Natural disasters

Often people search for either meaning or some pattern in natural disasters, often attributing them to human action or some divine punishment.

The relationship between disasters and humans come in three varieties. There are the ones we are responsible for. If we channel a river and then build in the flood plain, when there's a good rain and the river comes up, we cause our ill-conceived building to flood.

There are disasters that are a hybrid of human and nature. Pumping CO2 into the atmosphere causes climate change, which, through a chain of activity, can make hurricanes, natural occurrences, more intense, thus causing more damage.

Then there are disasters that have nothing whatsoever to do with humans, such as the huge earthquake that hit Japan. In those cases, the earth does what it does, and it has nothing to do with us. We aren't all that important.