The Control of Nature by John McPhee is a non-fiction collection of three essays dealing with humanity’s attempts to control natural processes. The idea for the collection began in 1980, when McPhee took his daughter on a canoe trip down the Atchafalaya River. His daughter was fascinated by the works of writer Walker Percy, who was born in Alabama but spent most of his life in Louisiana. Their river trip took them into Mississippi, where...
The Control of Nature by John McPhee is a non-fiction collection of three essays dealing with humanity’s attempts to control natural processes. The idea for the collection began in 1980, when McPhee took his daughter on a canoe trip down the Atchafalaya River. His daughter was fascinated by the works of writer Walker Percy, who was born in Alabama but spent most of his life in Louisiana. Their river trip took them into Mississippi, where McPhee met with a local who encouraged him to work on his first essay investigating the Army Corps of Engineers’ monitoring of river flow in southern Louisiana.
Not long after, McPhee was off to California for essay two, a look at the debris slides from San Gabriel mountain that threatened Los Angeles. His final essay deals with the threat of lava eruptions and flows in Hawaii and Iceland. McPhee’s work placed him in front of locals, non-locals, engineers, scientists, and governmental bureaucrats. The whole adventure was steeped in money, power, conflict, death, and destruction. McPhee was not shy about exposing humanity’s hubris when it came to harnessing the forces of nature, nor its resilience in the face of looming threats.
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