The Philippines is an unlucky country when it comes to the ravages of nature, a reality apparently confirmed by the mudslide in Southern Leyte province which may have killed 1,800 people. But while nature may be blamed for the powerful typhoons, earthquakes and volcanos that pound the poverty-stricken nation of 80 million people, mudslides are a different matter.
Although the exact circumstances of the tragedy are unclear, mudslides are generally the result of mistreatment of the environment. Land, when stripped of protective trees, bushes and grass, is prone to erosion from wind and rain.
Filipinos, the majority of whom are farmers, are well aware of this because their livelihoods depend on it. Yet the gap between knowledge and practice is wide, as the Leyte disaster and countless similar ones in recent years reveal.
Survivors of the mudslide in the farming village of Guinsaugon were quick to realise man's hand in the disaster, suggesting to President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo that logging was partly to blame. The leader promised to do her utmost to prevent a repeat and urged Filipinos to 'link arms to preserve our environment and protect what remains of it for our next generation'.
Little more than a year ago, Mrs Arroyo made the same pledge after heavy rain in the province of Quezon, south of Manila, caused slides that killed more than 1,000 people. A law was drafted and enacted cracking down on unauthorised logging nationwide. Similarly, after a series of deadly landslides on an island adjacent to Leyte in 2003, officials launched a geo-hazard mapping project to identify and make safe dangerous slopes.
The Philippines' vulnerability to land slippages is well known; up to 6,000 people died on Leyte from them in 1991 and the yearly toll around the nation is in the hundreds, sometimes thousands.
Logging, usually illegal, is mostly to blame, but the constraints of poverty and increasing population numbers can also mean encroachment onto sensitive land. The same has been the case in other developing countries across Asia, where landslides are also a frequent occurrence.