In the late 19502, Ian Burton, then a geographer at the University of Chicago, learned about a troubling conundrum with levees. These expensive and engineering-intensive strategies — which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers favored for reining in floods along big river floodplains — worked well for holding back intermediate amounts of water. But they gave people a false sense of safety. After a levee went up, sometimes more people actually built and moved onto the land behind it. Then, if an oversized flood eventually poured over or broke through the levee, the disaster could damage more property and cause more havoc than it might have before engineers began meddling.

The paradox would become a classic lesson in how not to adapt to the hazards nature might throw at the human-built environment. It was also an important cautionary tale for an even larger […]