Move the Mississippi?

Despite engineering genius and wild spending, man is a hapless pipsqueak when trying to control nature's wily, unpredictable vicissitudes.

So it probably strikes most people as pure madness that engineers, scientists and politicians are seriously discussing "moving" a stretch of the Mississippi River downstream from New Orleans as futuristic prevention of another Hurricane Katrina calamity by controlling the Big Muddy.

Why not? Rebuilding Gulf Coast cities laid to waste by Katrina ultimately will cost tens of billions of dollars. And if a workable engineering feat of shifting the Mississippi's Gulf mouth can prevent another catastrophe, while also redirecting 120 million tons of wasted sediment into wetlands to rebuild 1,500 square miles of lost marshes, then the price would be cheap in the long run.

Yet, although the Katrina horrors have created a special, sentimental urgency for the Gulf Coast in the American heart, the national landscape is littered with horribly neglected engineering problems that have grown into cancers on the nation's system of public services and facilities.