technology and culture Book Reviews 405 The Control of Nature. By John McPhee. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989. Pp. 272. $17.95. John McPhee thinks like historians but writes better than most. His books, extending back twenty-five years, have always mirrored his wonder at the complex, unpredictable responses of humans to their environment. In true historical fashion, McPhee analyzes specific situations while seeking answers to questions that are timeless and therefore always relevant. The title of this book is intentionally ambiguous. It is taken from the words etched on the engineering building at the University of Wyoming: “Strive On—the Control of Nature Is Won, Not Given.” On one hand a defiant and assertive exclamation of hubris, the statement also unintentionally hints at the futility of it all: humans striving to control nature in ways that would be considered absurd if they were not also sublime, tasks that celebrate the human spirit while revealing human folly. McPhee identifies three such tasks. In Louisiana, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers erected a monumental structure in the early 1960s to keep the Mississippi River from flowing into the Old River channel of the Atchafalaya River. The corps dammed the Old River channel, built a lock to get river traffic around the dam, and then created an entirely new channel to direct the waters of the Mississippi into the Atchafalaya, only this time at regulated flows through the massive concrete portals of the Old River Control Structure. Had all this not been done, Baton Rouge and New Orleans would no longer have been ocean ports by the mid-1970s, salt-water intrusion would have threatened their water supplies, and the Mississippi’s main channel would have been through the Atchafalaya swamp. The Atchafalaya River basin swamp is North America’s largest. It is the Louisiana homeland of the Cajun people and supports half of America’s migratory wildlife. As a major sport and commercial fishing center and the site of important oil and natural gas operations, its economic value is substantial. It is also an essential part of the Lower Mississippi River flood-control system. A large portion of the swamp is confined between levees so that it can act as a floodway to pass Mississippi River water to the Gulf of Mexico in the event of a major flood. Finally, the Atchafalaya River is a major artery connecting the Mississippi River, the Intracoastal Waterway, and the Gulf of Mexico. The balancing of myriad environmental, recreational, flood-control, and commercial interests in the region is a major challenge, one largely in the hands of the Corps of Engineers. Should the Old River Control Structure fail, something some professional geologists think inevitable, the social, environmental, and economic results would be devastating. The structure was already threatened once during a major flood in 1973. Since then, the corps has made important modifications, includ ing the construction of a massive auxiliary structure. 406 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Through interviews with many people representing different sides of the issue, McPhee shows the fragile political and natural environ ment in which the corps must operate. Environmentalists and scien tists express doubts about the corps’s capability to win the war against nature, a metaphor that the corps does not discourage, while eco nomic interests demand added protection, including the rebuilding of levees that constantly subside in the swampy soil. McPhee’s work reveals substantial reading on the subject, although without bibliog raphy or footnotes I can only conjecture what his sources were. Knowing personally most of the people he interviewed, I believe that his subjects, both government officials and private citizens, fairly characterize the deeply felt attitudes, from gloom to eternal optimism, that people have about Old River. McPhee’s second study is of the Icelandic island of Heimay, where in 1973 red-hot lava moved inexorably toward a town and harbor. Facing the lava was a small crew of men who squirted the molten rock with fire hoses. Icelanders watched the unequal contest first with amusement, then with astonishment as the lava slowed. Lava walls were created, but the lava would change direction, and new walls had to be quickly constructed. The platoon...