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Name: A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster - Kindle edition by Solnit, Rebecca. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.
Rating: 4.4 (511 reviews)

Rebecca Solnit

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A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster Kindle Edition

by Rebecca Solnit (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.4 511 ratings

See all formats and editions

The author of Men Explain Things to Me explores the moments of altruism and generosity that arise in the aftermath of disaster

Why is it that in the aftermath of a disaster? whether manmade or natural?people suddenly become altruistic, resourceful, and brave? What makes the newfound communities and purpose many find in the ruins and crises after disaster so joyous? And what does this joy reveal about ordinarily unmet social desires and possibilities?

In A Paradise Built in Hell, award-winning author Rebecca Solnit explores these phenomena, looking at major calamities from the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco through the 1917 explosion that tore up Halifax, Nova Scotia, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. She examines how disaster throws people into a temporary utopia of changed states of mind and social possibilities, as well as looking at the cost of the widespread myths and rarer real cases of social deterioration during crisis. This is a timely and important book from an acclaimed author whose work consistently locates unseen patterns and meanings in broad cultural histories.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Natural and man-made disasters can be utopias that showcase human solidarity and point the way to a freer society, according this stimulating contrarian study. Solnit (River of Shadows) reproves civil defense planners, media alarmists and Hollywood directors who insist that disasters produce terrified mobs prone to looting, murder and cannibalism unless controlled by armed force and government expertise. Surveying disasters from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, she shows that the typical response to calamity is spontaneous altruism, self-organization and mutual aid, with neighbors and strangers calmly rescuing, feeding and housing each other. Indeed, the main problem in such emergencies, she contends, is the elite panic of officials who clamp down with National Guardsmen and stifling regulations. Solnit falters when she generalizes her populist brief into an anarchist critique of everyday society that lapses into fuzzy what-ifs and uplifting volunteer testimonials. Still, this vividly written, cogently argued book makes a compelling—and timely—case for the ability of ordinary people to collectively surmount the direst of challenges. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

Praise for A Paradise Built in Hell:

“Everyone feels alone in a crisis . . . It needn’t be that way. In fact, as the incomparable Rebecca Solnit has shown throughout her long, meandering, brilliant career, but especially in [this book], it must not be. A Paradise Built in Hell is an eye-opening account of how much hope and solidarity emerges in the face of sudden disaster . . . [These lessons] offer deep comfort now, as antidotes not just to feelings of helplessness but loneliness.”
—David Wallace-Wells, New York Magazine

“What will it be like to live not on the relatively stable planet that civilization has known throughout the ten thousand years of the Holocene, but on the amped-up and careening planet we’re quickly creating? With her remarkable and singular book, A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit has thought harder about the answer to that question than anyone else. Her answer is strangely and powerfully hopeful. As she proves with inspired historiography, disasters often produce remarkable temporary communities—paradises of a sort amid the rubble, where people, acting on their own and without direction from the authorities, manage to provide for each other.”
—Bill McKibben, The New York Review of Books

“Thought-provoking . . . captivating and compelling . . . there's a hopeful, optimistic, even contagious quality to this superb book.”
—Los Angeles Times

“Far-reaching and large-spirited.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Stirring . . . fascinating . . . presents a withering critique of modern capitalist society by examining five catastrophes . . . Her account of these events are so stirring that her book is worth reading for its storytelling alone. . . . [An] exciting and important contribution to our understanding of ourselves.”
—The Washington Post

About the Author

Rebecca Solnit is an American writer. She has written on a variety of subjects, including the feminism, environment, politics, place, and art. Solnit is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine, where bi-monthly she writes the magazine's "Easy Chair" essay.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Prelude: Falling Together

Who are you? Who are we? In times of crisis, these are life-and-death questions. Thousands of people survived Hurricane Katrina because grandsons or aunts or neighbors or complete strangers reached out to those in need all through the Gulf Coast and because an armada of boat owners from the surrounding communities and as far away as Texas went into New Orleans to pull stranded people to safety. Hundreds of people died in the aftermath of Katrina because others, including police, vigilantes, high government officials, and the media, decided that the people of New Orleans were too dangerous to allow them to evacuate the septic, drowned city or to rescue them, even from hospitals. Some who attempted to flee were turned back at gunpoint or shot down. Rumors proliferated about mass rapes, mass murders, and mayhem that turned out later to be untrue, though the national media and New Orleans’s police chief believed and perpetuated those rumors during the crucial days when people were dying on rooftops and elevated highways and in crowded shelters and hospitals in the unbearable heat, without adequate water, without food, without medicine and medical attention. Those rumors led soldiers and others dispatched as rescuers to regard victims as enemies. Beliefs matter—though as many people act generously despite
their beliefs as the reverse.

Katrina was an extreme version of what goes on in many disasters, wherein how you behave depends on whether you think your neighbors or fellow citizens are a greater threat than the havoc wrought by a disaster or a greater good than the property in houses and stores around you. (Citizen, in this book, means members of a city or community, not people in possession of legal citizenship in a nation.) What you believe shapes how you act. How you act results in life or death, for yourself or others, as in everyday life, only more so. Katrina was, like most disasters, also marked by altruism: of young men who took it upon themselves to supply water, food, diapers, and protection to the strangers stranded with them; of people who rescued or sheltered neighbors; of the uncounted hundreds or thousands who set out in boats—armed, often, but also armed with compassion—to find those who were stranded in the stag- nant waters and bring them to safety; of the two hundred thousand or more who (via the Internet site HurricaneHousing.org in the weeks after) volunteered to house complete strangers, mostly in their own homes, persuaded more by the pictures of suffering than the rumors of mon- strosity; of the uncounted tens of thousands of volunteers who came to the Gulf Coast to rebuild and restore.

