Control Nature? Oh, how we wish we could!

This post was published in the Wilson Times Sept. 25, 2020

    I contacted a friend (and former Wilson resident) now living in Oregon last week to ask how he’s faring amid the wildfires near his Oregon home. Wildfires are burning in Oregon, California and Washington. The wildfires are not receiving the attention they deserve as our eastern side of the continent is preoccupied with a presidential election, a COVID-19 pandemic, and a Supreme Court vacancy.

            But the wildfires on the West Coast are frighteningly real and disturbing. My friend is safe so far, but the fire season is not over, and this season is the worst in memory. On the East Coast, we have a multitude of hurricanes threatening the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Before calendars turned to October, the hurricane center had run out of designated names for hurricanes and was turning to Greek letters for subsequent storms. Welcome Hurricane Beta.

            All of this reminds me of John McPhee’s slender book “The Control of Nature” from 1980. McPhee’s lyrical prose can lull the reader away from existential warnings his words convey. The fundamental message of the book is that humans cannot control nature. It is in humanity’s nature to want to control nature, but in the long run we cannot do it. Nature has all the time in the world, and it will ultimately prevail.

            McPhee’s book is divided into three sections, each dealing with a separate attempt to control nature. For generations, Americans have sought to control the Mississippi River and its tributaries. Dikes, levees and canals approved by the Army Corps of Engineers have been installed to force the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya rivers to flow where humans wanted them to go, but the rivers inevitably broke free from the engineers’ carefully laid plans.

            Residents of Iceland sought a way to prevent the flow of lava from active volcanoes from taking over towns and man-made structures. Efforts to cool the lava so that it was merely big, stationary rocks instead of hellishly hot and immediately deadly lava. Good try, but not a winner.

            The third example in this memorable book is the development of luxury housing on the hills around Los Angeles. Wildfires in those hills became a seasonal event where thin, arid topsoil would not support much vegetation, making those same hills the scene of mudslides as rainstorms washed away the thin soil and homes slid down the hills. Los Angeles, with an average annual rainfall of only 15 inches, was never suitable for human habitation without extraordinary efforts to transport water from other sites.

            Los Angeles has another problem: fires. The arid hills are home to chaparral, which McPhee’s book terms “one of the most flammable vegetation complexes there are.” The hills are covered in the volatile shrub. Those hills are a poor place to build a home or a city, but people love the view from those hills and expect nature to accommodate them, instead of vice versa.

            McPhee does not address one control of nature issue: development of barrier islands, such as the N.C. Outer Banks. For generations, people have built vacation homes, roads and towns on shifting sands from Maine to Miami. North Carolina spends billions to keep N.C. 12 open along the Outer Banks, but hurricanes punch holes through the asphalt almost every year.

            McPhee’s book was written before climate change became an environmental catch phrase, but ever stronger and more frequent hurricanes, heat waves, flooding and windstorms testify that things are changing. What hasn’t changed is people’s stubborn belief that they can control nature.

            They can’t.