Reviews for The Control of Nature

The average rating for The Control of Nature based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-05-10 00:00:00 Joshua Bailey 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? Atchafalaya 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'�tre 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 . . . Cooling the Lava 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. Los Angeles Against the Mountains 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.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-07-24 00:00:00 Margaret Stewart 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 Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible! , 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.