The Beach in Dunwich
I don't know why a travel story about a sleepy seaside village in Britain showed up in my Twitter feed, nor why I clicked on it. It was about Dunwich, a place with fewer than 200 residents which has a little museum with displays about the bustling town, one of the largest in England which disappeared into the sea due to a succession of storms in the 13th and 14th centuries. The bustling port never recovered.
Apparently there have been plenty of stories about fishing gear snagging on the buildings of the sunken town and in recent years work has been done to map these submerged streets from the distant past. These include eight churches and a couple of monasteries where people likely prayed for deliverance from the terrors of those destructive storms. Dunwich is not alone. There are hundreds of coastal communities around the British Isles which have succumbed to the sea.
Dunwich Museum
This got me thinking about the projections about rising sea levels because of climate change and the damage which will result in coastal areas around the world. Cities such as Miami are experiencing what's known as "sunny weather flooding" which is related to the combination of high tides and rising water levels rather than storms. Miami and New York and other big cities are spending billions on climate change mitigation but experts warn that the "perfect storm" of events -- the "storm from hell" could overwhelm defences, as happened in New Orleans.
Could the day come when millions of people will be on the move because of coastal areas becoming a climate change Atlantis? Would folk gather in churches and mosques and synagogues to desperately pray for deliverance? Perhaps our most meaningful prayer is repentance for our blindness to the climate emergency and a willingness to change our patterns of consumption and denial of what is already happening.
Flooded downtown Miami
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