The Control of Nature

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.