In the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, or a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors as well as friends and loved ones. The image of the selfish, panicky, or regressively savage human being in times of disaster has little truth to it. Decades of meticulous sociological research on behavior in disasters, from the bombings of World War II to floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, and storms across the continent and around the world, have demonstrated this. But belief lags behind, and often the worst behavior in the wake of a calamity is on the part of those who believe that others will behave savagely and that they themselves are taking defensive measures against barbarism. From earthquake-shattered San Francisco in 1906 to flooded New Orleans in 2005, innocents have been killed by people who believed or asserted that their victims were the criminals and they themselves were the protectors of the shaken order. Beliefs matter.

“Today Cain is still killing his brother” proclaims a faded church mural in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, which was so devas- tated by the failure of the government levees. In quick succession, the Book of Genesis gives us the creation of the universe, the illicit acquisi- tion of knowledge, the expulsion from Paradise, and the slaying of Abel by Cain, a second fall from grace into jealousy, competition, alienation, and violence. When God asks Cain where his brother is, Cain asks back, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” He is refusing to say what God already knows: that the spilled blood of Abel cries out from the ground that has absorbed it. He is also raising one of the perennial social questions: are we beholden to each other, must we take care of each other, or is it every man for himself ?

Most traditional societies have deeply entrenched commitments and connections between individuals, families, and groups. The very con- cept of society rests on the idea of networks of affinity and affection, and the freestanding individual exists largely as an outcast or exile. Mobile and individualistic modern societies shed some of these old ties and vac- illate about taking on others, especially those expressed through eco- nomic arrangements—including provisions for the aged and vulnerable, the mitigation of poverty and desperation—the keeping of one’s broth- ers and sisters. The argument against such keeping is often framed as an argument about human nature: we are essentially selfish, and because you will not care for me, I cannot care for you. I will not feed you because I must hoard against starvation, since I too cannot count on others. Bet- ter yet, I will take your wealth and add it to mine—if I believe that my well-being is independent of yours or pitted against yours—and justify my conduct as natural law. If I am not my brother’s keeper, then we have been expelled from paradise, a paradise of unbroken solidarities.

Thus does everyday life become a social disaster. Sometimes disaster intensifies this; sometimes it provides a remarkable reprieve from it, a view into another world for our other selves. When all the ordinary divides and patterns are shattered, people step up—not all, but the great preponderance—to become their brothers’ keepers. And that purposeful- ness and connectedness bring joy even amid death, chaos, fear, and loss. Were we to know and believe this, our sense of what is possible at any time might change. We speak of self-fulfilling prophesies, but any belief that is acted on makes the world in its image. Beliefs matter. And so do the facts behind them. The astonishing gap between common beliefs and actualities about disaster behavior limits the possibilities, and changing beliefs could fundamentally change much more. Horrible in itself, disas- ter is sometimes a door back into paradise, the paradise at least in which we are who we hope to be, do the work we desire, and are each our sister’s and brother’s keeper.

I landed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, shortly after a big hurricane tore up the city in October of 2003. The man in charge of taking me around told me about the hurricane—not about the winds that roared at more than a hundred miles an hour and tore up trees, roofs, and telephone poles or about the seas that rose nearly ten feet, but about the neighbors. He spoke of the few days when everything was disrupted, and he lit up with happiness as he did so. In his neighborhood all the people had come out of their houses to speak with each other, aid each other, improvise a community kitchen, make sure the elders were okay, and spend time together, no longer strangers. “Everybody woke up the next morning and everything was different,” he mused. “There was no electricity, all the stores were closed, no one had access to media. The consequence was that everyone poured out into the street to bear witness. Not quite a street party, but everyone out at once—it was a sense of happiness to see everybody even though we didn’t know each other.” His joy struck me powerfully.

A friend told me of being trapped in a terrible fog, one of the dense tule fogs that overtakes California’s Central Valley periodically. On this occasion the fog mixed with dust from the cotton fields created a shroud so perilous that the highway patrol stopped all traffic on the highway. For two days she was stranded with many others in a small diner. She and her husband slept upright, shoulder to shoulder with strangers, in the banquettes of the diner’s booths. Although food and water began to run short, they had a marvelous time. The people gathered there had little in common, but they all opened up, began to tell each other the stories of their lives, and by the time the road was safe, my friend and her hus- band were reluctant to leave. But they went onward, home to New Mexico for the holidays, where everyone looked at them perplexedly as they told the story of their stranding with such ebullience. That time in the diner was the first time ever her partner, a Native American, had felt a sense of belonging in society at large. Such redemption amid disruption is common.

It reminded me of how many of us in the San Francisco Bay Area had loved the Loma Prieta earthquake that took place three weeks before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Or loved not the earthquake but the way commu- nities had responded to it. It was alarming for most of us as well, devastat- ing for some, and fatal for sixty people (a very low death count for a major earthquake in an area inhabited by millions). When the subject of the quake came up with a new acquaintance, she too glowed with recollection about how her San Francisco neighborhood had, during the days the power was off, cooked up all its thawing frozen food and held barbecues on the street; how gregarious everyone had been, how people from all walks of life had mixed in candlelit bars that became community centers. Another friend recently remembered with unextinguished amazement that when he traveled the several miles from the World Series baseball game at Candlestick Park in the city’s southeast to his home in the central city, someone was at every blacked-out intersection, directing traffic. Without orders or centralized organization, people had stepped up to meet the needs of the moment, suddenly in charge of their communities and streets.

