hell and high water
Climate change has left its calling card in a place deniers and believers both call home.
In late July, the sky opened up over eastern Kentucky and poured down devastation.
Some have called it a thousand year flood. Some say it’s gonna happen again, maybe over and over. Some are quick to point out the vulnerable state that decades of deep mining, strip mining and shoddy reclamation have left in these mountain towns. No matter your thoughts on fossil fuels, no one can doubt that Climate Change has left its calling card in a place deniers and believers both call home.
It might be difficult to understand this area unless you’re from here, and I am. My hometown of Wise, VA is just about 30 miles from the ravaged area. My father worked in eastern Kentucky for much of my childhood. I spent many a summer visiting relatives in this area. So even though I haven’t lived here since I left for college in 1977, when I drove thru the wreckage left by raging rivers, my heart ached same as if I’d never left. I talked with many people, and the lilt and cadence of their language was so familiar that something in my heart center was activated. The land has its own language too. Many of the small towns originated as part of coal camps which sit crowded at the base of hills where the river, the railroad, the streets and modest houses have just enough room to co-exist. In the larger coal towns where supervisors and ‘company men’ might have lived, their houses were usually a bit further up the hillside. Outside of these towns, still other people live up hollers - the small valleys that snake up mountainsides alongside a creek usually.
Main street in Neon, Kentucky.
I feel at home in these places with these people, even though I’ve lived most of my life in a city. I was in eastern Kentucky one week after the flood roared through and pushed homes and people down the slopes. The wreckage was like a war zone, yet I observed resilience that left me in awe of the human spirit. But I also heard and felt despair and anguish and saw first hand what climate refugees look like. They look like me. And you.
If the good Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise: Finding the political and personal will to combat climate change
Whether its wealthy Californians running from wild fires, northwesterners baked by heat waves, Floridians contending with sea level rise, or already destitute Appalachians displaced by water, maybe this flooding in Kentucky will be yet another wake-up call? We’ve been hitting snooze on the scientist’s predictions for way too long and the alarm bells now come in the form of ruin. It’s time for all of us to embrace systemic change and support policies and technology that combat climate change AND to take personal responsibility for reducing our individual carbon footprint. What will you do?
