Welcome to Risk Book Club! Where I read and summarize arguments about risk so you don’t have to. Today we’re reading A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit.
The bar summary: We’ve all watched a movie or two where communities fall apart and people behave selfishly after a disaster. To the contrary, Solnit argues that most people behave in a collective and cooperative manner after disasters, often taking care of each other and actually emerging stronger as a community.
Ok but really tell me what this book is about: Solnit uses her own research experience and that of other disaster sociologists to explore many historical disasters where communities emerged and took care of each other. She argues that the myth of individualized panic and looting after disasters is perpetuated by elites and that disasters can actually lead to positive changes in our communities.
Solnit’s examples vary from impromptu food support networks after the San Francisco earthquake to citizen rescues during 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. She criticizes disaster responses from the US government, which often involve military or national guard deployments that treat citizens as unruly subjects.
Solnit points to community self-organizing as often more effective, especially in the early hours of a disaster, at getting help to others. Her examples reminded me of the creative response by a downtown Vegas bar during the early days of COVID stay-at-home orders, which quickly pivoted to filling drive-up orders for liquor and even giving out industrial-sized rolls of toilet paper. Disasters may inspire panic, but they also inspire creativity and, in Solnit’s words, undo some of the privatization of modern life.
Why should I care? I don’t know about you, but the idea of impending, compounding, and worsening natural disasters in coming decades scares me. A lot. Solnit makes the case for building resilience and maintaining hope. Her book energized me to think about knowing my neighbors and sharing contact information, and getting more involved in nonprofit and volunteering organizations.
I did wonder what Solnit would say about the COVID pandemic, which doesn’t “count” as a natural disaster but created similar challenges for communities. Yet, banding together after a natural disaster is in some ways easier than banding together when you have explicitly been told to stay away from each other due to infectious disease. I wonder how much the messaging around COVID “social distancing” led to a more competitive versus cooperative mentality, as seen by the cleaned out freezer food aisle at my local Trader Joe’s in March 2020. I wonder if the consequences of social distancing will carry over when we face future community disruptions, and, if so, how we can address this setback to resilience through smart communication choices.
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