“Man against nature. That’s what life’s all about.”
I remember first really thinking about conflict discussing “The
Interlopers” in my 7th grade
English class. We were taught then that narratives would have conflict, and
that conflict should be broken down into one of the following: man vs. man, man
vs. self, or man vs. nature. Characters or events pit against another force to resolve
an occurrence, explaining some sort of theme or moral to the story. Conflict
typically creates more conflict, and if we look at John McPhee’s narrative as we often
cyclically look at history, or even nature, knowing what we know about damage
and land in Louisiana today and post-Katrina, can we begin to believe that man
over nature in any case could win?
Although the main conflict in the Atchafalaya chapter if
not all of The Control of Nature is
man vs. nature, the possible man vs. man theme is under-pronounced. If the
environment is the world around humans, how much does human interaction pertain
to the idea of control? It is fascinating to me that although there are so many
stakeholders: fisherman, crawdad catchers, property owners, farmers, residents,
engineers, and others, the only ones who really have a say in the story seem to
be the US Army Corps of Engineers, even when the Mississippi River Commission
exists and outnumbers the Corps. Being provided with the most authority for
this conflict against an uncontrollable, dynamic body of water, the Corps
assumes responsibility for aiding man with the potential to become a man vs.
man conflict as we know it does when people lose their property or livelihoods
if the Corps’ decisions have consequences.
If we are to lock ourselves in the narrative conflict
bubble, where McPhee seems to want us, we may lose the fact that nature can and will retaliate. “The more the
levees confined the river, the more destructive it became when they failed”
(35). When we build ahead for resiliency or have to immediately react to
environmental damages as both were the case with the Atchafalaya, we risk
putting people who may not be stakeholders stewarding someone else's environment. Or is everyone a stakeholder because it is everyone's environment? How much does responsibility play into this? The idea that the levees that man builds are
alien to nature show domination of man on the environment, just like the diversity of uses on the land and water around from fishing to transport to farming, they all take advantage of the resources available.
Our
friends at Wikipedia helped us with this visual history of the controls that I
found to be helpful to further understand the canalization and spatial
reasoning of the waterways. Man’s control of nature has made it so the history
of the Acadians and the Atchafalaya is not what is present today. It is safe to
assume in the next century the Atchafalaya will change even more, but as things
change, how can we create a collaboration, rather than a conflict, with nature?
Is that possible, or with control must humans always show the upper hand?
First of all, thank you so much for the link to the geomorphology of Old River. That is extremely helpful.
ReplyDeleteI think the idea of control you bring up is very interesting. Part of what separates us from nature is the concept of control itself. The idea and the attempt to invariably and indefinitely control the course of mother nature is distinctly human. Because of this, we not only have conflict with nature, but also run into huge interhuman conflict over this control. It might be necessary to learn how to work with nature rather than against it if we are also to learn how to work with other humans, not against them.