The room was silent, but my ears were filled with the roar of flowing water, the screams of desperate men, and the sound of distant gunfire.

I walked into “Before the Deluge,” an exhibit at the Yale Center for British Art, expecting to see a room full of paintings mostly featuring Noah and the Abrahamic God, and maybe even epic floods from other religions. What I found, though, was a striking display of religious stories of deluge placed beside scenes of climate change and World War I.

Floods from religious stories carry themes of human helplessness in the face of divine power. Noah was able to survive only because God took pity on him, but no other creature on Earth stood a chance against the power of the deluge. The message of both history and the exhibit is clear: humans will always be powerless against floods, whether literal or metaphorical.

“Before the Deluge” probes the differences between the types of floods that humans face, both ancient and modern. Floods sent by God are not endings, but rather new beginnings for the human race. They carry a grain of hope amidst the chaos and destruction. Even the helpless soldiers of WWI believed that the war they fought would be the end of all wars, and thus nurtured hope throughout the flood of brutality and mass destruction.

One plaque describing “The Deluge,” a print made in 2001, contains a quote from its artist John Goto: “Tomorrow’s poor,” he said, “will live by the scenic water’s edge.” Groto’s print depicts a British landscape reminiscent of the landscape tradition of the 18th century with its dreary and foreboding tones. Goto’s landscape, however, does not portray a water’s edge but presents a scene almost entirely underwater. A rusted car and overactive smokestacks draw the viewer’s attention. A woman and child, frozen in motion, run in desperation, but whether they are running toward something or running away from the water remains unclear.

With Biblical stories of floods presented alongside apocalyptic scenes and brutally war-torn landscapes, “The Deluge” forces us to think about how humans have brought about the end of our own world. We have polluted and razed and depleted the world for the sake of production; we have bombed, gassed, and shot ourselves into oblivion. We have, in other words, inundated ourselves with our own floods. It seems that we ourselves have played the role of God in creating our Flood. In our story, though, there will likely be no Noah’s Ark to carry our hopes.

In Proximity to the Floods was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.