It Never Rains in Southern California

It Never Rains in Southern California
Deuteronomy 11: 1- 32

“It never rains in southern California,” the song says, though it goes on to comment that they don’t warn you how it pours. It’s raining this morning. It is several months since it rained, and that is no problem to me as a British person who has seen plenty of rain, but I know we need rain. We are in the midst of a long-term drought. We are banned from irrigating our gardens most days of the week, and we are urged to take short showers, which are trivial deprivations, but they herald a bigger problem. The governor is threatening to veto seven hundred bills unless the legislature agrees on a deal to repair the state’s water ecosystem and increase water conservation. This morning I also received an e-mail from friends in the Philippines who have been on the receiving end of a typhoon (actually our rains are apparently related to those rains the other side of the Pacific) that has caused serious flooding in different parts of the country. It seems quite likely that both excess of rain in some places and shortage of rain elsewhere result from humanly induced climate change. If so, we are experiencing the consequences of our own wrong actions in the way we have treated the world...