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A Paradise Built in Hell
A month or two into the 2020 pandemic lockdown I scanned my bookshelf for something appropriate to read that didn't involve staring at a screen. I found A Paradise Built in Hell: The extraordinary communities that arise in disaster by Rebecca Solnit. Given the novel disaster that the world was collectively experiencing, this seemed a particularly opportune time to read it. As with many new pandemic hobbies, reading this book ebbed and waned, taking until New Year's Day of 2023 to finish it.
The book dives deep into a handful of major physical disasters which struck cities, how the residents in the disaster area responded with creativity and communal support, and how the official response and media coverage assume that people in a disaster engage in anti-social behavior that isn't generally happening. This exploration was inspired by the author's own experience of euphoria and sense of possibility in the aftermath of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco and deepened over the next two decades as she researched the sociology of other disasters and interviewed people who were on the ground, participating in the suddenly created community where many of the social norms from just hours before had fallen away.
She shares writings from survivors of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, highlighting the profound impact it had on Dorothy Day who went on to a life of social activism and anarchism. The ordinary residents of San Francisco quickly improvised solutions to help the community, putting out fires, setting up tents in Golden Gate Park for the suddenly homeless, preparing free meals, and other simple and effective acts of mutual aid. Many firsthand descriptions of the experience describe a joyful time in an odd utopia, where the city collapsed but the community rose up. Solnit contrasts this spontaneous community support network from the elite panic shown by the mayor and the army (based in the Presidio) whose goal was to "save the city from the people." In a refrain that recurs throughout the book, political, military, police, business, and media leaders often focus on looting in disaster situations even though property theft is rarely prominent in such situations. Additionally, the word
Solnit then explores some unnatural disasters: the 1917 Halifax explosion (the collision of an ammunition ship that stands as the largest non-nuclear explosion), the London Blitz, and nuclear fears in the Cold War. Once again, elite expectations that the public would panic and a large collective of disaster survivors would bring out the worst in humanity did not materialize. The famous scenes of Londoners spending the night on subway platforms as bombs fell and air raid sirens screamed above ground was initially an organic response of ordinary people that surprised the authorities, who only belatedly provided institutional support. Solnit introduces sociologists who found a lack of evidence of panic and social disorder during a natural disaster or military attack, yet politicians still worried about it and Hollywood found crowd panic and a Hobbesian state of nature to be compelling tropes.
Moving forward in time, Solnit dives into the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, writing
The next chapter is titled
The final third of the book dives into two events in America that many readers think they're quite familiar with: the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina. Rebecca Solnit weaves together many stories in and around New York and New Orleans, reminding the reader of the stories they saw on the news while also introducing them to personal stories which show that the disasters looked a lot different on the ground than they did on TV. While the nation freaked out about the collapsing World Trade Center towers, the people of lower Manhattan remained fairly level headed. Ordinary office workers helped their colleagues out of the burning building, in some cases despite official instructions not to evacuate. In the neighborhoods people were generous and compassionate (despite New York City's reputation for being gruff and impersonal) and without regard for religious, racial, or social divisions. Americans glued to their TV sets that day saw Mayor Rudy Giuliani in picturesque leadership situations, covered in WTC dust along with the evacuees and rescue workers. He was so available for TV in part because he'd insisted on creating New York's emergency operations center at the World Trade Center, rendering it essentially useless in handling New York's biggest emergency. The stories that TV continued to tell about 9/11 had a monumental impact on American society in the weeks and years to come. Aided by elite panic from the government, the media turned 9/11 into a clash of civilizations narrative, of terrorists versus the free Western world, a story that would spike George W. Bush's popularity rating and lead to two decades of destructive foreign policy, America's longest war. If the story had instead been told by the people on the ground in New York, the people who experienced the painful clouds of dust and the generosity of fellow New Yorkers, it could have been a tale of compassion, connection, and good deeds in the face of governmental failure to prepare for an emergency or protect the country from nineteen guys with box-cutter knives.
