The Control of Nature by John McPhee discusses 3 detailed case studies of humans

Question

The Control of Nature by John McPhee discusses 3 detailed case studies of humans battling against nature. Your task for this project is to discuss how each of these case studies relate to specific terms/definitions and concepts that you’ve learned about in the Physical Geography class this semester. Read the instructions and guidelines for each part of the assignment carefully:

Part 1: Atchafalaya (10 points)

This section of John McPhee’s book best relates to the chapter on River Systems and Landforms. Review the main textbook chapter on the topic of River Systems and Landscapes as well as the Powerpoint presentation. Also feel free to review your question assignment on this part of the book. Select 3 terms/definitions or concepts from the chapter or Powerpoint and write a paragraph about how this section of the book relates to those 3 terms. Before each paragraph, type a direct quote from the John McPhee book that relates to one of the terms you’re writing about (include the page number after the quote). Your paragraph should be at least 200 words (the quotation doesn’t count toward the word count).

Explanation / Answer

three hundred miles up the Mississippi River from its mouth many parishes above New Orleans and well north of Baton Rouge navigation lock in the Mississippi’s right bank allows ships to drop out of the river. In evident defiance of nature, they descend as much as thirty-three feet, then go off to the west or south. This, to say the least, bespeaks a rare relationship between a river and adjacent terrain any river, anywhere, let alone the third-ranking river on earth. The adjacent terrain is Cajun country, in a geographical sense the apex of the French Acadian world, which forms a triangle in southern Louisiana,

  The Atchafalaya River is navigable and provides a significant industrial shipping channel for the state of Louisiana. It is the cultural heart of the Cajun Country.

The Mississippi River, with its sand and silt, has created most of Louisiana, and it could not have done so by remaining in one channel. If it had, southern Louisiana would be a long narrow peninsula reaching into the Gulf of Mexico. Southern Louisiana exists in its present form because the Mississippi River has jumped here and there within an arc about two hundred miles wide, like a pianist playing with one hand—frequently and radically changing course, surging over the left or the right bank to go off in utterly new directions. Always it is the river’s purpose to get to the Gulf by the shortest and steepest gradient. As the mouth advances southward and the river lengthens, the gradient declines, the current slows, and sediment builds up the bed. Eventually, it builds up so much that the river spills to one side. Major shifts of that nature have tended to occur roughly once a millennium. The Mississippi’s main channel of three thousand years ago is now the quiet water of Bayou Teche, which mimics the shape of the Mississippi. Along Bayou Teche, on the high ground of ancient natural levees, are Jeanerette, Breaux Bridge, Broussard, Olivier arcuate strings of Cajun towns. Eight hundred years before the birth of Christ, the channel was captured from the east. It shifted abruptly and flowed in that direction for about a thousand years

  Now, aboard the towboat Mississippi, the General is saying, “In terms of hydrology, what we’ve done here at Old River is stop time. We have, in effect, stopped time in terms of the distribution of flows. Man is directing the maturing process of the Atchafalaya and the lower Mississippi.” There is nothing formal about these remarks. The General says that this journey downriver is meant to be “a floating convention.” Listening to him is not a requirement. From the pilothouse to the fantail, people wander where they please, stopping here and again to converse in small groups.This a floodgate system in a branch of the Mississippi River in central Louisiana. It regulates the flow of water leaving the Mississippi into the Atchafalaya River,

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