My hometown, Hagerstown, Indiana, recently made news for its performance in the Little League World Series.
Today, Hagerstown makes headlines for more tragic reasons, after storms flooded Nettle Creek and other parts of eastern and central Indiana, including Indianapolis.
While severe weather is no stranger to Hoosiers, this scale of violent weather is unprecedented.
The aftermath is shocking. Ball fields have been swept away, hardware and grocery stores ruined, and dozens of families lost homes, cars and possessions.
And that's just Hagerstown. Damage nearby is even worse. Many in Northwest Indiana are still reeling from tornadoes preceding the floods. At Purdue, we mourn a prospective student, Matthew Morey, taken by floodwaters in Delaware County. The death toll is seven, but total economic, social, and human costs are yet to be tallied.
As jarring as the experience is, with climate change we risk this becoming a "new normal."
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change documents "3.3 to 3.6 billion people live in contexts ... highly vulnerable to climate change," places where "human mortality from floods, droughts and storms was 15 times higher" than less vulnerable places.
At Purdue, I teach courses on environmental policy and politics. Among the key lessons is: "There is no such thing as a natural disaster." As geographer Neil Smith wrote after Hurricane Katrina, "in every phase and aspect of a disaster ... the contours ... and difference between who lives and who dies is ... a social calculus."
What makes a natural event a disaster — or not — is thoroughly social and political.
Thus, to understand what is happening where I call home, we must address how policies, politics and political leadership in Indiana are failing Hoosiers.
According to U.S. News, Indiana is dead last in environmental quality, with Hoosiers exposed to twice as many drinking water violations and four times the industrial pollutants as the national average. In 2022, the Indy Star reported "nearly 25,000 miles of Hoosier rivers and streams," more than any other state, and 99% of the lakes and reservoirs designated for drinking water tested were "too polluted ... for recreation, fish consumption, aquatic life and drinking water."
So much of the state now devastated by storms were once wetlands, which serve ecosystemic vitality and climate resilience by absorbing precipitation and buffering storms and erosion. What little wetlands remain had some of their last, remaining legal protections recently stripped.
And more than most, Indiana depends on fossil fuels, especially coal. Not only does this degrade environmental quality directly, fossil energy addiction fuels the climate crisis threatening even more severe conditions.
What does this mean for my students?
First is acknowledging that education is not about teaching or learning what to think and do in the world as much as how. To relentlessly ask and methodically pursue the right sorts of questions is a necessary skill. To effectively confront the world's problems, students must be able to ask and pursue hard questions, especially the "who gets what, when, and how" of politics.
This requires academic freedom for students and instructors, and the ability for us to connect as humans. However, recent actions by the Indiana Statehouse undermine academic freedom and higher education, undercut school funding, putting already vulnerable, especially rural, districts at greater risk, while jeopardizing land and water with data centers and microchip facilities to support a billionaire-led AI revolution with its own deleterious impacts on education, affordability, democracy, and personal liberties that few actually want — all while making it harder for my students to vote in a state lagging in political engagement.
A final lesson comes from Mr. Rogers: Look for the helpers. In Hagerstown, much of the restoration is led by families and youth with the baseball programs.
It isn't hard to find similar examples of courageous leadership today. Not long ago, students in West Lafayette organized to not just demand but take direct action on climate change. Among other things, this led to the Greater Lafayette Climate Action Plan.
The question is not whether ordinary people are willing or able to help tackle problems of the 21st century. Rather, who among us is willing and able to listen and cooperate enough to effectively address challenges yet to come?
Reed Kurtz is a political scientist, educator and writer at Purdue University and member of the Purdue-West Lafayette chapter of the American Association of University Professors and American Federation of Teachers Local 6751.
This article originally appeared on Lafayette Journal & Courier: Purdue prof: What Indiana's floods should teach us about climate change