Floods in Kentucky - Photo courtesy Flickr CC License

Care of Creation, my organization, does a lot of work teaching people in Kenya and other East African countries about the dangers of destroying forests.  God gave us trees for good reason:  In terms of hydrology (water cycles), trees are essential.  They are like the columns holding up the roof of a building – lose the trees, the whole system falls apart.  It turns out that something very similar is going on in the Mississippi River watershed of middle America.  We’re a richer country – but it appears that mere wealth can’t stop a flood.  When we human beings carelessly destroy vital parts of the world God gave us to live in, it doesn’t seem to matter whether we’re living in a village in Kenya or on a farm in Missouri.

Lost in the blizzard of headlines over the last week – tornadoes, weddings, the death of a terrorist – is the developing  flood situation in the Mississippi River valley.  The few stories that we’ve seen have focused on what one commentator called a solomonic dilemma:  Whether to save a small, struggling riverside city (Cairo, Illinois) or hundreds of thousands of acres of the country’s best farmland in Missouri.  That case has been all the way to the US Supreme Court in the last 48 hours, with the result that last night the Corps blasted two miles of levees at Bird’s Point, just south of Cairo in order to reduce the pressure on that community’s flood defenses.  As of this writing, the river has receded by a foot – the Corps hopes that they’ll see three more feet of decline in the next couple of days. Read more »

In this blog we don’t spend a great deal of time on climate change/global warming.  This is not because we do not believe it’s a problem – it is.  But in the larger picture of what is happening in God’s creation, climate change is one of many problems, including loss of biodiversity (extinctions), water, deforestation, chemical pollution – the list could go on and on. The January issue of the Journal of the Royal Geographic Society, one of the most prestigious scientific organizations in the world, devotes itself to the question of whether and when the globe might reach a temperature increase of four degrees Celsius (7 degrees F) and what such a temperature rise might mean.

This is not good bedtime reading, but you need to at least take a look. Keep in mind that the 2070′s (see the first article below) are within the lifetime of today’s college students, and that this is not material from the radical edges of the blogosphere.  These are some of the world’s most respected scientists, but – considering the scenarios they are describing – some of them are more optimistic than I would have expected.

Below are some of the articles in this issue with a quote or two from each.  The content is free today – I’m not sure if it will remain so.  I have copies if the links to the articles no longer work – drop a note in the comments or send me a message. Read more »

Another guest post from Donn Ring.  Who knew water drops had so much to teach us?  [previous post by Donn is here.] Click on the pictures to see them full-size.

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I have often attended 2 martini or chardonnay social hours where mature folk chat about their recent global treks to visit the wonders of civilization — pyramids, temples, castles, palaces, fortresses, cathedrals, chateaus, museums, mausoleums, formal gardens. Monuments of Man. All very impressive and fascinating.

“Oh — Donn, have you seen the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London? Ahh — but then there is the Antwerp World Diamond Centre in Belgium. Have you been there? Stunning! And how about Paris’ Les Arts Decoratif with it’s fascinating display of fashion jewelry?”

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