When that earthquake shook the central California coast on October 17, 1989, I was surprised to find that the person I was angry at no longer mattered. The anger had evaporated along with everything else abstract and remote, and I was thrown into an intensely absorbing present. I was more surprised to realize that most of the people I knew and met in the Bay Area were also enjoying immensely the disaster that shut down much of the region for several days, the Bay Bridge for months, and certain unloved elevated freeways forever—if enjoyment is the right word for that sense of immersion in the moment and solidarity with others caused by the rupture in everyday life, an emotion graver than happiness but deeply positive. We don’t even have a language for this emotion, in which the wonderful comes wrapped in the terrible, joy in sorrow, courage in fear. We cannot welcome disaster, but we can value the responses, both practical and psychological.

For weeks after the big earthquake of 1989, friendship and love counted for a lot, long-term plans and old anxieties for very little. Life was situated in the here and now, and many inessentials had been pared away. The earthquake was unnerving, as were the aftershocks that continued for months. Most of us were at least a little on edge, but many of us were enriched rather than impoverished, overall, at least emotionally. A more somber version of that strange pleasure in disaster emerged after September 11, 2001, when many Americans seemed stirred, moved, and motivated by the newfound sense of urgency, purpose, solidarity, and danger they had encountered. They abhorred what had happened, but they clearly relished who they briefly became.

What is this feeling that crops up during so many disasters? After the Loma Prieta quake, I began to wonder about it. After 9/11, I began to see how strange a phenomenon it was and how deeply it mattered. After I met the man in Halifax who lit up with joy when he talked about the great hurricane there, I began to study it. After I began to write about the 1906 earthquake as its centennial approached, I started to see how often this peculiar feeling arose and how much it remade the world of disaster. After Hurricane Katrina tore up the Gulf Coast, I began to understand the limits and possibilities of disasters. This book is about that emotion, as important as it is surprising, and the circumstances that arouse it and those that it generates. These things count as we enter an era of increasing and intensifying disaster. And more than that, they matter as we enter an era when questions about everyday social possibilities and human nature arise again, as they often have in turbulent times.

When I ask people about the disasters they have lived through, I find on many faces that retrospective basking as they recount tales of Canadian ice storms, midwestern snow days, New York City blackouts, oppressive heat in southern India, fire in New Mexico, the great earth- quake in Mexico City, earlier hurricanes in Louisiana, the economic col- lapse in Argentina, earthquakes in California and Mexico, and a strange pleasure overall. It was the joy on their faces that surprised me. And with those whom I read rather than spoke to, it was the joy in their words that surprised me. It should not be so, is not so, in the familiar version of what disaster brings, and yet it is there, arising from rubble, from ice, from fire, from storms and floods. The joy matters as a measure of otherwise neglected desires, desires for public life and civil society, for inclusion, purpose, and power.
Disasters are, most basically, terrible, tragic, grievous, and no matter what positive side effects and possibilities they produce, they are not to be desired. But by the same measure, those side effects should not be ignored because they arise amid devastation. The desires and possibilities awakened are so powerful they shine even from wreckage, carnage, and ashes. What happens here is relevant elsewhere. And the point is not to welcome disasters. They do not create these gifts, but they are one avenue through which the gifts arrive. Disasters provide an extraordinary window into social desire and possibility, and what manifests there matters elsewhere, in ordinary times and in other extraordinary times.
Prelude: Falling Together

Who are you? Who are we? In times of crisis, these are life-and-death questions. Thousands of people survived Hurricane Katrina because grandsons or aunts or neighbors or complete strangers reached out to those in need all through the Gulf Coast and because an armada of boat owners from the surrounding communities and as far away as Texas went into New Orleans to pull stranded people to safety. Hundreds of people died in the aftermath of Katrina because others, including police, vigilantes, high government officials, and the media, decided that the people of New Orleans were too dangerous to allow them to evacuate the septic, drowned city or to rescue them, even from hospitals. Some who attempted to flee were turned back at gunpoint or shot down. Rumors proliferated about mass rapes, mass murders, and mayhem that turned out later to be untrue, though the national media and New Orleans’s police chief believed and perpetuated those rumors during the crucial days when people were dying on rooftops and elevated highways and in crowded shelters and hospitals in the unbearable heat, without adequate water, without food, without medicine and medical attention. Those rumors led soldiers and others dispatched as rescuers to regard victims as enemies. Beliefs matter—though as many people act generously despite
their beliefs as the reverse.

Katrina was an extreme version of what goes on in many disasters, wherein how you behave depends on whether you think your neighbors or fellow citizens are a greater threat than the havoc wrought by a disaster or a greater good than the property in houses and stores around you. (Citizen, in this book, means members of a city or community, not people in possession of legal citizenship in a nation.) What you believe shapes how you act. How you act results in life or death, for yourself or others, as in everyday life, only more so. Katrina was, like most disasters, also marked by altruism: of young men who took it upon themselves to supply water, food, diapers, and protection to the strangers stranded with them; of people who rescued or sheltered neighbors; of the uncounted hundreds or thousands who set out in boats—armed, often, but also armed with compassion—to find those who were stranded in the stag- nant waters and bring them to safety; of the two hundred thousand or more who (via the Internet site HurricaneHousing.org in the weeks after) volunteered to house complete strangers, mostly in their own homes, persuaded more by the pictures of suffering than the rumors of mon- strosity; of the uncounted tens of thousands of volunteers who came to the Gulf Coast to rebuild and restore.

In the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, or a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors as well as friends and loved ones. The image of the selfish, panicky, or regressively savage human being in times of disaster has little truth to it. Decades of meticulous sociological research on behavior in disasters, from the bombings of World War II to floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, and storms across the continent and around the world, have demonstrated this. But belief lags behind, and often the worst behavior in the wake of a calamity is on the part of those who believe that others will behave savagely and that they themselves are taking defensive measures against barbarism. From earthquake-shattered San Francisco in 1906 to flooded New Orleans in 2005, innocents have been killed by people who believed or asserted that their victims were the criminals and they themselves were the protectors of the shaken order. Beliefs matter.

