Saturday's earthquake in El Salvador leaves us once again, sadly, with pictures of poor people facing the awful power of nature. The disaster becomes even more worrisome put in context. Pacific News Service editor Mary Jo McConahay lived in Central America for 13 years. Some of this article is taken from her stories on environmental refugees in a recent issue of Sierra Magazine.

First, survivors of the El Salvador earthquake must bury their dead. But soon they will have to determine how to rebuild their lives. For many, living on the edge of survival in a poor country before the quake, the solution -- though slow to arrive, and painful -- will be clear: emigrate.

They will join the world's fastest-growing community of displaced people -- "environmental refugees," the millions forced from homelands each year by earthquakes such as the 7.6 temblor that struck El Salvador Jan. 13, or by Hurricane Mitch, which killed 15,000 in Central America in l998, sending 100,000 refugees -- most without legal immigration papers -- to the United States from Honduras alone.

Once known as "acts of God," such disasters are often provoked or amplified by human activities such as damming rivers, clear-cutting forests, over-extracting groundwater, or building unsafe structures in hazardous zones.

In l998, for the first time, more people were forced to leave their homes globally because of environmental disaster than because of war, according to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Environmental refugees now number 25 million people -- 58 percent of the total worldwide population of refugees.

Their numbers are growing for reasons that include weather super-disasters such as Mitch, and the El Nino-caused drought three years ago in Indonesia that destroyed the rice crop and set the countryside ablaze. Deforestation contributed to the flooding that affected l80 million people in China's Yangtsze River basin, and to the catastrophic deluges after Mitch in Honduras. Sometimes, as in densely populated El Salvador that is over 90 percent deforested, peasants can no longer make a living in the countryside and move to jerry-built misery belts and other unplanned communities surrounding big cities; today 40 of the 50 fastest-growing cities on earth, most ringed by shantytowns, are in earthquake zones.

Look at pictures from the neighborhood where hundreds died in San Salvador: houses were destroyed not by the force of the quake itself, but by killer mud that sweeps down upon them from a steep hill, partly deforested by construction of more luxurious houses. Even as neighbors frantically dug and scraped the earth to find those who might still be breathing, a local Red Cross relief worker spoke to a radio reporter in frustration: the scene was "unfortunately" a repetition of the pattern of other recent "natural" disasters, he said, "a lack of respect for the environment and failure to abide by building codes."

El Salvador, already deeply dependent on money sent home from Salvadorans working abroad, has no safety net for survivors. Some 96 percent of the globe's environmental refugees come from such developing countries, according to the authoritative l998 World Disasters Report of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Often the serious exodus begins only when relief aid runs out, weeks or months after the disaster, as people realize they can no longer hope to make a living at home.

Some see these displaced as important indicators of the globe's environmental health. Stuart Leiderman, a University of New Hampshire environmental scientist, argues they should be granted formal refugee status. This would not necessarily entitle them to economic help, but justify legal status while they work abroad. "This is not just migration we are talking about, but people who must move involuntarily," said Leiderman.

Those fleeing environmental catastrophe are not recognized as refugees in the same way as those fleeing war, but the notion of who is a refugee continues to evolve, a process which gives activists like Leiderman hope. The Organization of African States already recognizes refugees not only from conflict but ecological disaster. Even the United States has done so on rare occasions, for example, giving special visas to citizens of Montserrat fleeing volcanic eruptions in l998. And Hondurans who came to the United States before December l998 (two months after Mitch hit in October) are eligible to apply for Temporary Protective Status. However, most of those did not arrive here until after December of that year.

Karla Hatrick, a University of Nottingham researcher, notes that the l951 international refugee convention -- the one the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and other agencies use to define their mandates -- might be expanded to give the environmentally displaced certain protections short of the full guarantees that might "dilute" the category originally for those fleeing war. "The emergence of a people's right to a healthy environment, while its status is contested, illustrates awareness of the problem," she said. Many nations already have a notion of temporary refuge ("a common thread of humanitarianism," Hatrick calls it) that could be a starting place.