John McPhee published *The Control of Nature* in 1989, the same year the Berlin Wall came down, which means two of the twentieth century's most ambitious engineering projects—one ideological, one hydrological—were being examined for structural integrity at roughly the same moment. Only one of them has since collapsed. The other, the Old River Control Structure on the Mississippi, still stands. Barely. McPhee's account of the Army Corps of Engineers' fight to keep the Mississippi from abandoning its current channel and pouring down the Atchafalaya was, at the time of publication, an elegant piece of narrative journalism about stubbornness dressed as infrastructure. Thirty-seven years later it reads like a slow-motion prophecy. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 did not break the Old River structure, but it broke the illusion McPhee was already quietly dismantling: that human engineering could indefinitely hold a negotiating position with a river carrying the drainage of forty percent of the continental United States. The levee failures in New Orleans were not the scenario McPhee described—he was focused on the capture problem upstream—but they were the same species of catastrophe, born of the same institutional confidence. The 2024 and 2025 flood seasons, with their increasingly erratic precipitation patterns driven by climate disruption McPhee never named, have made the Atchafalaya capture scenario not a geological curiosity but an active planning concern for FEMA and the state of Louisiana. He got the physics right. He got the timeline conservative.

What McPhee could not see—what almost no one writing environmental nonfiction in 1989 could see—was the degree to which climate change would accelerate the timetable on every scenario he described. The book treats the river's behavior as a function of geology and hydrology, which it is, but the variable McPhee holds roughly constant is precipitation volume and intensity. That variable has not been constant. The Mississippi River's discharge patterns have shifted measurably since 1989, and the spring flood pulse that the Old River Control Structure was engineered to manage now arrives with less predictability and sometimes greater force. McPhee's blind spot is not ignorance; it is the reasonable assumption of a journalist writing before the IPCC's first assessment report that the boundary conditions of the problem would remain stable. They have not. The book also carries the quiet assumption, common to its era, that the Corps of Engineers is the only relevant actor—that this is a story about federal technocrats versus geology. The politics of Louisiana's coastal erosion, the environmental justice dimensions of who lives behind which levees, the role of oil and gas canal-cutting in accelerating wetland loss—these are absent or peripheral. McPhee was writing a story about hubris and hydrology. The story has since acquired additional characters.