Sunken+-+D.C.

“The Sunken City” Darcy Cameron Reading John McPhee’s article “The Sunken City” was an interesting and enjoyable experience. The focus is more on the environmental issues that I was kind of expecting from the beginning of this course, seeing as how it’s subtitled “environmental reporting.” I assume he has written a lot about environmental issues, although many of the articles I’ve read so far have focused on other things. I think it was good to read a lot of that other stuff first, however, because now I have more of a sense of McPhee’s style and techniques, and it helped me better understand how he puts his pieces together and how he tries to get his points across. This article is about New Orleans, and how it is sinking, and without human intervention much of the city would likely be under water. This seems to be a recurring theme in many of McPhee’s environmental articles, or at least in what I have read so far – humans intervening and interrupting the natural order of things. He doesn’t really seem to take a stand or to shove his opinions down our throats in an obvious way; he simply shows us the scene, tells us what is happening, and trusts that this will be enough for us to form our own opinion. I get the impression that he is hoping the mere presentation of certain facts will be enough for us to form an opinion that is the same as his opinion, but this is probably not always the case. Different people can look at the same set of facts and form different opinions about it. One thing that struck me about this article is how much humour McPhee uses while describing a very serious subject. The way he chooses to describe certain things is so unique, for example: // “In New Orleans, income and elevation can be correlated on a literally sliding scale: the Garden District on the highest level, Stanley Kowalski in the swamp.” // That stuck me as such a uniquely humours way to describe the separation of rich and poor people in this area. And again, McPhee assumes we know who Stanley Kowalski is. If we don’t, we’ll still get the point, but it might not seem quite as unique or funny. I chuckled when I read it, not because it’s so hilarious, but it just struck me as such a good way to illuminate the class differences. Stanley Kowalski. Classic. There are also a few other pieces of bizarre humour littered throughout this piece, which made me laugh but also made me stop and think: this is a serious subject, but is McPhee taking it seriously? Perhaps throwing in bits of ridiculous humour actually serve to better illuminate the seriousness of the subject – a “Dr. Strangelove” sort of technique: // “The people cannot have wells, and so they take rain-water,” Mark Twain observed in the eighteen-eighties. “Neither can they conveniently have cellars or graves, the town being built upon ‘made’ ground; so they do without both, and few of the living complain, and none of the others.” The others may not complain, but they sometimes leave. New Orleans is not a place for interment. In all its major cemeteries, the clients lie aboveground. In the intramural flash floods, coffins go out of their crypts and take off down the street. // This is both ridiculously hilarious and unbelievably horrifying if it is actually anywhere near the truth. This could have been said in a more serious way, but I think the fact that we may read this and chuckle actually makes the reality of the situation all the more terrible. All in all, I have taken points from McPhee out of this article without really getting an overwhelming sense of where he stands, or even where I stand. I get the sense that he’s not really a big fan of people interfering with nature to serve their own purposes, and that doing so tends to lead to even more disastrous results. But on the other hand, what’s the alternative? Abandon New Orleans and just start over somewhere else? Maybe that would be ideal, but it seems a bit unrealistic. Maybe a scene like this that gives us a sense of “look what we’ve done to ourselves” is enough to just make us stop and think, and enough for McPhee to have succeeded in what he set out to do.