“Today Cain is still killing his brother” proclaims a faded church mural in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, which was so devas- tated by the failure of the government levees. In quick succession, the Book of Genesis gives us the creation of the universe, the illicit acquisi- tion of knowledge, the expulsion from Paradise, and the slaying of Abel by Cain, a second fall from grace into jealousy, competition, alienation, and violence. When God asks Cain where his brother is, Cain asks back, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” He is refusing to say what God already knows: that the spilled blood of Abel cries out from the ground that has absorbed it. He is also raising one of the perennial social questions: are we beholden to each other, must we take care of each other, or is it every man for himself ?

Most traditional societies have deeply entrenched commitments and connections between individuals, families, and groups. The very con- cept of society rests on the idea of networks of affinity and affection, and the freestanding individual exists largely as an outcast or exile. Mobile and individualistic modern societies shed some of these old ties and vac- illate about taking on others, especially those expressed through eco- nomic arrangements—including provisions for the aged and vulnerable, the mitigation of poverty and desperation—the keeping of one’s broth- ers and sisters. The argument against such keeping is often framed as an argument about human nature: we are essentially selfish, and because you will not care for me, I cannot care for you. I will not feed you because I must hoard against starvation, since I too cannot count on others. Bet- ter yet, I will take your wealth and add it to mine—if I believe that my well-being is independent of yours or pitted against yours—and justify my conduct as natural law. If I am not my brother’s keeper, then we have been expelled from paradise, a paradise of unbroken solidarities.

Thus does everyday life become a social disaster. Sometimes disaster intensifies this; sometimes it provides a remarkable reprieve from it, a view into another world for our other selves. When all the ordinary divides and patterns are shattered, people step up—not all, but the great preponderance—to become their brothers’ keepers. And that purposeful- ness and connectedness bring joy even amid death, chaos, fear, and loss. Were we to know and believe this, our sense of what is possible at any time might change. We speak of self-fulfilling prophesies, but any belief that is acted on makes the world in its image. Beliefs matter. And so do the facts behind them. The astonishing gap between common beliefs and actualities about disaster behavior limits the possibilities, and changing beliefs could fundamentally change much more. Horrible in itself, disas- ter is sometimes a door back into paradise, the paradise at least in which we are who we hope to be, do the work we desire, and are each our sister’s and brother’s keeper.

I landed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, shortly after a big hurricane tore up the city in October of 2003. The man in charge of taking me around told me about the hurricane—not about the winds that roared at more than a hundred miles an hour and tore up trees, roofs, and telephone poles or about the seas that rose nearly ten feet, but about the neighbors. He spoke of the few days when everything was disrupted, and he lit up with happiness as he did so. In his neighborhood all the people had come out of their houses to speak with each other, aid each other, improvise a community kitchen, make sure the elders were okay, and spend time together, no longer strangers. “Everybody woke up the next morning and everything was different,” he mused. “There was no electricity, all the stores were closed, no one had access to media. The consequence was that everyone poured out into the street to bear witness. Not quite a street party, but everyone out at once—it was a sense of happiness to see everybody even though we didn’t know each other.” His joy struck me powerfully.

A friend told me of being trapped in a terrible fog, one of the dense tule fogs that overtakes California’s Central Valley periodically. On this occasion the fog mixed with dust from the cotton fields created a shroud so perilous that the highway patrol stopped all traffic on the highway. For two days she was stranded with many others in a small diner. She and her husband slept upright, shoulder to shoulder with strangers, in the banquettes of the diner’s booths. Although food and water began to run short, they had a marvelous time. The people gathered there had little in common, but they all opened up, began to tell each other the stories of their lives, and by the time the road was safe, my friend and her hus- band were reluctant to leave. But they went onward, home to New Mexico for the holidays, where everyone looked at them perplexedly as they told the story of their stranding with such ebullience. That time in the diner was the first time ever her partner, a Native American, had felt a sense of belonging in society at large. Such redemption amid disruption is common.

It reminded me of how many of us in the San Francisco Bay Area had loved the Loma Prieta earthquake that took place three weeks before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Or loved not the earthquake but the way commu- nities had responded to it. It was alarming for most of us as well, devastat- ing for some, and fatal for sixty people (a very low death count for a major earthquake in an area inhabited by millions). When the subject of the quake came up with a new acquaintance, she too glowed with recollection about how her San Francisco neighborhood had, during the days the power was off, cooked up all its thawing frozen food and held barbecues on the street; how gregarious everyone had been, how people from all walks of life had mixed in candlelit bars that became community centers. Another friend recently remembered with unextinguished amazement that when he traveled the several miles from the World Series baseball game at Candlestick Park in the city’s southeast to his home in the central city, someone was at every blacked-out intersection, directing traffic. Without orders or centralized organization, people had stepped up to meet the needs of the moment, suddenly in charge of their communities and streets.

When that earthquake shook the central California coast on October 17, 1989, I was surprised to find that the person I was angry at no longer mattered. The anger had evaporated along with everything else abstract and remote, and I was thrown into an intensely absorbing present. I was more surprised to realize that most of the people I knew and met in the Bay Area were also enjoying immensely the disaster that shut down much of the region for several days, the Bay Bridge for months, and certain unloved elevated freeways forever—if enjoyment is the right word for that sense of immersion in the moment and solidarity with others caused by the rupture in everyday life, an emotion graver than happiness but deeply positive. We don’t even have a language for this emotion, in which the wonderful comes wrapped in the terrible, joy in sorrow, courage in fear. We cannot welcome disaster, but we can value the responses, both practical and psychological.