The final chapters about New Orleans are the most personal and the most gut-wrenching. Rebecca Solnit had already been researching the spontaneous community building and often collective sense of euphoria that occurs after a disaster, and had just published an article in The Nation when Hurricane Katrina pounded the Gulf Coast. Here again are stories of ordinary people helping their neighbors out, a media looking for stories of looting, elite panic, and a government woefully unprepared to handle the disaster and often outright hostile to citizens trying to help solve the problem. In New Orleans the media disaster narrative fed back into the community and built upon over two centuries of racial distrust and injustice. The police chief in predominantly white Gretna prevented people from evacuating to higher ground across the Crescent City Connection bridge. In the predominantly white neighborhood of Algiers Point, a well-armed vigilante group worried about looting, not because of direct evidence but due to the cultural assumption that looting is a natural byproduct of disaster, especially in black areas. This fear led the Algiers Point folks to murder several African Americans, actions which they didn't try to hide but that have gone largely unreported. Solnit does a great job helping the survivors of Katrina tell the stories of these murders in plain view. Looting, as distinct from requisitioning supplies was quite rare after Katrina, perhaps in part because there's not much use stealing an expensive television when your house is under ten feet of water and most of the city is without electricity. Evacuees sheltering in the sweltering heat of the Superdome were trying desperately to get bottles of water; a shopping cart full of orange juice would've been more valuable to take from a store than a flat screen TV. I remember seeing a video from inside a Whole Foods after Katrina; basic foodstuffs had been taken from the shelves but the cooler of fancy cheeses was largely untouched.
Katrina started as a natural disaster, but it was compounded by a man-made disaster. All levels of government failed the people of New Orleans. Mayor Ray Nagin avoided an evacuation order (worrying it would make him look bad if the storm didn't have a big impact) and did not have a plan to evacuate a city where many people don't own a car. Police, the military, and other government organizations treated the people of New Orleans as potential enemies rather than victims of a disaster that needed help. Police and soldiers essentially imprisoned New Orleanians in their own city, waist deep in water. George W. Bush had spent four years making sweeping changes to prevent another round of terrorist attacks, curtailing civil liberties and reorganizing every disaster-related agency into the Department of Homeland Security. Yet DHS failed miserably in its first trial in a real disaster; they'd focused so much on a threat model of foreign invaders yet were woefully unprepared for a city of people displaced by Mother Nature. Unlike 9/11 the media started asking tough questions about the government response to Katrina, leading to the resignation of unqualified FEMA director Michael Brown and the beginning of the crash in President Bush's popularity ratings that had been based in large part on his image as a protector of the nation. One might imagine a post-9/11 media narrative focused on resilient communities that prepare locally and remain resilient and resourceful in the face of tragedy.
The physical damage on 9/11 was very localized and most New Yorkers could return to something resembling normalcy within days or weeks. The World Trade Center and The Pentagon are symbolic and commercially valuable, so financial and organizational support for rebuilding was easy to come by. Hurricane Katrina destroyed infrastructure for more than a hundred miles along the coast of Louisiana and Mississippi. In many neighborhoods it took months or years for half of the residents to return from evacuation before they could even start rebuilding their homes, often with limited and frustrating government help. Here again civil society emerged to help people meet their basic needs more quickly and flexibly than official emergency response organizations could. Solnit reports that Camp Casey, Cindy Sheehan's protest community in front of President Bush's ranch (which had itself become a temporary community much like after a disaster) quickly decamped from Crawford, Texas and headed east to help the communities hit by Louisiana. She shares stories of the generosity of Rainbow Family members who arrived in Mississippi to share their experience building temporary sanitation, community kitchens, and spontaneous welcoming communities. (Burners Without Borders also came into existence as volunteers traveled straight from Burning Man to the Mississippi coast to help rebuild.) Community groups formed in New Orleans, providing basics like medical care and construction tools while also fighting for the rights of long-time residents as elites and outside parties sought to rid the city of public housing and other social infrastructure.
