In this paper, two major schools of thought regarding disaster and disaster assistance are identified and examined in order to bring to light their underlying assumptions about assistance and development in the Third World. The first section discusses the context of the problem, citing figures and presenting charts to illustrate the scope and extent of recent disasters throughout the Third World. In the remaining two sections, each of the two approaches to disaster assistance is reviewed. The first approach is that of the human ecologists, who examine the human response to disasters, presenting models of purposeful and nonpurposeful responses within a cultural context. This group emphasizes factors important to the response of the system to stress, rather than factors relating to the cause of that stress. This approach--the dominant school of thought about disaster for decades--focuses on modes of disaster prevention or disaster relief, and as such it places little emphasis on education. The second school of thought, the "marginalists," focus on the underlying causes of large-scale disasters, examining the socioeconomic conditions of a country as they relate to the physical environment. This school, while recognizing the technical and technological contributions of the human ecologists, posits that disasters are not random natural accidents; rather, they are fundamentally tied to both a deteriorating physical environment and oppressive socioeconomic conditions. A five-page bibliography is appended. (TE)