew, of course, that the Mississippi floods, that volcanoes bubble, and that Los Angeles has random fires and mudslides. Yet I didn't know the science of it. As he always does, John McPhee here blends history, science, biography, anecdote and the occasional personal intrusion to explain it all. Man versus Nature. Who will win?


n  Atchafalayan

People settled in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. They became thriving cities and important ports well before it became apparent there was a problem. The Atchafalaya (rhymes with jambalaya) runs roughly parallel to the Mississippi. It just lies there quiet and smooth. It lies there like a big alligator in a low slough, with time on its side, waiting--waiting to outwit the Corps of Engineers--and hunkering down ever lower in its bed and presenting a sort of maw to the Mississippi, into which the river could fall.

It is the Atchafalaya's raison d'être to capture the Mississippi. And it would, maybe already would have, if Nature was allowed to run its course. The Mississippi "is just itching to go that way," Congress was told in 1928. And if it did, well, New Orleans and Baton Rouge would be underwater and the Saints would be playing home football games about 150 miles to the west.

So they built levees, and then ever higher and higher levees. But the Atchafalaya is not going away, nor is its seeming purpose. Stay tuned.

One of the reasons I read McPhee is for his humor, which can sneak up on you. In referencing The War of 1812, McPhee begins a sentence: When that unusual year was in its thirty-sixth month . . .


n  Cooling the Lavan

I said above that sometimes people settle in a place for the view and you can see why folks are reluctant to leave Vestmannaeyjar, a town and archipelago off the south coast of Iceland:



Until, of course, this happens:



Iceland, I learned, is volcanic, a hot spot. Or, as McPhee writes: Iceland is the geologic chocolate shop of this minor planet.

But there's that view. So some people left, but others came back.

A lot of this section is about how Iceland tries to control the lava flow, shooting streams of water at it that works, sort of. It worked well enough that other countries brought the Icelanders in to see if they could help.

They couldn't help in Hawaii. There McPhee went, took the obligatory visits to Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. Then he went to Kilauea and, after appropriate waivers, climbed to the top. McPhee wrote: Kilauea since 1983 has not been quiet for fifteen minutes.

I read the section on Kilauea, paused for a sip of red wine since it was handy, and heard my cellphone buzz with an alert: Kilauea had just erupted. My reading life gets spookier and spookier.

Anyhow, I also read McPhee because he just writes with a wide-angle lens. Speaking of Mauna Loa:

The long mountain is fifty miles long. Viewed from the edge of the ocean, it is an astonishing trompe-l'oeil, because it is so smoothly constructed that it appears in two dimensions and presents a deceptive depth of field. It looks like a low friendly hill, a singing dune, at worst a bald Scottish brae. You think, I'll run up there and have a look around before lunch. The long mountain is as high as the Alps. If it were dissected by streams--given promontories and reentrants, serrated by canyons, invaded by shadows--it might look something like the Alps. As is, it's just a massive shield, composed of chilled magma, looking the way the Alps would look if a dentist could repair them.


n  Los Angeles Against the Mountainsn

Fires and mudslides in Los Angeles are widely reported on (Oprah's house being front page news), but I never knew the particulars of why they happened. It turns out there are many factors, not excluding human foible.

Los Angeles sprawls. On one side is the Pacific Ocean, and on the other side is the San Gabriel Mountains. On these particular mountains is chaparral which will burn in large swaths. Humans are often the culprit. But when chaparral is consumed by fire it makes the ground essentially waterproof. Then it's a matter of waiting for the winter rains. Boulders come loose, join with mud, and trees and cars and parts of buildings in the way. It's not just the water. It's massive debris, filling swimming pools, garages and houses, and really spoiling the view.

This is a story of debris basins and other human attempts to stop the mountains. Because the people won't move. There's the view, and the celebrities, the money, and sometimes the seeming privacy. As one resident said, "If it gets where I can't pee off my front porch, I'll move."

Oh, and another reason I read McPhee is that he will not say smog. No. Instead he writes this:

The ascending effluents of the smelters, refineries, mills, and factories added a great burden to the marine fog layer--made heavier still as the work force moved about in cars. To describe this ochre cumulus, the world's shortest portmanteau word, which had been coined around 1905, was borrowed from London.

