Download or read book The Control of Nature written by John McPhee and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While John McPhee was working on his previous book, Rising from the Plains, he happened to walk by the engineering building at the University of Wyoming, where words etched in limestone said: "Strive on--the control of Nature is won, not given." In the morning sunlight, that central phrase--"the control of nature"--seemed to sparkle with unintended ambiguity. Bilateral, symmetrical, it could with equal speed travel in opposite directions. For some years, he had been planning a book about places in the world where people have been engaged in all-out battles with nature, about (in the words of the book itself) "any struggle against natural forces--heroic or venal, rash or well advised--when human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth, to take what is not given, to rout the destroying enemy, to surround the base of Mt. Olympus demanding and expecting the surrender of the gods." His interest had first been sparked when he went into the Atchafalaya--the largest river swamp in North America--and had learned that virtually all of its waters were metered and rationed by a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' project called Old River Control. In the natural cycles of the Mississippi's deltaic plain, the time had come for the Mississippi to change course, to shift its mouth more than a hundred miles and go down the Atchafalaya, one of its distributary branches. The United States could not afford that--for New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and all the industries that lie between would be cut off from river commerce with the rest of the nation. At a place called Old River, the Corps therefore had built a great fortress--part dam, part valve--to restrain the flow of the Atchafalaya and compel the Mississippi to stay where it is. In Iceland, in 1973, an island split open without warning and huge volumes of lava began moving in the direction of a harbor scarcely half a mile away. It was not only Iceland's premier fishing port (accounting for a large percentage of Iceland's export economy) but it was also the only harbor along the nation's southern coast. As the lava threatened to fill the harbor and wipe it out, a physicist named Thorbjorn Sigurgeirsson suggested a way to fight against the flowing red rock--initiating an all-out endeavor unique in human history. On the big island of Hawaii, one of the world's two must eruptive hot spots, people are not unmindful of the Icelandic example. McPhee went to Hawaii to talk with them and to walk beside the edges of a molten lake and incandescent rivers. Some of the more expensive real estate in Los Angeles is up against mountains that are rising and disintegrating as rapidly as any in the world. After a complex coincidence of natural events, boulders will flow out of these mountains like fish eggs, mixed with mud, sand, and smaller rocks in a cascading mass known as debris flow. Plucking up trees and cars, bursting through doors and windows, filling up houses to their eaves, debris flows threaten the lives of people living in and near Los Angeles' famous canyons. At extraordinary expense the city has built a hundred and fifty stadium-like basins in a daring effort to catch the debris. Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strategies and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking in his vivid depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those who would attempt to wrest control from her--stubborn, often ingenious, and always arresting characters.

Download or read book Mississippi River and Tributaries Flood Control Plan Big Sunflower River Maintenance Project Yazoo Basin Sunflower County Washington County Humphreys County Sharkey County Yazoo County written by and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Mississippi River and Tributaries with Respect to Old River Control written by United States. Army. Corps of Engineers and published by . This book was released on 1954 with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Mississippi River and Tributaries Old River Control LA written by United States. Army. Corps of Engineers. New Orleans District and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Beyond Control written by James F. Barnett, Jr. and published by . This book was released on 2024-04-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A detailed chronicle of how the wild Mississippi will eventually deliver a cataclysm

Download or read book Mississippi River and Tributaries Project written by United States. Army. Corps of Engineers and published by . This book was released on 1964 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Mississippi River Water Quality and the Clean Water Act written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2008-02-08 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mississippi River is, in many ways, the nation's best known and most important river system. Mississippi River water quality is of paramount importance for sustaining the many uses of the river including drinking water, recreational and commercial activities, and support for the river's ecosystems and the environmental goods and services they provide. The Clean Water Act, passed by Congress in 1972, is the cornerstone of surface water quality protection in the United States, employing regulatory and nonregulatory measures designed to reduce direct pollutant discharges into waterways. The Clean Water Act has reduced much pollution in the Mississippi River from "point sources" such as industries and water treatment plants, but problems stemming from urban runoff, agriculture, and other "non-point sources" have proven more difficult to address. This book concludes that too little coordination among the 10 states along the river has left the Mississippi River an "orphan" from a water quality monitoring and assessment perspective. Stronger leadership from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is needed to address these problems. Specifically, the EPA should establish a water quality data-sharing system for the length of the river, and work with the states to establish and achieve water quality standards. The Mississippi River corridor states also should be more proactive and cooperative in their water quality programs. For this effort, the EPA and the Mississippi River states should draw upon the lengthy experience of federal-interstate cooperation in managing water quality in the Chesapeake Bay.

