kthulhu wrote:Yes, but natural disasters aren't caused by corporations, they're caused by God
. Unless corporations have natural disaster machines....
Bah, human actions (and by that, inclusive of corporate decisions) can and do regularly affect the scope and occurance of natural disasters.
Landslides, for example, are frequently the direct consequence of human activity. Seemingly insignificant modifications of surface flow and drainage may induce landslides. In an urban setting, improper drainage most often induces disastrous sliding. The placement of buildings on slide-prone coastal dunes (look to California for this), eroding headlands and sand spits, or at the edge of a receding shoreline, may lead to the loss of the structure. It has been noted that in Portland, population pressure has pushed construction into many areas and sites previously rejected as landslide-prone. Agricultural irrigation and forestry practices such as <a href="
http://www.lightparty.com/Economic/Clea ... ar-cutting and stripping vegetation from naturally oversteepened slopes have been shown to be responsible for a spate of landslides</a>. Highway construction on similar slope conditions awaits only the first good rain to provoke earth movement. In an urban setting, improper drainage most often induces disastrous sliding.
One might also look to the failure of the <a href="
http://www.ida.net/users/elaine/idgenwe ... htm">Teton Dam in Idaho in 1976</a> and the <a href="
http://lists.uakron.edu/geology/natscig ... ississippi floods of 1993</a> as examples of human actions either leading directly to natural disaster or making the disaster more catastrophic through channelization of waterways and wetland destruction, which, in both cases, would have slowed the progress of flood waters.
During the 1930s, poor agricultural practices, and increased mechanized farming led to nearly a decade of <a href="
http://www.ptsi.net/user/museum/dustbowl.html">"Dust Bowl</a>" climate in the West and Midwestern U.S.. Similarly desertification in the Sahel of Africa is regularly blamed on similar factors, though economic conditions, and political turmoil in the region make conservation efforts by either farmers or governments difficult.
And the notion that it is possible to argue that human caused disasters are not "natural" is little more than fancyful and ego driven thinking. Calicott, Nash, Foreman, Leopold, Muire, among others we might note as being or having been leading conservationist thinkers, handily dismissed the notion that humans can continue to place themselves as "seperate" from nature.
up in the sky are not going to HEAVEN, there is NOT A heaven :\ 
