WHEN THE MISSISSIPPI RAN BACKWARDS: Empire, Intrigue, Murder, and the New Madrid Earthquakes
by Jay Feldman
Free Press, $27; 320pp
£14.99 (free p&p)
DIVINE WIND: The History and Science of Hurricanes
by Kerry Emanuel
OUP, USA, £23.99; 304pp
£22.50 (free p&p)
0870 1608080
THE SURPRISING THING about New Orleans is not that the city should have been engulfed, but that it took so long for it to happen. Cities do not last. Those built in precarious places collapse. The rest are doomed to decay or suffer humanly induced destruction. It is only our historical myopia, which prevents most of us from seeing much of the past at once, that makes us think our cities are solid or enduring.
We should know better. There are plenty of authors rushing to put us right. Jared Diamond’s recent Collapse was a harbinger of disaster books. Among new titles this year, Jay Feldman’s When the Mississippi Ran Backwards, on the New Madrid earthquakes of 1812, seems made for present circumstances. Philip Fradkin produced a lively account of the San Francisco disaster of 1906 and Simon Winchester has a work in the offing on the same theme. Kerry Emanuel’s Divine Wind is about to come out, promising to be definitive on hurricanes. It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.
The ruins of places once full of confidence surround us. History is a path we pick among them. Yet we contemplate them with romantic yearning or philosophical detachment, instead of being very afraid. Gibbon on the Capitol was moved by the mutability of empires, but fortified in his belief in progress. All the “lost cities” scattered through the jungles and deserts of the world provoked in their discoverers ruminations on the fate of their inhabitants, and laments for fallen cities are common in every significant literary tradition. We even indulge in the comfortable horror of imagining our own cities in ruins, when, for example, London Bridge is broken down and green grass grows over Ludgate Hill. But we are not really ready for that day. It will come, if the past is anything to go by. New Orleans is one with Nineveh and Tyre — and with most of the other cities people built.
Çatalhüyük in Anatolia is a strong candidate to be regarded as the world’s first and longest-lasting urban experiment. Eleven thousand years ago, it stood on an alluvial plain, filling a 32-acre honeycomb of mud-brick dwellings. It lasted — pretty much continuously, as far as we can tell — for a record-setting 4,000 years, partly because it was a modest project, which never got too big to feed off its hinterland. Eventually, however, a shift in the course of the river choked it and buried it in dust. Other city-sites with long records of occupation usually turn out to have pasts punctuated by catastrophe. Troy is now just a ruin, but the last city on the site rose over other ruins. At least a dozen Troys rose and fell before builders there finally gave up.
The fragility of cities is a cruel fact to acknowledge. We put so much effort into them. We beautify them in confidence of the future. We measure the greatness of the builders by their willingness to make present sacrifices for future fame, or — more altruistically — for the benefit of posterity. We admire cities that seem to court disaster. Dazzlingly heroic examples include Venice — built in stone on islets of salt marsh, so that it is bound to sink; or San Francisco, built and rebuilt in defiance of topography and almost in the embrace of a geological fault-line; or Tokyo, earthquake-prone and in the path of typhoons.
Of course, people do not live in cities for environmental reasons. The impulse is psychological, imaginative — maybe even spiritual. For cities represent an extreme form of a fatally human temptation: the desire to transform Nature. Our ancestors colonised just about every habitable environment on the planet. Even then, many of them remained dissatisfied. Some of them began to score the landscape with fields and irrigation ditches, or to re-shape it to impose order and geometry. They longed to see rough places plain and hills made low. The logical end-point of the process was to smother nature in another environment — a built environment — of their own design.
The problems were obvious. The very idea of a permanent dwelling seems risky. A nomad can abandon camp without emotional severance. A tent can be folded and re-erected somewhere better or safer. The first people, as far as we know, to build permanent settlements — the Natufians of what is now Syria some 14,000 years ago — did so because the foods they gathered were so abundant that they did not need to move to find them. But there are other hazards, apart from starvation, that one might want to elude. So many menacing, unstable elements in the environment — weather, watercourses, lethal microbes, infestations of pests — invite evasion. All cities can do is build defences. These are expensive, because natural forces are powerful and unpredictable. If you shelve the costs, as in New Orleans, you face the consequences.
Cities, moreover, generally outgrow their economic benefits. Their main advantage is that they facilitate specialisation. But most cities are inefficiently big. Aristotle thought 10,000 people was ideal. Nowadays, because we have more specialisations and more diverse demand, we need a bigger threshold. The city grows into a metropolis — a lot of cities crammed together — because of the magnetism of demand for labour and because of the way cities focus communications. The effect is exciting to live in, but generates problems that make life stressful: pollution, traffic, health hazards, costly infrastructures, elaborate governance, expensive and often intrusive policing. As cities grow denser, critical parts of the infrastructure become harder to get at for repair and renewal. London’s centenarian sewerage and underground railway system are cases for concern: both really need more work than is possible without big disruption.
Can our cities defy history, as well as nature, and make a breakthrough into immortality? We certainly have the technology to prolong their lives. Amsterdam — a great city in a wildly irrational place — is now safe against anything the sea can throw at it in the foreseeable future. New Orleans could have been similarly protected. But we can only provide against what we can predict, and cities, because of their scale, are peculiarly vulnerable to unpredictable perils. We know that plagues, seismic convulsions, climatic fluctuations and apocalyptic wars will happen, but not where or when. Winds of change blow where they list.
The Majority Leader in Congress got into trouble last week for suggesting that New Orleans might be left unrenewed. Of course, only rebuilding can calm the present emotional flood. And capitalism makes reconstruction inevitable: there is money in it. Yet whether we should give up building new cities is a serious question. The history of cities seems to show that the best recipe for survival is to sacrifice the ambition.
It would be a depressing strategy. I love cities, warts and all. I want to belong to a society keen to challenge nature rather than remaining “at one” with her in static equilibrium. It seems better to live strenuously and die soon than fester indefinitely in inert contentment. In any case, it is worth bearing a couple of startling counter-examples in mind. Except for us, other species of the genus homo lived modestly and died out. Subsequently, societies of hunters, gatherers, pastoralists, and villagers disdained the city-dwellers — and all vanished or face extinction. Maybe we need to take risks in order to keep going. Maybe that is why, even when cities drown in many waters, the passion to go on building them lives on, unquenched.
www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
