Rain of terror

Compare this to the sheer drama of Exodus14,wherePharaoh'sarmyis destroyed in full Cinemascope, or Joshua's violent and bloody escapades in Jericho and Ai, and it might look as if the Lord missed an opportunity for good copy when he simply rained a corrupt humanity (with the exception of Noah and his kin) out of existence.

Then again, for religious readers at least, the drama of Noah's story lies not in the flood itself, but in what follows, in Genesis eight and nine: the establishing of the covenant between God and creation, when the rainbow appears in the sky and God makes his famous promise: "And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh." Or, as the old spiritual says, with a certain bitter humour: "God gave Noah the rainbow sign/No more water, the fire next time" - an interpretation that had a distinct resonance during the cold war period, when the dominant fear was of a white-hot nuclear catastrophe.

More recently, however, the circle has turned again and, with the events, not only of the last week or so, but of the last several years in our minds, the sheer horror of the deluge has recaptured our imagination. Slow and untheatrical it may be, as a global phenomenon, but as a vision of gradual, overwhelming catastrophe it grips the imagination - and it raises the question, at once irrational and powerful, of whether some god or other is visiting his, her or its wrath on a generation whose "every imagination" is evil.

Are we finally being paid back for our abuse of the environment, and of our own natural dignity? Are we being punished for treating everything around us as mere "resource" to be plundered and consumed without concern for the consequences, for living our lives in a condition of futile luxury, driving our 4x4s the half-mile to the local shops and feasting our corrupt imaginations on Big Brother and computer porn? What is the meaning of the rainbow if, having received God's covenant, the human race simply returns to its corrupt ways?

The answer is clear, and any self-proclaimed Christian in "public service" can read it in the book of Genesis: the rainbow is a contract between humanity and the natural world, a promise that humankind will not be drowned in their homes like rats, as long as we, in turn, keep our part of the bargain, which is to "replenish the earth".

Replenish the earth. This is what the Judaeo-Christian God asks of us. The followers of other religious faiths, Buddhists, say, or Jains, speak of an even more rigorous respect for the life around us, a sense of responsibility to all living things that is encapsulated in the idea of ahimsa, often, though perhaps too crudely, translated as "do no harm". Every culture has a notion of natural justice, which is to say, natural order, from the highly complex and beautifully organic notion of karma, to the Tao Te Ching's poetic evocation of the organic intelligence that governs all things, to Paul's eloquent warning in Galatians: "Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."

But what is it, exactly, that we can expect to reap, as the full cost of our long-term contempt for the natural environment is finally revealed by global climate change? In Africa, in parts of Europe and the Americas, the threat appears to come from drought and desertification; here, and elsewhere in the northern hemisphere, we are beset by repeated and dramatic flooding - a natural phenomenon for which we are woefully ill-prepared.

Last week, for example, in what now appears to be part of a distinct trend, we witnessed the worst flooding in at least 60 years: thousands forced from their homes, millions of pounds worth of damage, the town of Tewkesbury transformed into an island (not for the first time), and whole estates of new housing rendered valueless and uninsurable, often because they were built on former flood plains, in spite of warnings from local environmentalists.

Our coastal defences are crumbling, our rivers are mismanaged, and the government is accused yet again of failing to draw up adequate plans for protecting us against thevagariesofanincreasinglyunpredictableclimate.Meanwhile,theseais warming up, the polar ice is melting and, as a maritime country, Britain may well be about to suffer the even more dramatic consequences of a gradual but catastrophic rise in sea level. After years of spin about "global warming", we are beginning to see what climate change has in store for us - and it seems likely that a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

It's an odd notion, considering how much we talk about it, but we've never been very good at weather. An inch of snow brings the whole country to a standstill; a minor heatwave has us collapsing in the supermarket aisles. Still, when it comes to rain, surely we of all people have the experience to cope with whatever nature throws at us. We may not be so inured to the wet as the Norwegians perhaps - a favourite joke in Bergen tells of an American tourist who, after eight days of continuous downpour, stops a wee boy on the street and asks him if it ever stops raining in Norway; the boy's reply is: "I don't know. I'm only nine" - but we're not that far behind in making light of bad weather.

Dig a little deeper, though, and even the Scots psyche reveals a fear of water that is both profound and primeval: a fear, not only of the flood itself, but of what it brings forth in our imaginations. We might even venture to say that, for all of us, there is a certain consolation in the old spiritual's notion of "the fire next time" for, as devastating as it may be, fire has a cleansing, even a regenerative quality. After a fire, we begin again. We rebuild, we renew. The flood, however,washeseverythingaway,and turns what remains to mud; there is nothing left to rebuild, nothing left to renew.

