Psalm 24:1 says: “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.”
In the conclusion to his 1962 masterful book The Fire Next Time, writer James Baldwin writes:
Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we — and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious Blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others — do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racist nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, recreated from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!
Bill Leonard
In 2026, perhaps we should expand the phrase “racist nightmare” to include “the racist and environmental nightmare.”
Fifty-four years since Baldwin wrote those words, the curse of racism remains, with new intensity all around us. At the same time, “climate change,” described as a ‘hoax” and a “con” by the current president of the United States, is frightfully illustrated in even a small sampling of news stories from August of this very year.
The “fire next time” is upon us, not by God’s actions but our own.
New York Times, Aug. 23, updated August 24
A prolonged and dangerous heat wave is set to grip parts of the Southern United States this week, as forecasters warned that temperatures are expected to soar into triple digits, with daily records at risk of being broken. The most intense heat is initially expected across the Southern Plains and Lower Mississippi Valley before shifting west into parts of the Southwest later in the week . … The heat will not ease much after sunset, with much of the South expected to remain above 80 degrees for several nights in a row.
New York Times, Aug. 24
Firefighters on Monday were still trying to tame a wildfire near Reno, Nev., that has driven tens of thousands of people from their homes and that is keeping many more ready to run from the flames.
The blaze, known as the Hawk fire, has burned more than 15,000 acres since it began Saturday in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Officials said that seven people had been injured, including three firefighters, and that more than 30 homes were destroyed. By Monday afternoon, the blaze was 27% contained, officials said. About 23,000 people remained under evacuation orders as of Monday afternoon, and an additional 40,000 were warned that they might need to leave at a moment’s notice. …
Arid conditions have propelled an active wildfire season across the American West this summer. In Washington state, hundreds of homes and more than 400,000 acres burned. In Oregon, a record 2.4 million acres have burned in 2026, according to state authorities.
A vintage hearse sits untouched right outside the property of Crystal Hallock where her home was destroyed in the Hawk Fire Aug. 22, 2026, in northwest Reno, Nevada. (Shane Merritt via AP)
New York Times, Aug. 23
With the seven states that rely on the Colorado River deadlocked over how to split its diminishing supply, the Trump administration is pushing its own plan to divide the water. The three downriver states — Arizona, California and Nevada — would most likely shoulder the most pain, but no single user stands to lose more than the Central Arizona Project. Short-term reductions, announced by the federal government on Friday, will cost Arizona roughly one-third of its share of river water over the next two years. But beyond that, a range of cutbacks remain possible. Under the most severe outcome, the system would be cut off entirely during the driest years, setting off a social and economic meltdown Arizonans shudder to even imagine.
A resident stands on the balcony of a damaged building during heavy rainfall along the Trishuli River, at Devighat, in Nuwakot district, Nepal, Friday, Sept. 4, 2026. The region was struck by devastating flash floods and mudslides following a high-altitude glacier collapse in late August. (Karma Bhutia/PTI via AP)
New York Times, Aug. 26
On the morning of Aug. 26, an entire glacier-covered mountainside in northern Nepal collapsed. Within minutes, a towering, churning wall of mud, rock and water engulfed villages in the valley of the Bhotekoshi River along the border between Nepal and Tibet. For many of those in its path, there was little time to escape. At least 900 people are dead; more than 4,500 people remain missing. The toll is expected to rise in the coming days. …
This is a sign of a new, disorienting danger in cold mountain zones: the rapid destabilization of glaciers and permafrost that can remake entire landscapes in the blink of an eye. The processes leading to these cascading failures are complex, but the hidden hand behind them is human-caused climate change. Our fossil fuel burning is pulling down the world’s highest peaks. …
Now something else is coming into view: Like termites gnawing on a house’s framing, rising air temperatures seem to be chewing away at the ice and permafrost holding slopes together at high elevations. We are accustomed to thinking of mountains — especially the Himalaya, which means “abode of snows” in Sanskrit — as fixed, timeless, immovable, permanent. The disaster in Nepal is the latest disturbing sign that mountains are fragile. The speed with which humans are warming the world is pulling them apart at the seams.
In the minutes before this week’s deluge struck and tore away the life he and others had known, a survivor downstream of the border said he heard what sounded like a “thunderclap” — the sound of one of the planet’s tallest mountains falling. This new warning alarm of climate breakdown is loud and terrible enough to echo around the world — if we choose to hear it.
Denial
The climate catastrophes referenced here occurred in the same year the current presidential administration withdrew the U.S. from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading global group for climate science, and the Paris Agreement, “a legally binding treaty on climate change.” Is that what the 77 million people who voted for this administration hoped would happen?
All these events sent me back to the Noah story as described in Genesis 7:19-23:
And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered. And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man: All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.
“When did the people of Noah’s world finally recognize there was no escape?”
And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.
In light of current climate crises, I keep wondering, when did the people of Noah’s world finally recognize there was no escape? The Genesis text sounds ominously like the title of The New York Times report on happenings in Nepal: “Mountains are Coming Undone.” Are people of faith listening?
In his 2014 book, Political and Spiritual: Essays on Religion, Environment, Disability, and Justice, Roger Gottlieb, professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytech and nationally known environmentalist, writes:
Quite simply, then, if (environmental) sustainability is not a religious issue, then religious people are ignoring how they themselves are destroying the necessary conditions for their own faith to exist in the future. If sustainability is a religious issue, however, then religions cannot continue as civilization’s unsustainable form of life. They cannot relegate ecological concern to a secondary status as it is now, but must take it at least as seriously as sexuality, poverty, war and peace, and tithing to the church. Actually, given the severity of the environmental crisis, it may be necessary to take environmental issues more seriously than the other issues. As sea levels, cancer rates, and the prices of oil and food rise, religious sustainability demands that a full and direct confrontation with our collective and individual ecological practices take pride of place.
Gottlieb wrote those words 12 years ago. In 2026, “religious people” would do well to act on them, if there’s still time, ever remembering Noah and Nepal.
While we still can.
Bill Leonard is founding dean and the James and Marilyn Dunn professor of Baptist studies and church history emeritus at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, N.C. He is the author or editor of 25 books. A native Texan, he lives in Winston-Salem with his wife, Candyce.