I had started reading A Paradise Built in Hell hoping for a perspective on the unfolding disaster. COVID-19 was in many ways the inverse of the disasters described in the book. Instead of everyone in a city simultaneously experiencing a sudden tragic event, the pandemic quickly jumped from hotspot lockdowns in Wuhan, Northern Italy, and New York to worldwide "safer at home" orders. Everyone in one house could die of COVID without anyone else on the street realizing anything was wrong. Rather than gathering with our neighbors in the streets and pulling strangers out of collapsed buildings we tried hard not to get within six feet of our neighbors. Instead of a city cut off from communication, experiencing a very different world than the media's rumor-fed narrative of chaos and looting, hundreds of millions of people spent hours a day sheltered in their living rooms feeding on COVID stories from around the world. And despite the constant stream of bleak news, uplifting stories spread as well: a video of a cute lockdown craft project could easily garner a few million views. The ubiquity of recording technology and easy Internet sharing helped everyone find connection in a shared experience: "the famous TV host is working from their living room table, just like me." As in physical disasters, generosity flowed from ordinary people, giving money, dropping off groceries for elderly neighbors, and providing emotional support video conferences. But without a physical shared experience the COVID disaster area turned into social conflict that wasn't typical of disaster communities. Acts of survival like wearing a mask and avoiding large gatherings became flashpoints of cultural conflict, seen by some as effective defense against an invisible hazard and by others as a government attempt at control. As in the disasters in the book, governments in 2020 were generally not well prepared to handle the situation, but it's unlikely that the people left to their own devices would've fared better: fighting an ongoing airborne disease requires coordinated social action, unlike the localized and improvised action needed to help people in a neighborhood that just collapsed.
A Paradise Built in Hell is a book about specific disasters and the communities that arose there. It's also a book about human nature, the human capacity for spontaneous generosity, and the wonderful connection and lack of hierarchy in disaster communities. It's a book about the incorrect assumptions people—especially elites with more to lose in a disrupted society—make about how people will behave without government authority and established social structure. And it's a book about transformation, people whose lives changed from being in a disaster or by coming to help people out of one.
The book dives deep into a handful of major physical disasters which struck cities, how the residents in the disaster area responded with creativity and communal support, and how the official response and media coverage assume that people in a disaster engage in anti-social behavior that isn't generally happening. This exploration was inspired by the author's own experience of euphoria and sense of possibility in the aftermath of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco and deepened over the next two decades as she researched the sociology of other disasters and interviewed people who were on the ground, participating in the suddenly created community where many of the social norms from just hours before had fallen away.
She shares writings from survivors of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, highlighting the profound impact it had on Dorothy Day who went on to a life of social activism and anarchism. The ordinary residents of San Francisco quickly improvised solutions to help the community, putting out fires, setting up tents in Golden Gate Park for the suddenly homeless, preparing free meals, and other simple and effective acts of mutual aid. Many firsthand descriptions of the experience describe a joyful time in an odd utopia, where the city collapsed but the community rose up. Solnit contrasts this spontaneous community support network from the elite panic shown by the mayor and the army (based in the Presidio) whose goal was to "save the city from the people." In a refrain that recurs throughout the book, political, military, police, business, and media leaders often focus on looting in disaster situations even though property theft is rarely prominent in such situations. Additionally, the word
lootingfails to distinguish theft of financially valuable items for personal gain from
requisitioningimportant supplies in an environment where survival is of the utmost importance and the ordinary mechanisms of cash transactions and functioning supply chains are disrupted. Earthquake survivors broke pharmacy windows so they could take medicine for a sick neighbor, an act which should not be conflated with stealing luxury goods for sale in the underground market.