The events and technologies discussed in the book are dated, but the theme is not—humankind's need to control titanic natural forces. Is it ingenuity or hubris? In the early part of the twenty-first century humans face the certainty of it's greatest natural challenge as the planet warms. Will our attempts to control it look as futile as stopping the Mississippi from choosing its own course, stopping the flow of lava, or the sisyphusian folly of stopping gravity?

Human efforts to control nature are often unsuccessful, such as the Atchafalaya stealing water from the Mississippi, or the immense erosion of the San Gabriel Mountains. The efforts to cool lava on Heimaey (an island off the coast of Iceland) worked, and the harbor was not only saved, but improved. The population of Heimaey changed greatly, as some people left for good, and others decided to move in. These efforts tend to be very expensive, and many times hidden from public scrutiny.

This book is about people living in places where nature is in a state of constant change, and the extraordinary lengths they go to try to control the ultimately uncontrollable forces. It would be funny if it was fiction. A sheriff survives the inundation of his neighborhood by a massive debris slug only because it tosses him into the back of a pickup truck being carried along in the mud and boulders along with parts of houses. The absurdity of many of the eco-meets-ego situations reaches the Carl Hiaasen level, except these stories don’t take place in Florida. And they are real.
Written in 1989, Control of Nature analyzes the economic, social and geological forces behind three man-vs.-nature struggles: the attempt to force the Mississippi River to behave in the way that permanently settled human communities want it to, and not to change course when it naturally would have done so; the fight to cool a lava flow in Iceland and save a fishing harbor; and the most absurd of all somehow, Los Angeles Against the Mountains, the persistence of people living in the eroding and also rising San Gabriels, where the combination of tectonic forces lifting the mountains and erosion and fire on their slopes leads to a constant flow of rocks toward LA. Big ones. Tons of them.
The most depressing section was about the Mississippi. Hurricane Katrina made it all too clear how vulnerable people are when they live in places where only many man-made interventions have enabled them to be there—where it would be an entirely different ecosystem and landscape if left alone.
As we know from the story of post-Katrina New Orleans, some people go back, though lot of people didn’t. On the island in Iceland where the volcano erupted, a lot of people didn’t go back, either, but many did. McPhee does a good job of getting the points of view of the people who choose the risk. Some people have no choice—they were born in a threatened place and don’t have the means to move, but others build or buy expensive homes on the slopes of unstable mountains. He finds experts on the geology of the San Gabriels who consciously live right in the path of potential debris flows, as well as real estate agents who blithely talk their way around the risk, reassuring potential buyers more than they ought to be reassured. McPhee’s interest in the human beings involved as well as the earth makes him a great story-teller. A little distractible, a little inclined to collect as many anecdotes as possible, but never dull. He can make alarming and complex scientific material readable without making it any less alarming. The issues are not old. I did a little research before writing this review. People studying the Old River Control structure where the Atchafalaya is being—for now—prevented from capturing the Mississippi still say McPhee’s article that was the basis for this book is the best thing ever written on the topic. Debris flows are still endangering California towns. People still live where nature could cover them up with water, lava or rocks on short notice, and they love those places or need them economically. Taxes pay for the structures that make it possible for them to be there, and for the recovery when disaster strikes. Decide what you think about that, after you read this book.

This book was a mixed bag. On one hand, the three different stories of humans trying to overcome forces of nature were fascinating. On the other, I had a tough time getting through the book.
The variety of first hand accounts and historical documents made the"natural disasters" all the more prescient; but, at times the writing felt choppy or disjointed.

McPhee's ability to bring to life these often complex and confusing subjects is truly inspiring. Each essay discusses a different attempt to control nature (attempts that seem either insane or poorly thought out, at best) and his ability to connect humanity with these often complex ideas (and his way with a sly joke) make them compulsively readable.

Written decades ago, but still so fascinating and informative. Highly recommend for anyone who's ever been fascinated by where people live and their relationship to mother nature and in particularly her dangers. I learned so much about the Mississippi, Iceland, and even the Los Angeles mountains which are so close to me. I look forward to visiting all the places in this book and getting a better understanding of the infrastructure and their histories.
A wonderful history lesson that was an enjoyable read.