During the California floods of January 1995 and the Mississippi floods of 1993, the nightly news aired dramatic reminders of how human efforts to control rivers have failed -- or worse -- caused even bigger problems. "We created last year's flood damage," says UC Davis geology professor Jeffrey Mount, author of the new book "California Rivers and Streams" (UC Press, 1995). "Rivers will undo what we do if we don't work with them." Mount points out that the traditional engineering approaches to flooding and water supply, involving costly levees, channels and dams, conflict with the natural behavior of rivers. More problems are in store, he says, as dams fill up with sediment and floodplains become increasingly urbanized. "We are locked in a vicious cycle, where each engineering solution requires yet another engineering solution to correct for it," Mount says. In the long run, it's cheaper, safer and more environmentally sound to adapt to a river, than to force it to adapt to us, he says. An electronic overview of the book is available under "California Rivers and Streams" at the geology department World Wide Web site, http://www-geology.ucdavis.edu/.