Solnit then explores some unnatural disasters: the 1917 Halifax explosion (the collision of an ammunition ship that stands as the largest non-nuclear explosion), the London Blitz, and nuclear fears in the Cold War. Once again, elite expectations that the public would panic and a large collective of disaster survivors would bring out the worst in humanity did not materialize. The famous scenes of Londoners spending the night on subway platforms as bombs fell and air raid sirens screamed above ground was initially an organic response of ordinary people that surprised the authorities, who only belatedly provided institutional support. Solnit introduces sociologists who found a lack of evidence of panic and social disorder during a natural disaster or military attack, yet politicians still worried about it and Hollywood found crowd panic and a Hobbesian state of nature to be compelling tropes.
Moving forward in time, Solnit dives into the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, writing
One disaster utopia lasted. During the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, citizens discovered each other, their own strength, and the superfluity of what had seemed like an omnipotent and pervasive government, and they did not let go of what they discovered. It reshaped the nation. The real disaster began long before the earthquake, just as the utopia of social engagement and community strength lasted long after.Here again ordinary citizens suddenly sprang into action, digging their neighbors out from collapsed buildings with no tools or training. Meanwhile the bad deeds of many of the city's elite were exposed, including factory owners (some with military support, again to "prevent looting") who rescued their equipment from collapsed buildings but left their trapped workers to die. Many of the shoddy collapsed buildings were government built, and the official response to the disaster left much to be desired. Citizen groups sprung up from the destruction and persistently demanded change. The whole city could see the incompetence and corruption of the PRI and organized effectively, winning concessions as Mexican civil society began to develop outside the patronage structure of the ubiquitous authoritarian political party.
The next chapter is titled
Losing the Mandate of Heavenand expands from the Mexico City earthquake to connect disasters and revolutions.
In some ways a diaster merely brings the existing tensions, conflicts, and tendencies in a society and its government to light or to a crisis point. If the government fails to meet the urgent needs of its people, if it is seen to be self-interested, incompetent, or possessed of interests that serve an elite while sabotaging the well-being of the majority, the upheaval of disaster provides an opportunity to redress this failing that disaster has brought to the light.The 1755 Lisbon earthquake marked a shift in Portuguese political power and it
is usually considered to be one of the starting points of the European Enlightenment, a movement away from authority and religiosity toward individual reason—and doubt.A 1972 earthquake near Managua and the Somoza dictatorship's corruption and focus on personal profit from rebuilding provided the spark which culminated in the Sandinista revolutionaries toppling the government seven years later. And not just earthquakes; bad weather (thanks, Icelandic volcanoes) led to crop failures that were major factors in the French Revolution. Mikhail Gorbachev attributed the Chernobyl disaster as the most important cause of the Soviet collapse of the early 1990s. As in disasters, the chaotic period of a revolution often brings out euphoric feelings, communal connections, and a sense of utopia.
The final third of the book dives into two events in America that many readers think they're quite familiar with: the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina. Rebecca Solnit weaves together many stories in and around New York and New Orleans, reminding the reader of the stories they saw on the news while also introducing them to personal stories which show that the disasters looked a lot different on the ground than they did on TV. While the nation freaked out about the collapsing World Trade Center towers, the people of lower Manhattan remained fairly level headed. Ordinary office workers helped their colleagues out of the burning building, in some cases despite official instructions not to evacuate. In the neighborhoods people were generous and compassionate (despite New York City's reputation for being gruff and impersonal) and without regard for religious, racial, or social divisions. Americans glued to their TV sets that day saw Mayor Rudy Giuliani in picturesque leadership situations, covered in WTC dust along with the evacuees and rescue workers. He was so available for TV in part because he'd insisted on creating New York's emergency operations center at the World Trade Center, rendering it essentially useless in handling New York's biggest emergency. The stories that TV continued to tell about 9/11 had a monumental impact on American society in the weeks and years to come. Aided by elite panic from the government, the media turned 9/11 into a clash of civilizations narrative, of terrorists versus the free Western world, a story that would spike George W. Bush's popularity rating and lead to two decades of destructive foreign policy, America's longest war. If the story had instead been told by the people on the ground in New York, the people who experienced the painful clouds of dust and the generosity of fellow New Yorkers, it could have been a tale of compassion, connection, and good deeds in the face of governmental failure to prepare for an emergency or protect the country from nineteen guys with box-cutter knives.
