Book blog: A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit

Positive news on community responses to disasters

We’re clearly in an era of mounting disasters: not just incidents like hurricanes, but longer-term systemic disasters like habitat loss and food supply failures. This is a highly perceptive and reassuring book for our times.

Rebecca has thoroughly researched a number of major disasters, including Hurricane Katrina, 9/11 in New York, and the big earthquake in Mexico in 1985. Research may be too cold a word: she learned most from in-person conversations with survivors.

In every case, she describes how community arises spontaneously, how people become generous and trusting towards each other, and they look back on post-disaster as a joyful time, despite all the problems. One of her big questions is why can’t we have these qualities in normal times?

The answers to this question take us deep into systemic issues. I share her view that we live in a ‘privatised’ society where the prevailing media message is that other people can’t be trusted, the streets are dangerous, happiness is found as an individual, couple, or nuclear family, consuming more stuff.

She believes that humans have an innate desire for community and capacity to trust and give to others: she sees the strange joy that arises post-disasters as due to our delight in fulfilling that desire. It’s tragic that only systemic breakdowns enable us to get beyond the usual societal conditioning.

The book has a perceptive view of how “the overlapping beliefs of the media and the elites can become a second wave of disaster”. All of us need to understand the huge power of the media and the elites, because it operates away from public scrutiny, and imposes policies which serve the elites. Jem Bendell’s book, Breaking Together, describes in stark detail how this operated in the covid pandemic.

The elite interventions often involve imposing control and regulations, delivered through statutory forces like the army and police, with little interface with the early-stage, ad hoc responses created by local communities.

All this underlines my concerns about the poor condition of the UK’s official systems for disaster preparation and response (see more here). The UK Government publishes a National Risk Register which assesses a long list of risks for both impact and probability. Some of their ratings are well adrift of mine (see my UK Risk Review 2030), for example around a food emergency (see blog here).

Responding to these risks is a network of Local Resilience Forums: however, my limited research on these suggests that they have limited capacity, only involve statutory services (e.g. police, fire, ambulance), and aren’t engaged with voluntary sector groups and local communities. If these official systems worked far better, it could avert damage from elite responses in future.

One of the examples Solnit gives of how disaster preparation could be systematically better comes from the San Francisco Fire Department. The city’s 1989 earthquake showed them how invaluable volunteer help could be, so they set up a Neighbourhood Emergency Response Team programme, which has trained thousands of volunteers to be first responders in their communities. This is the kind of partnership we need far more of, between public services and voluntary networks.