We can’t stop natural disasters, but we can stop them from being disastrous. One of the world’s foremost risk experts tells us how.

Year after year, floods sweep cities clean, earthquakes tear apart communities, and tornadoes uproot towns. Disasters bring with them rampage and despair. But does it have to be this way? In The Cure for Catastrophe, Robert Muir-Wood makes the controversial claim that our natural disasters are in fact human ones: we keep building in the wrong places and in the wrong way, putting brick buildings in the way of earthquakes, wood ones in the way of fire, and cities in the paths of tropical storms. We refuse to evacuate, blindly trusting our flood walls and disaster preparations, until they fail, making catastrophes even more deadly.

From the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755 to Hurricane Katrina, the story of natural disasters is less about a hostile environment than about human foolishness, denial, and greed. But there is hope, if humans cause catastrophes, we can also prevent them.