Floods and climate change: Sustainable development and other imaginations

Soaked as we are in anxieties about climate change, the great flood in the Book of Genesis offers a defining metaphor. Nature, in this mythological account, plays out as vengeful disaster. The Ark, on the other hand, is a technology that can mitigate and ultimately save lives while Noah, the patriarch, embodies prescient policy. The story of the great deluge, however, for all its compelling elements, gets one aspect of the plot wrong—the idea of the flood itself as always being an overwhelmingly calamitous event.