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Often their outings involve wading knee-deep in polluted water to test for fecal coliform.
skirt the outflow pipes of the Stickney plant, said to be the largest sewage operation in the world.
“combined sewer overflows,” or CSOs. There is speculation about what sort of “floatables” the CSOs have set adrift. Someone wonders if we’ll encounter any Chicago River whitefish, local slang for used condoms.
But reversing the Chicago didn’t just flush waste toward St. Louis. It also upended the hydrology of roughly two-thirds of the United States.
People have, by now, directly transformed more than half the ice-free land on earth—some twenty-seven million square miles—and indirectly half of what remains.
our planes, cars, and power stations emit about a hundred times more carbon dioxide than volcanoes do.
today people outweigh wild mammals by a ratio of more than eight to one. Add in the weight of our domesticated animals—mostly cows and pigs—and that ratio climbs to twenty-two to one.
Atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication—these are just some of the by-products of our species’s success.
Panama Canal, the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Bonneville Dam, and the Manhattan Project.
Grass carp (Ctenopharyngodon idella) eat aquatic plants. Silver carp (Hypophthalmichthys molitrix) and bighead carp (Hypophthalmichthys nobilis) are filter feeders;
Thanks to projects like the Three Gorges Dam, on the Yangtze, river fish are having trouble spawning. The carp are thus at once instruments of human control and victims of it.
“The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man,”
Eurasian watermilfoil—another
“hydrologic separation”
If control is the problem, then, by the logic of the Anthropocene, still more control must be the solution.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
When the Mississippi bursts through its levees, be they natural or man-made, the opening is called a “crevasse.”
New Orleans is called the “Crescent City,”
data found some parts of New Orleans dropping by almost half a foot a decade. “That’s one of the fastest rates on earth,” Kolker noted.
the Corps erected the world’s largest pumping station, part of a $1.1 billion structure called the West Closure Complex.
To the east, it built the Lake Borgne Surge Barrier, a concrete wall nearly two miles long and five and a half feet thick that cost $1.3 billion.
These pharaonic structures have kept the city dry through several recent storms, and, from a certain perspective, New Orleans now appears substantially better protected than when Katrina hit. But what looks like a defense from one angle can look like a trap from another.
“Drive out nature though you will with a pitchfork,” Horace wrote in 20 B.C., “yet she will always hurry back, and before you know it, will break through your perverse disdain in triumph.”
“But I think the areas that don’t get restored will flood more and more frequently. There will be continued wetland loss.”
L’Isle de la Nouvelle Orléans would, in coming years, Kolker predicted, “look more and more like an island.”
“In the springtime, there’s always water on the road,
Sea levels are rising. In the early part of the twentieth century, it lost its main sources of fresh sediment to flood-control measures.
The canals pulled in salt water, and, as the salinity rose, the reeds and marsh grasses died.
“Atchafalaya,” a morality tale of a darkly comic cast.
“In 1900, about ten percent of the Red River and the Mississippi put together was going down the Atchafalaya,”
“In 1930, you had about twenty percent.
By 1950, you had thirty...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
McPhee included “Atchafalaya” in his book The Control of Nature, published in 1989. Since then, a lot has happened to complicate the meaning of “control,” not to mention “nature.”
CHANS.
