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.

Of course, that’s only one city, and the Gulf of Mexico is a long way away.  Look for a lot more excitement on ‘Old Man River’ before it’s over:  This may take a month or more to play out.  But to give you a taste of what’s to come, here are some of the headlines today from Google News (search on ‘Mississippi River Flooding’):

Ohio River Sets New Record, Mississippi Waters Still Rising

Bloomberg - Brian K. Sullivan – ‎4 hours ago‎

The 6- to 10-day outlook from Commodity Weather Group LLC calls for below-normal rain in the southern US, including the Mississippi River valley. “These areas will be drier over the next 10 days, helping to ease the severity of flooding a bit for …

Isle of Capri Casino Hotel in Lula closed due to Miss. River flooding

Today’s THV - Amanda Terrebonne – ‎15 hours ago‎

(KTHV) — The Isle of Capri Casino Hotel announced Monday that as of 3 am central time on Tuesday, May 3, the casino will be closed temporarily until flood waters recede. “As the Mississippi River continues to rise access to our property has been …

Water reaches Tiptonville

State Gazette - ‎4 hours ago‎

Lake County, as well as other counties, is also experiencing rising water levels, both from the Mississippi river and rainwater. Lake County Mayor Macie Roberson stated the northern part of Tiptonville has begun flooding and almost 50 residences have …

As an aside, that last story may be the most important one in the list.  I’ve never heard of Tiptonville (it’s in western Kentucky), nor Lake County, nor Mayor Roberson.  Nor have you (unless this blog has a bigger reach than I expect).    But Tiptonville is a special place for all of the folks who live there, and who are heading into their own slow-motion version of what the tornado victims across the south experienced last week.   We measure disasters with numbers, but the reality is that every disaster is a collection of hundreds, thousands of individual human stories.  It’s people who will suffer in all of these events.

So what’s to be done?  There is not much you can do about tornadoes or earthquakes.  While there are suspicions that a warmer world may lead to more and stronger tornadoes, it appears that the link between climate change and tornadic activity isn’t there yet.   Like earthquakes, tornadoes are part of God’s world – we’ve got to learn to live with them.

Floods are a bit different.  In most places, the natural world doesn’t have drip irrigation.  Our water is delivered in batches.  When it rains, there will almost always be more than we need for the moment – sometimes so much more that we have a flood.  And then it will be dry, sometimes for a very long time.  In this sense, floods are part of the system by which the natural world runs.  And in fact, throughout most of history, floods would have been welcomed as nature’s way of restoring depleted soil with a fresh new layer of silt.

Care of Creation’s project area in Kenya comes to mind as an example of how a normal hydrological system should work.  In this region of East Africa, farmers have long counted on two rainy periods in the year:  The “long rains” come about now and last for six weeks or so.  The “short rains” come in November.  In between, hardly a drop falls from the sky.  In normal years, in normal times, this wasn’t a problem.  God’s creation and human beings had all adapted to this rainfall pattern:  During the brief, intense rainy periods,  the mountain forests acted like sponges, soaking up the rain when it came, and gradually releasing it into streams and rivers over the entire dry season.  Many mountain streams would flow year round, even during the months with no rain.

This system has been severely disrupted – almost destroyed – in East Africa.  Vast stretches of forest have been removed for firewood, charcoal, or to make room for farmland, and the result has been completely predictable:  Erratic rainfall (made worse by global climate change), floods when it does rain, contributing to massive erosion, and then droughts when it doesn’t.  I have personally stood with Kenyans who showed me a dry stream bed that used to flow year round when they were children.  The important lesson:  It is not God who dried up the streams.

We have a tendency to lecture people in countries like Kenya about how dangerous it can be to destroy the natural systems God has provided.  I give some of these talks myself.  Such lectures aren’t misplaced.  People in these countries tend to live closer to the edge than do those in, say, middle America, and when your country’s water supply is fragile anyway, destroying the forests that provide that supply is not ever a good idea.