For weeks after the big earthquake of 1989, friendship and love counted for a lot, long-term plans and old anxieties for very little. Life was situated in the here and now, and many inessentials had been pared away. The earthquake was unnerving, as were the aftershocks that continued for months. Most of us were at least a little on edge, but many of us were enriched rather than impoverished, overall, at least emotionally. A more somber version of that strange pleasure in disaster emerged after September 11, 2001, when many Americans seemed stirred, moved, and motivated by the newfound sense of urgency, purpose, solidarity, and danger they had encountered. They abhorred what had happened, but they clearly relished who they briefly became.

What is this feeling that crops up during so many disasters? After the Loma Prieta quake, I began to wonder about it. After 9/11, I began to see how strange a phenomenon it was and how deeply it mattered. After I met the man in Halifax who lit up with joy when he talked about the great hurricane there, I began to study it. After I began to write about the 1906 earthquake as its centennial approached, I started to see how often this peculiar feeling arose and how much it remade the world of disaster. After Hurricane Katrina tore up the Gulf Coast, I began to understand the limits and possibilities of disasters. This book is about that emotion, as important as it is surprising, and the circumstances that arouse it and those that it generates. These things count as we enter an era of increasing and intensifying disaster. And more than that, they matter as we enter an era when questions about everyday social possibilities and human nature arise again, as they often have in turbulent times.

When I ask people about the disasters they have lived through, I find on many faces that retrospective basking as they recount tales of Canadian ice storms, midwestern snow days, New York City blackouts, oppressive heat in southern India, fire in New Mexico, the great earth- quake in Mexico City, earlier hurricanes in Louisiana, the economic col- lapse in Argentina, earthquakes in California and Mexico, and a strange pleasure overall. It was the joy on their faces that surprised me. And with those whom I read rather than spoke to, it was the joy in their words that surprised me. It should not be so, is not so, in the familiar version of what disaster brings, and yet it is there, arising from rubble, from ice, from fire, from storms and floods. The joy matters as a measure of otherwise neglected desires, desires for public life and civil society, for inclusion, purpose, and power.
Disasters are, most basically, terrible, tragic, grievous, and no matter what positive side effects and possibilities they produce, they are not to be desired. But by the same measure, those side effects should not be ignored because they arise amid devastation. The desires and possibilities awakened are so powerful they shine even from wreckage, carnage, and ashes. What happens here is relevant elsewhere. And the point is not to welcome disasters. They do not create these gifts, but they are one avenue through which the gifts arrive. Disasters provide an extraordinary window into social desire and possibility, and what manifests there matters elsewhere, in ordinary times and in other extraordinary times.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B003XQEVLM
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; Reprint edition (August 31, 2010)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 31, 2010
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2.2 MB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 354 pages

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Rebecca Solnit

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Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of seventeen books about environment, landscape, community, art, politics, hope, and memory, including the updated and reissued Hope in the Dark, three atlases, of San Francisco in 2010, New Orleans in 2013, and New York forthcoming in October; 2014's Men Explain Things to Me; 2013's The Faraway Nearby; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; and River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at Harper's and frequent contributor to the Guardian newspaper.

She encourages you to shop at Indiebound, your local independent bookstore, Powells.com, Barnes & Noble online and kind of has some large problems with how Amazon operates these days. Though she's grateful if you're buying her books here or anywhere....

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44 customers mention "Thought provoking"37 positive7 negative

Customers find the book thought-provoking and inspiring. They appreciate the original thesis and insightful narrative of disasters. The accounts are incredible and the book holds their attention. Readers say it dispels myths about how disaster brings out the worst in people.

"...It is absolutely worth reading past the dreary fantasy-based leftist anarchism to get all this juicy science-based sociology and psychology in one..." Read more

"...This would be an excellent book for people interested in leadership, disaster sociology, and the effects of media." Read more

"...Earthquake and the explosion of munitions in Halifax -- healthy, heroic parallels that are moving to read...." Read more

"...It was heartwarming and inspiring to read about all the normal individuals who stepped up to help their neighbor after disaster struck...." Read more

6 customers mention "Community involvement"6 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the community's involvement. They say they band together and act as a community, in an altruistic way. The book supports volunteer community-driven work and the common good. It also recognizes the universal desire to assist in times of crisis and the need to identify and identify those who need help.

"...how, in most disasters, survivors tend to band together and act as a community, in an altrustic way, almost a utopia...." Read more

"...a great telling of how during times of crisis, communities band together to help one another...." Read more

"...that the people who are on-site and affected pull together and work as a community and bond over the disaster...." Read more

"...Hope is offered here for acknowledging the universal desire to assist in times of crisis and the need to identify and name this so that these..." Read more

13 customers mention "Writing quality"4 positive9 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the writing quality of the book. Some find the messages inspiring and creative, while others mention poor research, repetitive viewpoints, and jarring syntax. The printing errors and blurry text also deter some readers from reading the book.

"...The writing and viewpoints can be repetitive and meandering. The section on the Mexico City earthquake doesn't fit in well with the other disasters...." Read more

"...The writing is choppy at best, jumping from historical events, to the author's personal habits, to bio-sketches of people allegedly shaped by..." Read more

"...Flowery language for a non-fiction book could have been nice, but instead I came to resent it as overly precious since the "facts" in the book were..." Read more

"...The narrator reads the words without understanding, so the syntax is jarring and actually deters me from listening. It's a shame." Read more

10 customers mention "Pacing"3 positive7 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the book's pacing. Some find it praiseworthy for showing how people rise up during crises and support the common good. Others feel the conclusions are unreliable, drawn from comparing unequal events, and glossed over challenging evidence. They mention poor research and writing, and feeling disappointed by the subjective and questionable data sources.

