As June was just beginning, in those days just before the rain fell and the rivers rose and the levees broke and the floods poured through the Midwest, one of the scripture readings in many churches was the familiar story of Noah and the ark, the story of God destroying most of creation and starting over again.

It's a story that gets used as a reference point for those who want to interpret every natural disaster as a form of God's punishment on humanity. You heard it from preachers like Rev. John Hagee of Texas after Hurricane Katrina, who linked the destruction of New Orleans to plans for a gay pride parade. You heard it from Muslims after the tsunami of 2004 overwhelmed the Indian Ocean coastlines saying that immoral living had brought on this catastrophe.

There's another view of that Noah story. It's a view that attributes it to the way the early Jewish people, like their counterparts in other cultures, tried to explain the natural disasters of their own era. It may not have been the whole earth that was flooded - just the areas known to the people who first told this story. The story was about humans trying to figure out their relationship to God in the midst of disaster. The put the blame on those they thought had done wrong and then invoked God's wrath as an explanation for the horror of the flood.

So what does this have to do with the floods of 2008? Despite an overabundance of jokes about building arks, there was not a lot of talk about God bringing these floods as punishment for the sins of Midwesterners. There were questions about how God could allow this to happen. How could bad things happen to good people?

But nature has long taken its own course, bringing flood and drought, blizzards and tornadoes. The floods, though, may well have been made worse by the decisions we as human beings have made over the last century or so. And that's really closer to the way stuff works. It's not God arbitrarily wreaking havoc on the world. It's human actions that have consequences.

Amanda Paulson of the Christian Science Monitor wrote a vividly clear account earlier this month detailing the decisions about levees and dams and flood plains and paved-over wetlands that all contribute to the flooding patterns of this summer.

In some cases, it was decisions about the strength of the levees. She noted that to qualify for the National Flood Insurance Program, buildings must be protected by a levee build to the 100-year flood standard. (That means there is a 1 percent chance in any year that the flood will rise above the levee.) Compare that to the Netherlands, which has a 10,000 year flood standard along the ocean coasts and a minimum 250-year standard inland.

So we save money on our levees, only to have our communities overwhelmed by rising water.

Other human decisions come into play as well. Plowed fields have replaced tallgrass prairies. Drainage pipes under fields move water quickly from field to stream. Wetlands have been replaced with construction. Sediment is filling rivers and changing their course.

The way the story of Noah and the flood often gets interpreted is that God is punishing immoral behavior by humans. But the environmental consequences of bad stewarship of the land and water offers another model. It's a model of human catastrophe resulting from human actions that may have seemed good at the time, but that ultimately cause huge amounts of grief.