All of this makes the following Google News entry quite interesting:

Mississippi Floods Can Be Restrained With Natural Defenses

NatGeo News Watch (blog) - Sandra Postel – ‎4 hours ago‎

As riverboat casinos close along the lower Mississippi River as a precaution against disastrous flooding, another form of river gambling is coming under the spotlight — the bet that levees will be able to safeguard cities and farms from the rising …

Take a minute and click through to read the story.  It turns out that here in the US we are doing with our natural wetlands what Kenyans have been doing with their forests:

Over the last three-quarters of a century, while engineers were building hundreds of miles of flood-control structures along the river’s banks, the water-holding wetlands in the Mississippi watershed were being drained and filled to make room for more farms and homes. Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri and Ohio have each lost more than 85 percent of their wetlands.  Minnesota, where the Mississippi originates, has lost a whopping 9.3 million acres of wetlands, 62 percent of its pre-industrial total. All together, eight states of the upper Mississippi basin have lost 35 million acres of wetlands, an area the size of Illinois.

Those wetlands worked like a giant sponge: they absorbed rainwater and then released it slowly to nearby streams or the groundwater below. In this way, they mitigated floods and made the job of levees that much easier. But with these natural protections largely gone, levees have been left to do all the work.

So… we could say, with the Kenyan ladies of the cartoon, ‘God, why have you let these floods destroy our homes (again)?’ while looking out at acres of mall parking lots where wetlands used to be.  I think we’d get the same answer.

It’s not God’s fault.

It would appear that when we “pave paradise to put up a parking lot”, there are consequences.

The Egyptian revolution now underway has a personal connection for me – my niece Annie is attempting to pursue graduate studies in the middle of the chaos.  I had a conversation with her mother, my sister Marilyn this morning:  “So what’s Annie doing?  Trekking to the airport every day to try to get out?”  “Not exactly – she’s trekking to demonstrations every day…” Anyone who knows Annie – heck, anyone who knows her mother – would not be at all surprised by that. Marilyn’s family lived in Egypt for a number of years, and she has been covering the crisis very competently on her blog here if you’d like a well-written day-to-day overview including occasional eye-witness reports from Annie.

There are so many dimensions to this uprising that it’s hard to know even where to start.  There are plenty of obvious dimensions of this crisis:  A hard-pressed population’s desire for freedom.  The fear many have of the possibility – maybe remote, maybe not – of an Iran-style Islamic state taking the reins after Mubarak leaves.

Peeling back the layers, though, there is a dimension of this crisis that directly affects the topic of this blog – creation care.  In yesterday’s New York Times we read

Entrenched corruption, the depredations of police forces and demands for free elections have all helped drive the protest movement, but for many Egyptians, rising prices and unemployment were the strongest motivations to stand up to the government.

When people can’t work or can’t even feed themselves they will do desperate things.  From last night’s All Things Considered:

ROBERT SIEGEL, host: Among the many forces driving political unrest in Egypt, Tunisia and other countries is the rising cost of food. Prices for wheat, corn, rice, sugar, coffee and other basics have been surging. A U.N. report shows its food price index is at the highest level ever recorded. Food subsidies in Egypt have helped tamp down some of the anger there, but concerns are growing along with prices.

NPR’s Chris Arnold reports.

CHRIS ARNOLD: In the past six months, the price of wheat and corn has nearly doubled in many parts of the world. And in areas where people spend as much as half their income on food, that’s making it very hard for people to feed their families.

This is at least part of what’s driving the desperation and anger that’s sending people out into the streets of Cairo, such as this protester who spoke to Al-Jazeera.

Unidentified Man: (Through translator) We are tired, ma’am. We are tired. Stop the price hikes. We are suffering. We are Egyptians. We love Egypt. But stop this. We want to eat. We want to live, we and our children.

ARNOLD: Across a continent in the snow-covered city of Davos, Switzerland, economist Nouriel Roubini spoke to CNN.

Dr. NOURIEL ROUBINI (Chairman, Roubini Global Economics): What has happened in Tunisia is happening right now in Egypt. And also, riots in Morocco, Algeria, Pakistan are related not only to high unemployment rate and to income and wealth inequality, but also to this very sharp rise in food and commodity prices.

ARNOLD: So why are food prices rising so quickly? One reason is that bad weather has ruined crops in many parts of the world. There have been floods in Australia and Pakistan. Extreme heat last summer in the U.S. hurt corn production. Russia was hit by a severe drought last summer.

And that is the creation-care connection to this crisis: People are hungry.  Just two weeks ago we commented on this  food crisis, citing Lester Brown:

The unrest of these past few weeks is just the beginning. It is no longer conflict between heavily armed superpowers, but rather spreading food shortages and rising food prices—and the political turmoil this would lead to—that threatens our global future.

If we are not willing to feed the hungry for their own sakes, setting aside what Jesus clearly teaches us, would we be willing to feed them for the sake of our own security?  I wonder – and mostly because feeding the poor now doesn’t mean bringing a can of food to church for the food pantry or even donating to an international development organization.  Neither of these will hurt, but when the problem is weather (read: climate) , or water, or soil degradation, they aren’t going to help much either.  Lester Brown again:

Unless governments quickly redefine security and shift expenditures from military uses to investing in climate change mitigation, water efficiency, soil conservation, and population stabilization, the world will in all likelihood be facing a future with both more climate instability and food price volatility.

And many more scenes like this:

So how do we respond?  Where to begin?  The people of God have got to take these things seriously.  We may not be able to solve all of the problems, but we can start.  Check out some other recent posts on the role of the church in mobilizing in response to problems like this.

Countdown to Cape Town: What does the church have to offer? Part 2

Countdown to Capetown – Final: A Call to Respond

This won’t be a surprise to those who paid attention to some of the serious weather events of 2010:  When Russia’s wildfires exploded, we heard that Russia would be banning wheat exports for the immediate future.  Then Pakistan lost an entire rice harvest and a good deal of wheat due to the worst flooding in that nation’s history – requiring Pakistan to import more than it normally would have done.  And now Australia’s floods are affecting not only coal but  wheat and other commodities.

We had a food-price crisis in 2008 – (see chart) – but that one appears to have been driven by a speculative and greedy market where investors who had no interest in food were grabbing futures contracts in the hope of exploiting the competition between eaters and drivers  in the rise of biofuels, particularly ethanol.  The Great Recession seemed to have provided some relief for eaters, and prices dropped back toward normal.

[Washington Post Graphic - click image for full size]

I’m not an expert – but this year’s food crisis seems to be different.  It is being driven by a disruption in supply, not by speculation in the market, and if this is the case, we need to be listening to people like Lester Brown who says “The new reality is that the world is only one poor harvest away from chaos.”

If you are an eater 0r a driver, you need to educate yourself on this story.  The Washington Post has a good story from last Saturday.  A couple of excerpts:

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations recently warned that in December its food price index surpassed its previous peak of early summer 2008, fed by particularly sharp increases in sugar, cooking oils and fats. Corn and soy prices were also moving up quickly, with corn hitting a 29-month high Friday.

In Bangladesh, rice prices jumped 8 percent in December. In India, the price of onions soared 80 percent in just one week.

“Now everyone is having fears of going back to the levels of 2007-08,” said Sudakshina Unnikrishnan, a Barclays Capital commodities analyst.

Rising food prices may have been an ingredient in the instability in Tunisia that drove that country’s president, Zine el-AbidineBen Ali, from office Thursday…

Lester Brown has a report out this week on the topic:

Whereas in years past, it’s been weather that has caused a spike in commodities prices, now it’s trends on both sides of the food supply/demand equation that are driving up prices. On the demand side, the culprits are population growth, rising affluence, and the use of grain to fuel cars. On the supply side: soil erosion, aquifer depletion, the loss of cropland to nonfarm uses, the diversion of irrigation water to cities, the plateauing of crop yields in agriculturally advanced countries, and—due to climate change —crop-withering heat waves and melting mountain glaciers and ice sheets. These climate-related trends seem destined to take a far greater toll in the future…

…The current surge in world grain and soybean prices, and in food prices more broadly, is not a temporary phenomenon. We can no longer expect that things will soon return to normal, because in a world with a rapidly changing climate system there is no norm to return to.

The unrest of these past few weeks is just the beginning. It is no longer conflict between heavily armed superpowers, but rather spreading food shortages and rising food prices—and the political turmoil this would lead to—that threatens our global future. Unless governments quickly redefine security and shift expenditures from military uses to investing in climate change mitigation, water efficiency, soil conservation, and population stabilization, the world will in all likelihood be facing a future with both more climate instability and food price volatility. If business as usual continues, food prices will only trend upward.

