In their paper, "Hazards and Sustainable Development in the United States", Mileti and Peek-Gottschlich raise some practical possibilities for disaster mitigation. However, they retain the fundamentally U.S.-driven paradigm that social and technological approaches to mitigation can act, overall, to reduce the incidence or severity of disastrous events. This response to the Mileti-Peek-Gottschlich paper highlights some theoretical and practical difficulties in the way of accepting such a paradigm. The response claims that disasters result from the way people live their lives and structure their society. Therefore, disaster reduction can come about only through fundamental changes in political and social mores. Progress in disaster reduction will occur when people accept that they are the creators of disaster rather than its victims. Notes