It has been hard watching the news in this last month. Even as we watched and wondered about the huge piles of snow melting in our yards & streets, we have been hearing day after day of the flooding in Taber area, in Vulcan County, and other parts of Alberta, and now the pictures of the St. John River in New Brunswick overflowing its banks. It is all eerily familiar, and creates that uneasiness for us, here in High River. We are a town who now knows what that means. We watch those pictures & we understand what is happening behind the scenes in homes & basements. When evacuation notice is given, we are acutely aware of what that means.
Two years ago, at this time, it was the Fort McMurray fires. Last year, it was extensive fires in BC, fires & mudslides in California, multiple devastating hurricanes hitting the Caribbean and the southern US. And I haven’t even left our continent yet.
It is not just because we have such immediate and easy access to news that there is this overwhelming sense of natural disasters. Statistically, there really are more natural disasters more often in our world. The climate is changing.
Humans are, at least, part of the cause of that change. But my point today is not to get into a debate about how much of this is a natural cycle on the earth and how much is human caused. Humans have a part to play in addressing climate change and my point today is to talk about what it means for us as people of faith.