Download or read book Mississippi River and Tributaries with Respect to Old River Control Letter from the Secretary of the Army Transmitting a Letter from the Chief of Engineers Dept of the Army Dated April 8 1954 Submitting a Report on a Review of Projects for Flood Control prepared in Accordance with Section 6 of the River and Harbor Act Approved August 30 1935 written by and published by . This book was released on 1954 with total page 54 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Upper Mississippi River Navigation Charts written by United States. Army. Corps of Engineers. Rock Island District and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Atchafalaya Basin Floodway System written by and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book River Mechanics written by Pierre Y. Julien and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-12 with total page 527 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Completely updated and with three new chapters, this analysis of river dynamics is invaluable for advanced students, researchers and practitioners.

Download or read book The Atchafalaya River Basin written by Bryan P. Piazza and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this comprehensive, one-volume reference, Nature Conservancy scientist Bryan P. Piazza poses five key questions: —What is the Atchafalaya River Basin? —Why is it important? —How have its hydrology and natural habitats been managed? —What is its current state? —How do we ensure its survival? For more than five centuries, the Atchafalaya River Basin has captured the flow of the Mississippi River, becoming its main distributary as it reaches the Gulf of Mexico in south Louisiana. This dynamic environment, comprising almost a million acres of the lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley and Mississippi River Deltaic Plain, is perhaps best known for its expansive swamp environments dominated by baldcypress, water tupelo, and alligators. But the Atchafalaya River Basin contains a wide range of habitats and one of the highest levels of biodiversity on the North American continent. Piazza has compiled and synthesized the body of scientific knowledge for the Atchafalaya River Basin, documenting the ecological state of the basin and providing a baseline of understanding. His research provides a crucial resource for future planning. He evaluates some common themes that have emerged from the research and identifies important scientific questions that remain unexplored.

Download or read book Beyond Control written by James F. Barnett Jr. and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2017-03-16 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond Control reveals the Mississippi as a waterway of change, unnaturally confined by ever-larger levees and control structures. During the great flood of 1973, the current scoured a hole beneath the main structure near Baton Rouge and enlarged a pre-existing football-field-size crater. That night the Mississippi River nearly changed its course for a shorter and steeper path to the sea. Such a map-changing reconfiguration of the country’s largest river would bear national significance as well as disastrous consequences for New Orleans and towns like Morgan City, at the mouth of the Atchafalaya River. Since 1973, the US Army Corps of Engineers Control Complex at Old River has kept the Mississippi from jumping out of its historic channel and plunging through the Atchafalaya Basin to the Gulf of Mexico. Beyond Control traces the history of this phenomenon, beginning with a major channel shift around 3,000 years ago. By the time European colonists began to explore the Lower Mississippi Valley, a unique confluence of waterways had formed where the Red River joined the Mississippi, and the Atchafalaya River flowed out into the Atchafalaya Basin. A series of human alterations to this potentially volatile web of rivers, starting with a bend cutoff in 1831 by Captain Henry Miller Shreve, set the forces in motion for the Mississippi’s move into the Atchafalaya Basin. Told against the backdrop of the Lower Mississippi River’s impending diversion, the book’s chapters chronicle historic floods, rising flood crests, a changing strategy for flood protection, and competing interests in the management of the Old River outlet. Beyond Control is both a history and a close look at an inexorable, living process happening now in the twenty-first century.

Download or read book Stages and Discharges Mississippi River and Its Outlets and Tributaries written by and published by . This book was released on 1963 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Public Works Appropriations for 1958 written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Appropriations. Subcommittee on Public Works Appropriations and published by . This book was released on 1957 with total page 1796 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Report written by United States. Congress. House and published by . This book was released on with total page 2226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Energy and Water Development Appropriations for Fiscal Year 1987 Nondepartmental witnesses written by United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Appropriations. Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 1288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: