The Earthscan report says: “Disasters are increasingly man-made. Some disasters (flood, drought, famine) are caused more by environmental and resource mismanagement than by too much or too little rainfall. . . . Disasters are social and political events which can be and often are prevented.

Similarly, one African newspaper charged: “Not all the agony [of droughts] can be blamed on the weather. . . . Wars from the Horn of Africa to the Atlantic shore and back to Mozambique have sent peasants fleeing from their croplands.” Ethiopia’s drought, for example, has been aggravated by years of civil war that has destroyed grasslands.

God or Greed?

Thanks to modern technology, farmers are now able to plow vast tracts of land​—including areas that ecologists say should not have been plowed in the first place. Said National Geographic respecting parts of the Great Plains of North America: “Speculators and hard-pressed ranchers have been plowing up hundreds of thousands of acres of fragile grasslands to grow wheat . . . These soils easily blow when it’s dry, and prolonged drought on the plains, like the one that led to the Dust Bowl [a drought-stricken area of the United States during the 1930’s] is only a matter of time.”

Already, some grazing lands in that region are covered with a blanket of soil reaching up to the fence posts. One cattle rancher thus affected said: “It’s not an act of God. It’s an act of greed. God doesn’t have a plow.” Mohandas Gandhi put it well when he said: “There is enough for everyone’s need but not for everyone’s greed.”

However, some would say it is the livestock raisers who are greedy. Some stock so many animals that the lands are overgrazed. And while they may get away with doing so for years, when drought strikes, overgrazed lands can turn into a permanent desert. Consider what happened on the borderlands of the Sahara Desert. Earlier this century, thousands of wells were sunk to provide more water. African livestock raisers rejoiced, for this allowed them to increase their livestock. But, alas, there was not sufficient grazing land to accommodate this increase!

“The Sahel was already sick when a drought began in 1968,” states the book Our Hungry Earth​—The World Food Crisis. “As the grasses died, herdsmen cut down trees so that their cattle could eat the leaves. The drought continued, and the grasslands and farmers’ fields started turning to desert.” The Sahara, according to New Scientist magazine, “has expanded southward by 650 000 square kilometres [250,000 sq mi] over the past 50 years.” That is an area larger than Spain and Portugal combined!

Then there are developers who chop down trees, ignoring the ecological consequences. “On a global basis,” says Professor Hanks, Director of the Institute of Natural Resources, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, “in the time it takes you to read this sentence, three hectare [7.4 a.] of forest will have disappeared. . . . There is much more to this loss of trees than a loss of raw material for energy and for building. Deforestation destroys well-established water cycles, leading to siltation of streams and rivers, depletion of ground water, intensified flooding, and an aggravation of water shortages during dry periods.”

Divine Punishment?

No wonder, then, that the aforementioned Earthscan report concluded that man​—not God—​is responsible for the disastrous effects of flood and drought. True, man does not control the weather, although there are some who think that man’s tinkering with the environment through nuclear testing and the like have altered weather patterns. However, as the Earthscan report stated:

“People are changing their environment to make it more prone to some disasters, and are behaving so as to make themselves more vulnerable to those hazards. Growing Third World populations are forced to overcultivate, deforest and generally overuse their land, making it more prone to both floods and droughts.”