23rd May 2011

Alistair McIntosh, in his climate change book Hell and high water, describes an important irony. He notes that similar to today, ‘the biggest fear of the ancients was of flooding…on a global scale that threatened cities near the coast’ (McIntosh 2008:109). The ancients tended to blame natural disasters on moral degradation. From a scientific perspective, however, disasters were unlikely to have been caused by human badness but rather ‘the plate tectonics of the Earth’s crust and…to ‘natural’ prehistoric climate change’ (p109). The irony, then, ‘is that the ancients developed an astute moral analysis of anthropogenic climate change but one that is perhaps more applicable to us today than it often was to them. As ecological prophets they were two or three thousand years ahead of their time’. To illustrate this, McIntosh uses the description of flooding in the King James ‘Authorised’ version of 1611, because he considers it ‘the most poetic, the most dramatic and, therefore, the most psychodynamic English translation’ (p111). The relevant verses are Genesis 6.5 – 7.21.

References

McIntosh, Alistaire (2008) Hell and high water: climate change, hope and the human condition. Edinburgh: Birlinn