In our imaginations, at least, fire purifies, but flood corrupts. After a fire, the people take stock and perhaps they live a better, cleaner life; when the flood abates, what follows is cholera and mudslides. Even the language itself reveals our deeper fear of the deluge: fire is associated with passion, with renewal, with inspiration and creativity, but the flood is about being overcome, about first losing control and then losing everything.

Dealing with flood conditions is a world away from simply staying cheerful when the family picnic is rained off, or a certain native Schadenfreude about the dreich days. To live with floods takes a deep-rooted strength of character, a quiet determination and good humour in the face of a wilful environment, an almostimpossible stoicism in the face of the uncontrollable.

These are strengths we lack because, for centuries, we have lived with a myth of control: a dual myth, essentially, in which we control nature in both its external - that is, environmental - and its internal - psychological or spiritual - manifestations. The truth, however, is that we control neither, and the flood continually wells up, not only in the world around us, but also in our own hearts and minds, to prove us gravely mistaken in our assumptions.

"Natureoffersnohome,"saysthe American philosopher, James P Carse, in his unjustly neglected masterpiece, Finite And Infinite Games. It's true. For humans, as for other animals, home is a provisional matter, a temporary dwelling-place that is only as good as our ingenuity and local knowledge make it. We cannot control nature, we can only learn how to live with a local environment, in a shifting, endlessly challenging and inventive cycle of feast and famine, dry and wet, give and take.

In PrairyErth, his magnificent study of Chase County, Kansas, a land subject to every kind of weather from drought to tornado to flood, William Least Heat-Moon recalls his conversations with the people of Saffordville, a tiny community a little too close to the Cottonwood River for comfort. Here, he is talking to Edith MacGregor, who came to the town in 1947, and "saw floods about every year" but didn't really suffer until 1951, when the water "rolled across those west bean fields like a wall".

"There's a story of the woman who in the drought of 1929 prayed hard for rain, even asking that the river overflow and water their drying corn, and it began raining, and the Cottonwood rose and washed out their whole crop, and I ask, did you pray? And she says, I suppose we did. My son got scared when the water started rising in the house, but he got over it. The first floor is four feet above the yard: I measured the water in this kitchen, and it came to the top of the table, 33 inches. We took canned goods upstairs: I remember a lot of hominy and mackerel. Haven't eaten hominy since."

It doesn't sound like an enviable life, but what emerges from Least Heat-Moon's stay in Saffordville and its neighbouring communities is the sense of a tentative, wary, yet profoundly satisfying relationship with the natural environment. Unlike most of us, these people cannot turn their backs on the world; they must be prepared for disaster, and they must come to terms with their fears and with their occasional losses.

Yet, as he leaves the MacGregor home, Least Heat-Moon is struck by their calm, and their stoical acceptance of the natural order: "These people of Saffordville, the whole population, all five of them, as they talk their way back in to the big floods, grow animated, and sorrows and smiles come and go so quickly about their faces that I almost don't see them, and their eyes are widened and keen.

They are not boastful, but they relish, not having beaten the river, but having held their own with it and not yielding to it other than by climbing a flight of stairs, and the whole time they realise the battle is a little foolish - just the way they want it.

"They recognise but do not say how the river whets a fine edge on their lives, and I never heard any of them speak love for the river, or hate. These are not people locked in the flood plain by poverty, they are held here by recollections of what the river has given them: hours of a family bound tightly like shocks of wheat, of moments when all their senses were almost one with the land, of times when they earned the right to be tenants of the first terrace of the Cottonwood River. One afternoon, Edith MacGregor said to me, Not everybody gets the chance to live like this.'"

I find that last remark deeply moving. I have walked the banks of the Cottonwood River, but only in a dry autumn season, the prairie grass singing in the wind, the great cottonwoods standing in the dry land like miraculous visitors who are just passing through, on their way to more hospitable terrain, the water itself slow and quiet. Reading PrairyErth's descriptions of the floods, of a man cut off from his family driving to the bluff above Saffordville to look down and see a lamp burning in an upstairs window as a signal that all at home are safe, or of a fleeing woman who stops her pickup on the highway while "a big old hog climbed up in the seat and sat down beside her", I am astonished to think that it's the same river.

I am filled with admiration for those people, that they took "the chance to live like this". At the same time, I would not wish to change places with them. I am not sure I would have the gumption, to be honest. Yet I feel certain that there is something I can learn from them, with respect to my idea of home, and what I call nature, and I know there is something in their way of life that we all must learn, if we are to come to terms with the changing weather.

Like the MacGregors and their neighbours, our education must begin with the idea that nature offers no home: we cannot defeat the river, we can only hold our own with it and try to regain the "fine edge" on our lives that comes of accord, and not control.Anaccord,notonlywiththe ungovernable waters that surround us, but also with the bright, dark tides that rise and fall within our souls. Otherwise, we will all be washed away.