"...Some of the prose is repetitive, and sometimes it strays from the point...." Read more

"...She makes the contrarian point that masses of people actually behave quite well, with courage and altruism when disasters hit, but often times..." Read more

"...As it is, I was thoroughly disappointed. I'll be selling this one to the used book store in near original condition, if you want to save your money...." Read more

"...and helpful - are too important to have been buried with poor research and even poorer writing...." Read more

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J. Bradley Hicks
We Are Better Than We Think We Are
Reviewed in the United States on October 12, 2009
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Before I picked up this book, I didn't even know that there was an academic field called "disaster sociology." It turns out it goes back to William James himself, an eyewitness to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake who had the open-mindedness to look at how the people of San Francisco were affected by that disaster without projecting his own prejudices on it. He was astonished; people in disasters don't act anything like how we would expect them to. James' findings have been replicated by studying people in hundreds of historical and modern disasters, and from those studies disaster sociologists have come to some concrete, reliable scientific findings. Solnit believes very, very much that the rest of us need to know what the disaster sociologists know, because our mistaken expectations of what will happen during and immediately after disasters keep making things worse, not better, for the survivors. Before James Lee Witt took over FEMA, and ever since he left, it's been a standing joke that all disasters come in two phases: the disaster itself, and then the even worse disaster when FEMA arrives. This is not a coincidence; Witt knows things about disaster that almost nobody else in America knows, including other first responders, and it showed up in his priorities.

Solnit draws most of her examples from four disasters and their aftermaths, each recounted in detail: the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the 1917 explosion of an ammunition ship in Halifax harbor that destroyed the city, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, and the World Trade Center attack on 9/11 of 2001. Other earthquakes, hurricanes, bombings, and other disasters are cited for comparison and contrast. And here's what she reports, based on extensive research by multiple scientists into the actual first-hand accounts of people who lived through disasters:

During a disaster, heroism is not particularly rare. Before a disaster, most people predict that they will panic, will react selfishly, will be cowards. It turns out not to be true. Most people don't run away from a disaster, they run towards it to see if they can help. Most people don't trample others to get away, they stop to pick each other up and help each other along. We keep being surprised by the fact that in an actual disaster, we are nearly all better people than we are in our daily lives. Disasters bring out the best in almost all of us. This is the book's single most important finding. It is extensively documented, and that's important, because most people will find it to be the most surprising.

Disaster survivors do not panic. Actual examples of people succumbing to helplessness and going catatonic, or of rushing around destructively in panic, are seldom if ever found. When people self-evacuate, they almost 100% consistently do so calmly, in an orderly fashion, and spontaneously cooperate, even at their own risk, to carry out the wounded and the disabled. Crowds of people have trampled to death the injured and the fallen in the past -- but not in disasters. And once evacuated, rather than succumbing to grief and shock, the overwhelming majority of them move purposefully about, driven by the overwhelming urge to find something useful to do. More of them do find something useful to do, within the first half a day or so, than you would imagine. Those who find something useful to do, however briefly or however little it is, consistently report feeling overcome by joy, not panic or fear or depression or any other madness.

Disaster survivors generally do not rape, loot, murder, or rob. Crime rates go down during disasters, not up. There are almost no documented examples, anywhere in human history, of people taking advantage of a disaster as an opportunity to commit crimes. Two specific examples of things that are called looting have been reported. First, if people need things from inside a home or a store to survive the first several days of a disaster and there is no one there to sell it to them or share it with them, they do take those things; but actual eyewitness accounts of disasters reveal that they are more likely to overpay, to leave money on the counter to cover what they took, than they are to steal. And secondly, there are accounts of people going into buildings that were about to be destroyed by fire or flood to take valuables out. Does it really count as stealing if someone takes a case of expensive cigars from a cigar store that is about to burn to the ground, or takes a flat screen TV out of a building that's about to go under water? Technically, yes, but that's the only extent there is of any documented "looting" in disasters.

Rich people, politicians, and soldiers, on the other hand, consistently do panic, loot, and murder, specifically out of fear that poor people will. This happens so consistently that disaster sociologists have a term for it, "elite panic." Because they fear that temporarily ungoverned people will rape, murder, loot, and rob they send in soldiers under orders to shoot to kill, and shoot to kill they do. Having been instructed to think of the survivors of the disaster as little better than animals, many soldiers abuse the survivors on little or no provocation. In particular, the US Army's reaction to disasters, foreign and domestic, turns out to be execrable, by contrast to the US Coast Guard, the only military unit reported on in the whole book that never succumbs to elite panic, no matter how much political pressure they are put under to do so. Why not? Because disasters are a big part of what the Coast Guard does for a living, which means that the Coast Guard's experienced officers are just about the only "elites" we have who have enough first-hand experience with disaster survivors to know, first hand, what the disaster sociologists had to find out through scientific research.

Even when they don't panic, "leaders" are mostly useless in a crisis. Each disaster is unique. In the first several days after a disaster, society's leaders, governors, rulers, and experts don't know who lived and who died. Among the living, they have no idea who has what skills that can be used. They don't know what resources are still available inside the disaster zone and they don't know which resources inside the zone were destroyed. They don't know what infrastructure still works and what infrastructure has failed. From roughly the 2nd hour of the disaster until at least the third day, maybe later, the only people who know these things are the disaster survivors themselves, and that's why during those first three days, ad hoc gatherings of random survivors do a better job of organizing relief kitchens, digging sanitary latrines, distributing any supplies that are available, and improvising temporary shelter than any top-down disaster response community can be.

If elite panic focuses on a single ethnic group, the result can be particularly disastrous slaughter. It doesn't have to be. San Franciscans stood up for the ethnic Chinese in 1906, and there was no slaughter. But Ray Nagin, in particular, gets singled out for the most personalized and individual hatred by Solnit; his palapable and vocal fear that his fellow black New Orleaners would descend into savagery, and his constant acceptance of and passing along of every rumor to that effect that he heard, resulted in the mobilization of multiple white racist militias who killed harmless black people who were just trying to evacuate or survive, who posed no threat to anyone, and so far the killers have gone unpunished; a similar disaster befell the Korean-ancestry residents of one Japanese city after their earthquake, when that city's local mayor, like Nagin, whipped up fear of and hatred towards them.

