White Sulphur Springs, WV. Photo by Meera Subramanian.
Second in a series of stories for InsideClimate News. An evangelical mountain town in West Virginia lost eight people to flooding from an extreme rain storm last year. Many residents see the Biblical prophecy of the apocalypse, and welcome it, while some are considering climate change in a new light.
Jake Dowdy is a police officer in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, where he lived a block from Howard Creek, a stream so inconsequential you could usually hop-skip across parts of it without wetting your toes.
It was the morning of June 23, 2016, and a heavy rain was falling as Jake went to the gym for a workout. He wasn’t thinking much about the rain, other than that it’d be good for the garden. When he got home around noon, he had lunch and kicked up his feet in the living room, chilling out for a while before his 4 pm shift. He drifted off to sleep on the couch and awoke when his wife texted, confusing him for a moment; she was concerned about reports of flooding.
His disorientation turned to panic when he set his feet on the carpet and felt it squish soggily beneath his soles. He had just enough time to grab the cat and wade through thigh-high rushing water to his truck.
Read more at InsideClimate News or West Virginia Public Broadcasting.
Just read this “Gods hand in the Deadly floods…” and as a 20+ year advocate of action about Global Warming and a 2 year activist with the Citizens Climate Lobby, I find your insights spot-on.
The coming apocalypse is a big factor in the thinking in San Antonio, Texas (where I live and interact). Responses (on both sides) from the average person are usually “silence” when I pursue similar thoughts about the environment and/or spiritual matters. Why? It’s been my experience that “religious” folks don’t understand the science viewpoints and vice-versa. So when confronted, they ball up into their comfortable paradigms. I suppose that’s human nature but it sure is frustrating.
Bottom-line: I don’t understand why there’s a difference between religious attitudes and the scientific ones (except they seem to ignore each other, and they don’t listen to the same information.) For example, on the debate about evolution. Why can’t that be “how God does it”? “It” being life for humans.
PS: There are others also who believe that, before the climate change gets too bad (who knows how they define that though), technology will save the day. With these folks, I have even less meaty rebuttals.
thanks for reading, Bill. It’s good to remember that there is a solid 20% of evangelicals that don’t feel the science and their religious beliefs (Katherine Hayhoe there in Texas is a prominent example of this), and instead following the ideals of “Creation Care” — taking care of God’s creation as part of our role as stewards. Onwards!