Someone once wrote, "The work of God is the work of nature; and only through nature is God revealed."

Coal and timber operators and their apologists are scrambling to blame God and nature for recent severe flooding in heavily timbered and surface mined areas of West Virginia.

Lawyers for industry routinely blame "Acts of God" for their client’s debacles. It has become so routine that an "Act of God" is recognized by the courts as a normal, accepted defense for events directly related to failure of poorly designed water and waste impoundments that fail to contain their mucky, often deadly materials.

But what of God and recent flooding in southern West Virginia? I would argue that God, through natural events, is once again warning mankind that there are serious consequences to massive spoiling of God’s creation. And nothing in recent West Virginia history is more massive and destructive than the sterile and barren gigantic mountaintop removal coal mining projects and associated valley fills that now tower over entire watersheds. These watersheds are drowning and suffocating in the water and sediment runoff from these giant disturbances of God’s natural creation.

The Bible tells us of God’s wrath visited upon the earth in the form of a giant flood, for alleged sins of mankind, in the time of Noah. Is it not reasonable that God visit upon the earth more giant floods as a natural result of mankind having destroyed God’s natural barriers that would have diminished such floods?

When the trees and topsoil, God’s natural sponge against the worst of floods, are stripped away and allowed to erode into and fill the streams that would carry natural rain runoff, then it is natural that God-sent rains will result in floods.

When man and machines move whole mountain tops into the valleys below, where is the rainwater God sends us to go except to sheet off into the inhabited valleys even further below, in giant waves that overwhelm the ability of sediment clogged streams and rivers to handle such a volume of runoff in such gigantic bursts?

Does God visit natural wrath upon us in response to mankind’s sins against God’s creation. YES!

But for those who seek a less theocratic explanation of flooding events as they relate to mining and timbering practices, one only need look in a junior high school science textbook. There one can read that, in nature, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Go figure.