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. In the Third World where the poor are forced to overuse their land and live on dangerous ground, disasters are taking a rising toll.”

Consider how acts of man have brought about so-called acts of God. One night in May 1943 about 330 million tons of water poured into valleys in the western part of Germany. An act of God? No. It was caused by the bombing of the Möhne and Eder dams by British warplanes in World War II. Some 1,294 people drowned in the floods, and most were civilians.

Just five years earlier, a disaster occurred that some believe was more devastating than the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki! Commenting on a report from SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute), the magazine New Scientist said: “It was the dynamiting of the Huayuankow dyke of the Yellow River, which stopped Japanese troops advancing through China in 1938, but which also drowned several hundred thousand of China’s own people.” Millions more were left homeless.

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.”

An example of this can be seen in the Himalayas. “Forests in the foothills,” says the book Our Hungry Earth​—The World Food Crisis, “are fast disappearing. As a result, floods are getting worse in South Asia. A 1973 flood in Pakistan destroyed large amounts of stored grain. And in 1974, floods in Bangladesh and India damaged crops almost as much as drought.”

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.”

‘But is it not possible,’ some may ask, ‘that God somehow uses these disasters to punish man for his mismanagement of the earth? Does not the Bible show that God used such disasters in times past?’ Remember, though, that the divinely caused Noachian Flood was preceded by advance warning. God saw to it that righteous Noah and his family were spared from death. (Genesis 6:13, 14, 17) Certainly this cannot be said of recent disasters, for at times even faithful servants of God have suffered hardship and death because of them.