Opinion: The terrible beauty of climate chaos
Erosion is happening before our eyes. I took pictures on June 21 to remember this moment that is now commonplace worldwide, people meeting extreme weather at home — in our case, Castle Valley, Utah. Add other pictures of most of Grand County flooding, including downtown Moab and you have a more complete picture of the week we had two flash floods within days of each other. Highway 124, locally known as the “River Road,” looked like the first day of creation as dozens and dozens of pink sediment-laden waterfalls were cascading off red rock cliffs reaching the Colorado River in seconds. I didn’t know there could be that much free falling water in the desert in times of drought. San Juan County also experienced violent flash floods that reshaped and redistributed sand and land within the Valley of the Gods that no god of flesh or stone could control.
— By Terry Tempest Williams, writer-in-residence at the Harvard Divinity School. She divides her time between Utah and Massachusetts