To the Editor:
Last week a heat wave spread across much of our country causing roads to buckle and crack in South Dakota and Kansas and heat-related deaths in several other states. We’re told that climate change is making heat waves longer and more frequent than in the past, particularly in the West, the Midwest, and much of the Northeast regions. Climate change may be a punishment from God for our bad choices, or a beginning of the end, or He may have other purposes. But should this make us strive less to follow His words?
In the Bible it says, “As for you, my flock, thus says the Lord God: Behold, I judge between sheep and sheep, between rams and male goats. Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture, that you must tread down with your feet the rest of your pasture; and to drink of clear water, that you must muddy the rest of the water with your feet?” (Ezekiel 34:17-18).
In Ezekiel 34, the shepherds of Israel may not have seen their selfishness in the trampled pastures and muddied waters until God pointed it out, just as most of us did not know that using fossil fuels such as coal and gasoline is changing our climate by releasing a lot of carbon dioxide. As caretakers of God’s garden on earth, perhaps we should look at ways to use less fossil fuels and more renewable energy to do our part to care for God’s creation and keep the climate more like God made it.

D. McCoy
Elizabethton