Indeed, if we hadn’t played with Mother Nature by using ammonium nitrate to raise our crop yields, many readers of this book probably wouldn’t exist today. (Or they would at least be too busy to read, spending all day scrounging for roots and berries.) Stopping polio was also a form of playing with Mother Nature. As are the levees we use to control hurricane flooding—even if, as in Hurricane Katrina, they sometimes fail.
