Published September 30, 2024
Six months ago, I stood on Main Street in Chimney Rock, N.C., marveling at this postcard-perfect Southern Appalachian tourist town. Flanked by towering blue-green mountains, it nestled along a frothy whitewater stream where laughing children collected salamanders and sported a brewery, a barbecue joint, a magnificent ice cream shop, a gem store, and an array of little shops walking the fine line between kitschy and charming. It had become a favorite family haunt of ours, a place we’d try to get away to for a hike or invite friends to visit. Today, Chimney Rock is gone, wiped off the map—along with so many of the western Carolina towns and landscapes where I spent my childhood. As we watched the aerial footage of a valley choked with the fragments of upstream towns and shattered lives, my daughter wept silently beside me.
Today, the nation is slowly waking up to the scale of the apocalypse that Hurricane Helene unleashed over 8,000 square miles of the southern Appalachians, as hundreds of thousands struggle to find food, water, cell service, or just a way out of a wrecked and twisted landscape where almost every road was turned into a raging river. Our broken political system and absentee president have struggled to respond, with private citizens forced to organize helicopter rescues and insulin drops. Perhaps more than any disaster in recent memory, Helene highlights the increasingly yawning gap between our technical knowledge-gathering prowess and our capacity to act upon it. Our tech titans tell us all we need is more data. Appalachia begs to differ.
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Brad Littlejohn was a Fellow in EPPC’s Technology and Human Flourishing and Evangelicals in Civic Life programs from 2022-2025. His wide-ranging research and writing encompasses work on the relation of digital technology and embodiment, the appropriate limits of free speech, the nature of freedom and authority in the Christian tradition, and the retrieval of a Protestant natural law ethic.