For many of society's outcasts and downtrodden, the disaster is not the worst day of their lives, it's the best. For the first 72 hours or so of a disaster, you don't have to worry about losing your job. You don't have to worry about whether or not you have any money. You don't have to worry about what you're going to do with the rest of your life. And a lot of people who've lived on the fringes of society, whether fringe religious groups or outcast Vietnam veterans or the homeless, are people who've accumulated the hard way an awful lot of the skills needed to cope with the sudden loss of everything. For example, after 9/11 one of the most important and popular places for mourners to gather was organized by a handful of rave promoters, assisted by a nearby Buddhist temple, and managed by a dozen or so local homeless guys who used to live in nearby alleys; in hurricane stricken southern Mississippi, one of the most important relief kitchens and disaster response centers was co-organized by a group of Christian missionaries and a group of Rainbow Family volunteers who happened to get there at about the same time. What all of those people felt was tremendous gratitude that someone finally needed the skills they happened to have.

Those are just the findings that jumped out at me the hardest, after a single reading, and Solnit is absolutely right that everybody in the world needs to hear these things, needs to know these things, needs to respond to disaster based on how people actually act, not how we're afraid they're going to act. This is a very, very important book ...

... even though, frankly, it keeps getting tiresome. It took me a long time to read this book, because of one tooth-grindingly awful flaw, and that's Solnit's personal politics. Solnit chooses to read these findings, about how people react in the first 72 hours after a city-wide disaster, as "proof" of her anarcho-communist politics, proof that what we ought to be doing is finding some way to eliminate government, eliminate money, eliminate private property, so we can all self-organize our daily ordinary lives with the joy, purpose, and improvisational brilliance that disaster survivors consistently show. I remain unconvinced, and probably so will you, which makes it increasingly wearying when, every 3 or 4 chapters, she stops talking about disasters and starts talking about some future utopia or about how we should be living our daily lives according to her. My advice is to do what I did, do what you do when anybody with an equally weak grasp on reality starts ranting about politics: smile and nod, and move along. Skim the political rants about the wonders of anarcho-communism until you get back to the meat of the book, the actual useful disaster sociology. It is absolutely worth reading past the dreary fantasy-based leftist anarchism to get all this juicy science-based sociology and psychology in one very readable place. If you aren't already susceptible to anarcho-communist utopian arguments, they're not going to infect you against your will like some disease, but the rest of the book will infect you with something you do need: the realization that in any disaster, with the exception of a handful of us who have clawed their way to the top, the rest of us are all, pretty nearly without exception, better, kinder, and more useful people than we would ever have imagined in advance.

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Alicia Crumpton
Disaster Sociology
Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2023
Verified Purchase
Solnit, R. (2009). A paradise built in hell: The extraordinary communities that arise in disasters. Viking.

Rebecca Solnit is a writer, historian, activist and author of more than twenty books.

Through researching disaster including the San Francisco 1906 earthquake, the Halifax explosion of 1917, the Mexico City earthquake, New York City 09/11, and the New Orleans Hurricane Katrina, Solnit explores that seemingly temporary sense of solidarity, empathy, charity, and generosity. She described how a prevailing misconception is that when a disaster occurs, "people [become] so overwhelmed by fear and selfish desire to survive that their judgment, their social bonds, event their humanity are overwhelmed." In reality, this isn't true, instead, people experience a sense of purposefulness, interconnectedness, and a commitment to serve their fellow citizens. As though there is a short window of time, when everything is stripped away, people tend to prioritize one another while experiencing a sense of solidarity. From disaster sociology, we learn how grassroot responses serve to activate what was described as "elite panic." Disaster sociologist Kathleen Tierney observed how "elites fear disruption of the social order" which challenges their legitimacy. "Elite panic" is amplified due to elites' "fear of social disorder, fear of poor, minorities and immigrants; obsession with looting and property crime; and willingness to resort to deadly force." Media further amplifies elite fears by perpetuating disaster myths around lawlessness and the need for strict social control. In highlighting how human behavior is different than expected, different than portrayed in disaster narratives, Solnit shares a glimpse of hope. We humans have an enormous capacity for love, care, and support of one another.

This would be an excellent book for people interested in leadership, disaster sociology, and the effects of media.

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Alicia Crumpton

Disaster Sociology

Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2023
Solnit, R. (2009). A paradise built in hell: The extraordinary communities that arise in disasters. Viking.

Rebecca Solnit is a writer, historian, activist and author of more than twenty books.

Through researching disaster including the San Francisco 1906 earthquake, the Halifax explosion of 1917, the Mexico City earthquake, New York City 09/11, and the New Orleans Hurricane Katrina, Solnit explores that seemingly temporary sense of solidarity, empathy, charity, and generosity. She described how a prevailing misconception is that when a disaster occurs, "people [become] so overwhelmed by fear and selfish desire to survive that their judgment, their social bonds, event their humanity are overwhelmed." In reality, this isn't true, instead, people experience a sense of purposefulness, interconnectedness, and a commitment to serve their fellow citizens. As though there is a short window of time, when everything is stripped away, people tend to prioritize one another while experiencing a sense of solidarity. From disaster sociology, we learn how grassroot responses serve to activate what was described as "elite panic." Disaster sociologist Kathleen Tierney observed how "elites fear disruption of the social order" which challenges their legitimacy. "Elite panic" is amplified due to elites' "fear of social disorder, fear of poor, minorities and immigrants; obsession with looting and property crime; and willingness to resort to deadly force." Media further amplifies elite fears by perpetuating disaster myths around lawlessness and the need for strict social control. In highlighting how human behavior is different than expected, different than portrayed in disaster narratives, Solnit shares a glimpse of hope. We humans have an enormous capacity for love, care, and support of one another.

