AS I WRITE THIS, I’m looking at images from the disastrous floods in the Midwest and in Mozambique. One is in the heartland of the planet’s richest country and the other on the edge of the poorest continent, but from the air they look a lot alike: waters spread across farmland and cityscape, humans huddled in shelters. They look, actually, “biblical,” to use the word that is sometimes employed to describe devastation on an immense scale.
Flood, of course, was God’s weapon of choice early on, when, pissed off at the general humanness of humans, he vowed to cleanse the earth. But he made an exception for the faithful Noah, and perhaps more important he made an exception for everything else on earth: In this early-on iteration of the Endangered Species Act, he made sure that a breeding pair of everything got on board the ark. And then, once the waters receded, he made the covenant with the surviving humans that guaranteed he would never flood the planet again.
And yet it is flooding: The water is steadily rising, the rainfalls steadily growing more intense. Texas had the greatest rainstorm in American history about two years ago, when Hurricane Harvey dropped five feet of water on parts of the state. Five feet: Think about that.
One needn’t, I think, worry very much about the theology of the covenant. It should be clear that all God is promising is that God won’t flood the earth again. The very existence of a covenant implies that the other side has the agency to do or not do as it pleases. And what we have pleased to do is burn coal and gas and oil at unsustainable rates until the planet heats. And when the planet heats, glaciers melt. Water as it warms expands to take up more space. We’ve been told, explicitly, about all this: Scientists, using the gifts of intelligence that God gave them, have made it clear precisely what’s happening.
But we’re like all the other people who were not Noah. We don’t want to hear it; we want to go on with business as usual. And so some of us wield religion as a kind of amulet—a Get-Out-of-Floodwaters-Free card. Mozambique and the Midwest are among the more Christian places on the planet: I have no doubt that there are preachers this weekend explaining from the pulpit that God will prevent disaster.
God, it seems abundantly clear, does not want flooding. We want flooding—or at least we want it more than we want change. We’re willing to watch our brothers and sisters drown, and to risk drowning ourselves, rather than stand up to the powersand principalities that keep us stuck in the fossil-fuel age. White Christians, overwhelmingly, voted for Trump, after Trump declared climate change a hoax. No clearer and more tragic example of free will exists. So, no one blame God, and no one count on God to get us out of this. God flooded Noah’s world, and we are flooding ours.
Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, is the author most recently of The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at his Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.
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