Let the Owner Beware

By TIMOTHY EGAN;
New York Times
Published: May 7, 1995
SLIDE MOUNTAIN Or the Folly of Owning Nature. By Theodore Steinberg. 212 pp. Berkeley: University of California Press.

AS anyone living along the coast of the Pacific Rim can attest, the earth moves, sometimes rather dramatically. And as the great Mississippi River flood of two years ago showed, rivers can rise up out of their beds and jump all over the place, defying the best orthodontic designs of the Army Corps of Engineers. But even the most impulsive acts of nature have not kept us from forever trying to corral a slice of unruly land, branding it as our own and demanding that it behave itself.

The sometimes comic attempts to own the air above us, the water beneath us and the land in between are the subject of Theodore Steinberg's fascinating new study, "Slide Mountain."

SLIDE MOUNTAIN Or the Folly of Owning Nature