Man and Nature have always been at odds. Long ago, we sought caves to get out of the rain. It was human nature to do so. Now, stupidly, we build houses in locations we know will flood. We know they will. We’re essentially giving the game away, allowing Nature an advantage that assures it will win.

And the worst is yet to come.

In New Orleans, the levees failed years after engineers and hurricane experts told us they would. The disaster was, one could argue, extremely well planned. Officials said, “Nature, our levees are too short and we dare you to send a strong hurricane our way.” And then Nature just did what it naturally does.

This month’s Midwest floods remind us again how precarious it is to live where a river wants to flow. The Christian Science Monitor today explains that unlike the well-studied New Orleans levee system, the patchwork setup in the Midwest was an unwritten recipe for disaster.

“Little information is known about where levees exist, who maintains them, and what their condition is,” the article points out.

But we do know that the Midwest undergoes extensive flooding every few years [just look at the Great Flood of 1993]. This is not news. But it does get easily forgotten. As Gerald Galloway, a professor of engineering at the University of Maryland, put it a few months after Katrina: “The half-life of the memory of a flood is very short.”

To those who live in the flood plain and the lawmakers and planning officials and insurance companies that allow more homes to be built and rebuilt there, none of this week’s events should come as much of a surprise.

“To qualify for the National Flood Insurance Program [in the United States], structures simply need to be behind a levee built to a so-called 100-year standard, meaning there is a 1 percent chance in any given year that a flood will rise above the levee,” the Monitor article explains. This year, for many people, the odds are now at about 100 percent.

Seeing this week’s devastation, would you go for those odds? Would you build a home in the flood plain, with or without insurance? Apparently for many, the answer is yes.

Figuring out why people live in places they know could prove destructive is tricky. “We can’t underestimate the importance of place, weather and beauty to people,” says Paul Slovic, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon who studies risk behavior.

We need to think more like the Dutch, a good chunk of whom live below sea level:

“In the Netherlands, on the other hand, levees for ocean flooding are built to a 10,000-year standard, and inland levees are designed at least to a 250-year standard and usually in excess of 1,250 years,” according to the Monitor.

Not coincidentally, the Dutch are the least concerned of any nation about the rising seas expected from global warming. They’re planning for it.

What’s next? Oh, you don’t want to know.

More than 40 percent of the U.S. population lives in areas protected by levees, according to the Association of State Flood Plain Managers.

New Orleans will get slammed again, eventually. The whole city is sinking, which we’ve known for years, but now scientists say it’s sinking faster than expected. And in California, engineers have long warned of a disaster waiting for aging levees to give way in the vast Sacramento River delta.

“There are more people in the state of California in danger of catastrophic levee failure than in the states of Texas, Louisiana and Florida combined,” said Sandy Rosenthal, Founder of Levees.Org, a group that lobbies for the obvious: Build them taller and better.

If history is any guide, California is poised for an avoidable catastrophe you’ll be reading about one day. Bank on it.

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