Inspired by Lucretius' account of the plague at the end of The Nature of Things, as well as Hughes' descriptions of disasters faced by ancient Greeks and Romans, we set out to investigate the difference between naturally-occurring and human-created environmental disasters. In order to do so, we looked at four different contemporary examples of disasters our modern world has experienced, including wildfires in Alaska, Hurricane Sandy, Deforestation of the Amazon, and The Gulf of Mexico oil spill.