However, while progress in specific technical issues is important, the value of the PPP2000 forums lay in discovering the unexpected patterns and themes that appear when experts in different areas begin to talk to each other. Natural hazards, which the geologic record shows have been shaping the planet for millions of years, are not a problem to be solved but an essential part of how Earth functions. Ecosystems and individual species have evolved to coexist with them, and preventing their occurrence alters the natural system, often in undesirable ways. In 1996, the Department of the Interior was in the unusual position of creating an artificial flood on the Colorado River to mimic the natural spring floods in order to restore streambanks in the Grand Canyon. Wildland fire and beach erosion are other examples of hazards for which the once-standard approach controlling natural processes is now considered economically and environmentally unsound.
Natural hazards become disasters only when they collide with people.
It is natural disasters that require solutions, and lasting solutions must be rooted in the realities of human behavior. Natural disasters are neither acts of God nor simple technical problems. Rather, they result from human decisions about how we choose to live and build. As Dennis Mileti has stated in his 1999 Disasters by Design , natural disasters are symptoms of broader and more basic problems. Losses from hazards and the fact that the nation cannot seem to reduce them result from short-sighted and narrow conceptions of the human relationship to the natural environment.