President's Message - Control of Nature?by Krag Unsoeld Development activity in Seattle is everywhere, it seems. There are cranes and scaffolding, construction and deconstruction. It's a powerful visual testimony to the human belief that we are in control. Our culture, our very existence is predicated on shaping and changing the environment to our liking. Or so we would like to think. "Big Bertha," the world's largest tunneling machine, attempting to replace the Alaska Way Viaduct with a tunnel, is at a standstill. This project involves excavating a path through an amalgam of stiff clay, boulders, glacial till, sand, gravel, silt and groundwater. The machine apparently ground to a halt as a result of a steel pipe that was installed by the Washington Department of Transportation in 2002 to better monitor the flows of groundwater in the area. Further north of Seattle is the small town of Oso on the banks of the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River in Snohomish County. The effects of the record-setting winter rains, the flow of the river eating away at the base of a hill side, and questionable timber harvests resulted in the largest natural disaster in Washington State since the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens. Forty-one people are confirmed dead with two still missing and presumed dead from a landslide covering more than a square mile. It wiped out about thirty houses in this community of 180 people. The hillside that slid is referred to as the Hazel Landslide. It has been documented to be constantly moving and shifting. Daniel Miller, a geologist who often worked in the area, was quoted in a number of news sources saying that it was clear an event like this was going to happen. Unfortunately, that information did not get to the county building regulators or the people who built their homes in what turned out to be the path of disaster. John McPhee, in his classic book, The Control of Nature, delves into the human belief that we can choose to live wherever we want because we are in control. He examines communities in Iceland that have to spray seawater on the advancing lava flows to congeal them before they destroy villages. Then there is the City of New Orleans, building the Mississippi River levees ever taller so the river is being transported through the city in a raised aqueduct. If the river had its way it would long ago have changed course and proceeded to enter the Gulf far to the west of where it does now. The final example that McPhee uses is the people who build on the landslide prone slopes around Los Angeles. In all of these cases, people are attempting to exert their control over nature and its elements. This human characteristic has been analyzed in many great books such as Lewis Mumford's classic two-volume set titled, The Myth of the Machine. William Leiss wrote The Domination of Nature, which postulates that our drive to dominate nature reflects humans dominating other humans. More recent authors of note include Derrick Jensen. In order to maintain the civilization that we construct to our standards we must wage a constant struggle with the essence of nature. In the end, the only way that we are going to have a sustainable human future is to do more of what Gary Snyder recommends in his book of essays, The Practice of the Wild. We have to learn that we are part of the tapestry of nature. We must learn to make our built environment fit into the natural environment without causing the negative effects that we currently do. To quote Terry and Renny Russell from their book, On the Loose.
The weed will win in the end, of course. Krag Unsoeld is President of SPEECH and can be reached at kragu@juno.com or (360) 250-9982.
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