The Control Of Nature

A professor of law at Tulane University, for example, would assign it third place in the annals of arrogance. His name was Oliver Houck. “The greatest arrogance was the stealing of the sun,” he said. “The second-greatest arrogance is running rivers backward. The third-greatest arrogance is trying to hold the Mississippi in place

Southern Louisiana is a very large lump of mountain butter, eight miles thick where it rests upon the continental shelf, half that under New Orleans, a mile and a third at Old River. It is the nature of unconsolidated sediments to compact, condense, and crustally sink. So the whole deltaic plain, a superhimalaya upside down, is to varying extents subsiding, as it has been for thousands of years.

Every drop of rain that falls on New Orleans evaporates or is pumped out.

In making war with nature, there was risk of loss in winning.

By an order of magnitude, this was the most arresting sight I had ever seen in nature. The time spent gazing into it could not be measured.

For twenty million dollars, they had built in Burro Canyon an edifice ten times as large as the largest pyramid at Giza.