Outstanding vintage information and assessments. Top notch explanations of complex and never ending attempts (3 different scenarios) to fool Mother Nature.

This was a 5 star for the complicated science of delta and river system silt constructions, for me. Knowing the area and the reality, I never truly understood major aspects of the Mississippi River and its lower reaches particularly. I do now.

All 3 posits of peoples' will over reality dire physical positions in nature from engineering to the composites of fall out in the land masses themselves are excellent. (City building on deltas with changing tributary accesses and silt build ups to water flow % of the entire system, volcanic hot spots of earth spheres, mountainside "view" buildings on ranges facing a salt sea; those 3 exact posits and the engineering "used" answers here. SO far!)

It only lost a star on the intense engineering particulars and past name drops to all their uses, as this can get quite dry after so many pages. But their names should be far more well known than they are.

It will be a losing battle. Nature has far more time on the job.

John McPhee’s “The Control of Nature” explores man’s efforts to tame the natural world and the inherent complications that such endeavors entail. The author takes the reader to the lower Mississippi River and its distributary, the Atchafalaya; Iceland, where Eldfell’s volcanic cone on the east side of Heimaey erupted in January 1973; and various attempts to protect the Los Angeles metropolitan area from debris slides.

McPhee’s journalistic approach is sometimes engaging, but frequently becomes painfully discursive. The narrative competently discusses the scientific issues at play; however, his interviews with locals tend toward banality. McPhee notes Mark Twain’s prescient observation with regard to the Mississippi, that ”ten thousand River Commissions…cannot tame that lawless stream…cannot say to it ‘Go here,’ or ‘Go there,’ and make it obey…” Yet the author finds it obligatory to quote a multitude of observers to help confirm Twain’s commonsense discernment.

Technology has given man powerful tools with which to alter nature; technology has also increased man’s propensity for hubris. As Avi Loeb remarked, “Science is a dialogue with nature, it's not a monologue,” an obvious, but oft forgotten truism. McPhee quite rightly records that despite our best efforts, nature has all the time in the world at its disposal, and patience will out in the end. To this end, the essays contained herein might have a corrective or a cautionary effect on those that believe that man is responsible for nearly all natural phenomena, or that man can somehow refashion nature to his will.

I’ve read this before. I wanted to re-read his essay about Los Angeles’ mudslide control after driving around in the foothills above my mom’s house with my husband. We passed many concrete basins meant to contain debris slides, and I'd tell him those were for WHEN – NOT IF – the winter rains bring mudslides. My mom’s in no danger, way down in the valley, but yikes, I wouldn’t want to live in one of those canyons. Also essays about Mississippi flood control and volcanoes in Iceland. Anyway, it’s great.

This book is an essential text for anyone grappling with the unbearable cost of our current attitudes towards engineering our way out of climate crisis. Each of the three chapter/essays are spectacular writing, with that McPhee brand of human characters set against a wild, unruly, yet majestic natural landscape. I found "Los Angeles Against the Mountains" to be particularly instructional when working with students and advocates, but "Atchafalaya" really take the cake. Like much of McPhee's writing, you will question how long/short a human life span truly is on this blue planet.

this was my first read by John McPhee. i really liked it, my boyfriend’s aunt says McPhee writes like a “longform New Yorker article”, which i couldn’t agree with more. a really good and intriguing read, felt like something i should’ve read in college at some point. very fact heavy and pretty dense, but overall enjoyed it and excited to get into some of his other books!

I'm one of apparently few people who do not care for this author's writing style. At times I had to just close the book and walk away when confronted by sentences that left me in a grammatical quandry.

That said, as I have family that live at the foot of the San Gabriel mountains, it was educational to read of the fire/flood/debris flow cycle. It was also enlightening to read of the battles being fought along the Mississippi to keep it in its present channel despite nature's attempts to change.

Exactly the kind of book I would like and I really liked it :)

Los Angeles Against the Mountains: Pulitzer Prize winning author John McPhee writes with a style informed by the journalist he was and the sciences he has explored for decades. When you read a piece he has written, you hear honest echoes of the people and places and concepts he explores.

I just re-read a favorite McPhee essay, Los Angeles Against the Mountains from this three-essay collection. Perhaps because when I first read it I was living near the "over-steepened slopes" of the San Gabriel Mountains, I remember a distinct frisson upon learning about their tendency to spawn killer debris flows, a little-advertised regional problem.

The San Gabriels, in their state of tectonic youth, are rising as rapidly as any range on earth. Their loose inimical slopes flout the tolerance of the angle of repose. Rising straight up out of the megalopolis, they stand ten thousand feet above the nearby sea, and they are not kidding with this city.

The source material for such a multi-ton flow builds up over decades, but needs a specific set of triggering conditions to mobilize it. It might take additional years for such conditions to be met—which makes this a genuine problem in a place where even last week is ancient history. Without realizing the danger, developers, realtors, home buyers, and other newcomers to the area are often led to occupy hazardous properties.

People have been buried alive in their beds. But such cases are infrequent. Debris flows generally are much less destructive of life than of property. People get out of the way.

The good news, as they say, is that 30, even 50, years may go by without a killer debris flow.

The bad news is that when it does come, you can't outrun it. And everything it sweeps past (or over) is plucked up and added to the tonnage of the flow: cars, refrigerators, garden sheds, iron gates. Los Angeles has tried to control these flows by trenching debris basins above the built-up areas. Emptying them periodically—theoretically, anyway—serves to trap future flows before they can sweep through residential areas and businesses.

A private operator has set up a sand-and-gravel quarry in the reservoir. Almost exactly, he takes out what the mountains put in.

And it would work, too, except that people keep building new houses above the elevation of the basins, along picturesque creeks below the mountain skyline.

Right in the path of the next debris flow.


Atchafalaya: When Hurricane Katrina was still just a Weather Channel threat predicted to strike the historic city of New Orleans, and orders for evacuating the city were still days in the future, my thoughts turned to an already-stressed structure located several hundred miles upstream of New Orleans at the distributary channel of the Atchafalaya with the Mississippi River.

The Old River Control structure was built over fifty years ago (forty-plus years before Hurricane Katrina) by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to prevent Mississippi drainage from switching to the steeper Atchafalaya channel.

Geologically, the Mississippi River has switched channels many times to build the Mississippi delta. Today, a channel change would mean stranding the port economy of New Orleans, leaving farmers and industries along the lower reaches of the Mississippi without the water they need. The expensive levee system erected along the Mississippi (extensively rebuilt following Katrina) would no longer be needed, while a new levee system would have to be built on the Atchafalaya.

In addition, the Atchafalaya River could not accept the Mississippi flow without massive flooding of the basin's bayous, necessitating extensive relocations, and causing upheaval of the social and economic patterns of the area. Since the completion of Old River Control in 1963, therefore, the Corps of Engineers has striven to prevent the river from jumping channels.

But the water will not be denied forever.

Since 1963, the coastal salt marshes, an important buffer for New Orleans against Gulf hurricanes, have diminished as the basin subsided. The Mississippi River continues to raise its bed in a natural process of stream-bed deposition, even as the surrounding ground sinks lower. The result is a city not only mostly below sea level, but also well below river level. Only the levees (whose bases have also been sinking) prevent the Mississippi from overrunning its banks and flooding the streets, even in the driest season.

Also since 1963, the Mississippi has experienced several devastating floods. During the high waters of the Flood of 1973, water undercut the Old River Control structure and nearly swept away an entire sidewall. Rather than lose the control structure, the Corps let the water run through into the Atchafalaya basin, restoring the 70% flow to the lower Mississippi River only after the flood waters subsided. The record-breaking flood of 1993, even though its effects were mostly felt along the upper reaches of the river, also required the control to be let run, which further undercut the structure.

Breaches of the levee structure in New Orleans during Katrina in 2005 did extensive damage to property, but this very flooding may have saved the city — for the time being — from the disaster of the river switching channels.

In John McPhee's marvelous essay, "Atchafalaya," published in his book n  The Control of Naturen, McPhee relates the first-hand account of the damage taken by the control structure in 1973.

When Dugie himself went to look at the guide wall, he looked at it for the last time. "It was dipping into the river, into the inflow channel." Slowly it dipped, sank, broke. The foundations were gone. There was nothing below it but water. Professor Kazmann likes to say that this was when the Corps became "scared green." Whatever the engineers may have felt, as soon as the water began to recede, they set about learning the extent of the damage. The structure was obviously undermined, but how much so, and where? What was solid, what was not? What was directly below the gates and the roadway? With a diamond drill, in a central position, they bored the first of many holes in the structure. When they had penetrated to basal levels, they lowered a television camera into the hole.

They saw fish. —John McPhee, "Atchafalaya"

The flood of 1973 was a "40-year event," meaning that one might be expected, statistically and on average, every forty years. That the next flood came only thirty-two years later takes nothing away from this assessment: the river's overbank flow during and following Katrina had contributions from the release of impounded water from behind upstream levees, and energy from these successive releases owes much to the continued attempts by the Army Corps of Engineers to deny the river’s natural inclination to jump to the Atchafalaya drainage.

So inundation of the city from Katrina (a Category 3 storm at landfall), caused primarily by over fifty levee breaches, might have produced overbank flooding on the upper reaches of the river sufficient to allow the Atchafalaya to finally capture the Mississippi, had stress not been relieved farther down the river.

Besides, "[n]othing says capture has to happen at Old River," McPhee was told by a local. "It could happen anywhere the two channels are close enough. It probably will someday." The city of New Orleans may have survived the storm surge of Hurricane Katrina — devastating though it was — only to be hit sometime down the road with a second economic disaster.

It could happen anytime an up-river rainstorm causes the Corps of Engineers to lose their 52-year battle for control of the Mississippi River.

I read this 1989 copyrighted book quite some time ago but had to pick it up again to re-read the section entitled "Atchafalaya" given the current events along the Mississipi River. It was delicious as ever and full of facts about the long history of man against nature along the lower Mississippi. One of these days, it will be nature's turn again but in the meantime, it is an admirable story of the efforts of the Corps of Engineers to control the relentless force of the Mississippi. I will/have read, just about everything by John McPhee and next on my re-read list is the "Annals of the Former World".

A fascinating tour of human hubris by way of three great projects of ongoing geoengineering: capture of the Mississippi River, alteration of Icelandic lava flows, and attempts to control the slide of the San Gabriel Mountains onto Los Angeles. Written in a tone reminiscent of David Foster Wallace essays, this is a good bit of storytelling across a well chosen set of (cautionary?) examples.

Okay, so maybe I only read the first section ("Atchafalaya"), because its what I have time for and its the only bit that's relevant to my work right now, but it really is one of the most outstanding pieces on the relationship between humanity and water I've had the opportunity to read. Highly recommend

Fabulous book. Science, history, human intransigence, classical references and beautiful sentences. I’ve liked everything McPhee writes even if I knew nothing of the subject and had never considered it interesting enough to get informed.

This books is three essays on human attempts to control nature, not just for the fun of it but to solve a problem where nature caused humans difficulty mainly because it disrupted they way humans were already interacting with nature.

In the Mississippi example, the river wanted a new outlet to the Gulf and would have found it in the Atchafalaya River, a faster route because of the gradient and because it was the shortest route. It was predicted to happen naturally by 1991. But if it had, the cities of New Orleans and Baton Rouge, to say nothing of the industry which had been built up around them would have been cut off. And the Atchafalaya Swamp country (Cajun country) would also be changed. So the Corps of Engineers, beginning in the Sixties built a flood control structure that was designed to send no more than 30% of the water down the Atchafalaya while the rest was directed down the “old route”.

On an Icelandic island which was essentially a fishing community, a new volcano sprouted and seemed about not only to engulf the town but to destroy the harbor, a harbor from which fisherman caught a major portion of Iceland's main export, fish. Eventually they tried using water from high powered hoses to cool the lava flow and direct it away from the harbor. Much of the town was inundated, but the harbor was saved, even though it ended up with a new volcano on its edge.

In Los Angeles, people began to move to the hills in front of the San Gabriel Mountains and the more the hillsides were built up and the more people moved to the hills, the more disastrous floods and debris runs caused death and destruction. The cause was pretty complex. The chaparral would burn and become water proof. Then when winter rainstorms came, the water would not soak into the ground but cause floods and debris runs. Whole trees and huge boulders would rush down the mountain taking with it anything in the path: whole automobiles and other large objects from the highest homes and picking up more as it went. The solution was debris fans which channeled the debris to pickup points from which the city hauled it away, millions of tons.... these debris fans were pretty successful but there was no dissuading people from buying or building in the hills, higher and higher into the hills. Because these debris runs occurred infrequently and residents for the most part didn’t understand the conditions that made them possible, the danger was not taken seriously enough.

Fascinating book. Published in 1989. We still hear of these awful floods and debris runs in LA, though I never realized there was more to it than floods. The Mississippi has not deserted New Orleans though the ecological problems there make one wonder. Vestmannseyjar has not been overcome with lava and evidently Hawaii has learned some from their example. I’d love to have a 2019 update on these projects.