This would be an excellent book for people interested in leadership, disaster sociology, and the effects of media.

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Colleen K.
Fascinating Exploration of the Humanity in Great Disasters
Reviewed in the United States on December 12, 2020
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Highly recommended if you are not intimately familiar with the disasters covered in this book. I learned a lot about the 1906 earthquake/fires in San Francisco, massive 1917 explosion in Halifax, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina. Worth reading for those history lessons alone. Beyond that I definitely see why this book was recommended to me. Exploring the narrative around disasters vs the truth is a fascinating topic. That is true even if you don't agree with Solnit's conclusions or viewpoints. You've likely already seen the other sides of Katrina and 9/11 in the news. This book will help build a holistic view of those events and drive a skeptical view of future disaster coverage.

There are lots of small issues that combine to drive the missing star. The writing and viewpoints can be repetitive and meandering. The section on the Mexico City earthquake doesn't fit in well with the other disasters. Bringing more international disasters would have strengthened the book and eliminated lingering doubts about why they were excluded.

I really wish she had made the connection between disasters and war to create a more holistic view of the human nature shown in the book's examples. Many soldiers coming back from deployments have the same stories to tell with smiling faces and fondness about the meaning and connections they miss despite the horrific conditions they were in.

Given the current political climate I also wish she would have examined the different political responses to 9/11 and Katrina. She does not gloss over Democratic failings, but she also does not cover them as comprehensively or in the same way as Republicans. Non-partisan political reckonings are desperately needed today. If the Republican failings are truly more damning let the facts speak for themselves.

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Ofernandez
From my experience at 1985 Mexico’s earthquake
Reviewed in Mexico on September 17, 2021
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Nothing can resemble me more than this reading the exact same feeling and description where if “private life matters “ you don’t give a damn for it when you gather the collectively spirit of people struggling under destruction and debris and you need to turn into action no matter what . No time to analyze nor to cry or complain but to act and people became one not even social position nor wealthiness but to help and aid the needed .
After disaster a new culture and social behavior arises and life goes on where “Joy too matters “
Delighted to read Rebecca Solnit and ready to follow her through other books titles ,,

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David
Opinion changing well written book
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 7, 2022
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Challenged media view of panicking masses and gave measured optimism in ordinary people. In the light of covid it explains how we got on and supported each other. Worth reading and to learn to trust our neighbours

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PHM69
Everyone needs to read this
Reviewed in Canada on August 22, 2015
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This is a game-changing book. Everyone ought to read it.
Solnit documents, in clear and engaging style, the myth of panic among people in the midst of tragedies such as the California earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, etc. If there is any panic, it's among the privileged administrative class, who see in everyday people's cooperation a threat to the established order and the personal domination of the privileged.
Read it; you won't be disappointed.

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M. Koehne
sehr bereichernd
Reviewed in Germany on July 23, 2013
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Um den Inhalt kurz zusammenzufassen: Es geht um die spontante Entwicklung von ("Behelfs-") Zivilgesellschaften nach Katastrophenereignissen, die Menschlichkeit und den Altruismus, die gerade dann wieder zu Tage treten und die (oftmals unrühmliche) Reaktion des Staates darauf, der natürlich bemüht ist alles wieder unter seine Kontrolle zu bringen.

Ein Buch, das eigentlich in der Schule gelesen werden sollte. Aber dafür ist es wohl zu anarchistisch angehaucht, da die staatlichen Autoritäten nicht unbedingt in das beste Licht gerückt werden. Allerdings ist die Autorin dabei in keinster Weise polemisch oder reißerisch, sondern schildert einfach gewisse Abläufe. Diese zu bewerten bleibt natürlich jedem selbst überlassen.

Ansonsten schafft es dieses Buch tatsächlich, einem ein Stück weit den Glauben an die Menschheit zurückzugeben (so er denn vorher beschädigt war, optimistische Menschenfreunde wird das Buch eher in ihrer Weltanschauung bestätigen).

Das Buch ist größtenteils sehr kurzweilig und spannend geschrieben, was bei einem Sachbuch (wo ich es am ehesten einordnen würde) ja nicht unbedingt selbstverständlich ist. Da die Autorin sich einer klaren Sprache bedient und nicht ins poetische abschweift ist es auch recht leicht zu lesen, sofern man gewisse Englischkenntnisse hat. Aber wer die nicht hat, kommt wahrscheinlich sowieso nicht auf die Idee, sich hier über das Buch zu informieren.

Es bleibt zu hoffen, daß sich irgendwann ein Übersetzer für dieses Buch findet, um es einer breiteren Masse zugänglich zu machen. Ganz klare Lese- und Kaufempfehlung.

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Joseph Myren
AWESOME
Reviewed in Canada on June 30, 2022
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AWESOME

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Disaster Sociology

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5.0 out of 5 stars We Are Better Than We Think We Are

5.0 out of 5 stars Disaster Sociology

Disaster Sociology

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4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating Exploration of the Humanity in Great Disasters

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5.0 out of 5 stars From my experience at 1985 Mexico’s earthquake

5.0 out of 5 stars Opinion changing well written book

5.0 out of 5 stars Everyone needs to read this

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5.0 out of 5 stars AWESOME

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We Are Better Than We Think We Are

Disaster Sociology

Fascinating Exploration of the Humanity in Great Disasters

From my experience at 1985 Mexico’s earthquake

Opinion changing well written book

Everyone needs to read this

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AWESOME