What are some quotes from The Control of Nature?

I laughed. I laughed because I did not believe that we could stop Mother Nature.

This quote perfectly describes the main thesis of the book. McPhee contends that human ingenuity is no match for the power of nature. The island of Heimaey is home to Iceland's lucrative fish industry. The harbor at Heimaey is said to be more important to Iceland's survival than New York City is to the United States' survival. In the book, McPhee describes the terrible catastrophe that befell Heimaey on January 23, 1973.

On that day, a once dormant volcano spewed 2000° F lava onto the Heimaey mainland. The villagers on the island were eventually forced to choose between saving their homes or the harbor. They chose the harbor but only reluctantly. The people leveraged the physicist Thorbjorn Sigurgeirsson's idea of cooling the lava with water to save the harbor twice. However, the lava annihilated 350 houses in the town of Heimaey, a terrible price to pay. McPhee quietly makes the point that the wrath of nature is often an unstoppable force. To survive, human beings must make difficult choices.

Boulders bigger than cars ride long distances in debris flows.

In "Los Angeles Against the Mountains," McPhee describes how a debris flow buried the Genofile family home to the eaves. Jackie Genofile remembers the debris flow as a "big black hill" rolling toward the house. The rolling mass was part water and part solid material; some of the material was the size of boulders. Although the Genofile family survived ("The mud stopped rising near the children's chins"), the experience was a harrowing one. 

The debris flows from the San Gabriel Mountain region are actually precipitated by the Santa Ana winds, which cause the chaparral vegetation to burn. The ensuing fire leads to the creation of a hydrophobic soil layer. Intense precipitation then agitates the soil above this hydrophobic layer, leading to the formation of debris flows. The moving mass of water and solid material often accumulates cars and other man-made structures as it descends from the mountains. 

Man against nature. That's what life's all about.

This quote is taken from "Atchafalaya." It highlights the fact that the force of nature is implacable and that it is impossible for human beings to control nature. Thus, we can only approach environmental catastrophes from a defensive standpoint. Again, McPhee quietly makes the point that we can only be responsive to changing conditions; we are powerless to mold nature to our specifications.