Brown’s latest book, World on the Edge, is available here.

So what should a Christian response be? We need to open our eyes:  Big things are happening in our world, but Jesus warned us, didn’t he?  We need to practice stewardship in our own lives so we will be able to help others.  There are good biblical examples for this with remarkable parallels to our own day (rich Christians in one part of the world helping those in another part).  You can help practically by supporting organizations like Care of Creation - our Farming God’s Way program has great potential to increase food supply by making God’s earth healthier.

And some of us may be in a position to do more,  If we have the ear of those in authoriy, or the authority ourselves to modify policies or to move corporations who can make a difference, then the example of Esther probably applies.  Who knows but that God has placed you in the position you are in today for ‘such a time as this?’

If you live in the northeastern US, the title “weird weather” will not be a surprise.  Or if you lived in the cold south this past winter.  (See “Snow in 50 States – What’s going on?“).  Or if you lived in the UK, Europe, Australia…

This is a summary of current (ie. happening right now) weird weather around the world posted by Brad Johnson at Wonkroom blog yesterday:

NORTH AMERICA Weeks after some of the strongest snowstorms ever to hit the East Coast, another powerful winter storm drenches the Northeast, kills eight people, and knocks out power for hundreds of thousands. Record warmth in North Dakota and Minnesota threatens another year of catastrophic flooding.

SOUTH AMERICA Tropical Storm 90Q, also known as Anita, the “second known tropical cyclone to form in the cooler South Atlantic Ocean,” is circling off the Argentina coast. The first known South Atlantic tropical cyclone, Catarina, was in 2004.

EUROPE “Hurricane-force winds and widespread flooding battered vast swathes of western France and left more than a million homes without power,” as the storm named Xynthia “killed at least 62 people across western Europe” in Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, and Germany en route to Scandinavia.

AFRICA The death toll has risen to 36 people “and nearly 38,000 left homeless when tropical storm Hubert smashed into Madagascar this week.” Last month, stormy weather wreaked havoc across Egypt, as twenty-foot waves crashed into Alexandria and a hail storm killed four people in Cairo.

ASIA “A severe sandstorm hit Xinjiang’s Hotan Prefecture in northwest China on Friday, reducing visibility to zero.” The sandstorms are sweeping across China, and “are expected to hit Taiwan Tuesday.”

AUSTRALIA-PACIFIC Tomas, a Category Four cyclone, is plowing through Fiji, forcing thousands to evacuate. A “beast of a storm” ripped through Melbourne, Australia last week, “bringing with it hailstones the size of tennis balls” and causing $200 million in damage. Meanwhile flooding “which has smashed all the records known” in Queensland peaked in the country’s northeast, “parts of which have been in drought for almost a decade.” Category Four cyclone Ului now hovers off the Australian coast after the Solomon Islands narrowly escaped its wrath.

Those who wonder or doubt the reality of climate change spend a lot of time focused on temperature records and stolen emails.  It might be more profitable to spend that time looking out the window.

Climate change is here.

So I’m sitting in a motel room in Missouri, preparing for an Our Father’s World Seminar in Manhattan, Kansas.  Everything is ready.  A lot of people have been doing a lot of work for many months to make this event happen.  Tomorrow I’ll pull into town, check out the venue, work with my friends and local coordinators Robynn and Lowell Bliss to set up tables, and wait for people to come…

Um, maybe.  A late spring snow storm has blizzard (that’s right, BLIZZARD) warnings being posted throughout the central plains, apparently including Manhattan.  So what’s a poor seminar speaker to do?

Relax.  People will come – or they won’t.  The world will go on regardless.

Enjoy the unusual feeling that comes from watching our civilisation’s machinery grind to a halt.  If we stopped ourselves a bit more often, maybe God wouldn’t have to take these steps to remind us of what is really important in life…

Be thankful you threw in your winter coat.  [...even though you forgot the boots & gloves.]

And remember – no, not strong enough: REJOICE in the confidence that God is in control and he knows what he’s doing.

The doctrine of God’s sovereignty is a wonderful thing!

Cheers!

[March 27, 4 am, Bethany, Missouri]