From the point of view of many humans, the term "natural disaster" is a convenient scapegoat because it allow a person (or a whole nation) to blame nature for their own poor planning. Wherever we find so-called "natural disasters" around the world (such as Brazil at the moment), we also usually find a large group of people who have cut down the forests that buffer rainfall, paved over the grasslands that allow rain to soak into the soil, and built their homes right in the middle of gullies and natural drainage channels. When the floods come, they look to the sky and curse Mother Nature, shouting, "We got hit by a natural disaster!"
Of course, in some cases it really is a natural disaster. When a volcano blows and causes widespread destruction beyond what anyone could have reasonably foreseen -- such as Mt St Helens in the 1980's -- that's a legitimate natural disaster. When an under-the-ocean earthquake causes a fifty-foot tsunami that wipes out a beach town, that's a legitimate natural disaster, too. When a large meteorite slams into the planet with the force of millions of atomic bombs, laying waste to an entire era of unique lifeforms (the dinosaurs, for example), that's a natural disaster.
But getting wiped out by a flood because you built your house right in the flood path of a local river is not a natural disaster. That's a man-made disaster. Or, more accurately, it's just poor planning on the part of short-sighted humans. And when it comes to disasters, there's plenty of short-sightedness to go around these days.
Why most natural disasters aren't natural at all
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