The final chapters about New Orleans are the most personal and the most gut-wrenching. Rebecca Solnit had already been researching the spontaneous community building and often collective sense of euphoria that occurs after a disaster, and had just published an article in The Nation when Hurricane Katrina pounded the Gulf Coast. Here again are stories of ordinary people helping their neighbors out, a media looking for stories of looting, elite panic, and a government woefully unprepared to handle the disaster and often outright hostile to citizens trying to help solve the problem. In New Orleans the media disaster narrative fed back into the community and built upon over two centuries of racial distrust and injustice. The police chief in predominantly white Gretna prevented people from evacuating to higher ground across the Crescent City Connection bridge. In the predominantly white neighborhood of Algiers Point, a well-armed vigilante group worried about looting, not because of direct evidence but due to the cultural assumption that looting is a natural byproduct of disaster, especially in black areas. This fear led the Algiers Point folks to murder several African Americans, actions which they didn't try to hide but that have gone largely unreported. Solnit does a great job helping the survivors of Katrina tell the stories of these murders in plain view. Looting, as distinct from requisitioning supplies was quite rare after Katrina, perhaps in part because there's not much use stealing an expensive television when your house is under ten feet of water and most of the city is without electricity. Evacuees sheltering in the sweltering heat of the Superdome were trying desperately to get bottles of water; a shopping cart full of orange juice would've been more valuable to take from a store than a flat screen TV. I remember seeing a video from inside a Whole Foods after Katrina; basic foodstuffs had been taken from the shelves but the cooler of fancy cheeses was largely untouched.
Katrina started as a natural disaster, but it was compounded by a man-made disaster. All levels of government failed the people of New Orleans. Mayor Ray Nagin avoided an evacuation order (worrying it would make him look bad if the storm didn't have a big impact) and did not have a plan to evacuate a city where many people don't own a car. Police, the military, and other government organizations treated the people of New Orleans as potential enemies rather than victims of a disaster that needed help. Police and soldiers essentially imprisoned New Orleanians in their own city, waist deep in water. George W. Bush had spent four years making sweeping changes to prevent another round of terrorist attacks, curtailing civil liberties and reorganizing every disaster-related agency into the Department of Homeland Security. Yet DHS failed miserably in its first trial in a real disaster; they'd focused so much on a threat model of foreign invaders yet were woefully unprepared for a city of people displaced by Mother Nature. Unlike 9/11 the media started asking tough questions about the government response to Katrina, leading to the resignation of unqualified FEMA director Michael Brown and the beginning of the crash in President Bush's popularity ratings that had been based in large part on his image as a protector of the nation. One might imagine a post-9/11 media narrative focused on resilient communities that prepare locally and remain resilient and resourceful in the face of tragedy.
The physical damage on 9/11 was very localized and most New Yorkers could return to something resembling normalcy within days or weeks. The World Trade Center and The Pentagon are symbolic and commercially valuable, so financial and organizational support for rebuilding was easy to come by. Hurricane Katrina destroyed infrastructure for more than a hundred miles along the coast of Louisiana and Mississippi. In many neighborhoods it took months or years for half of the residents to return from evacuation before they could even start rebuilding their homes, often with limited and frustrating government help. Here again civil society emerged to help people meet their basic needs more quickly and flexibly than official emergency response organizations could. Solnit reports that Camp Casey, Cindy Sheehan's protest community in front of President Bush's ranch (which had itself become a temporary community much like after a disaster) quickly decamped from Crawford, Texas and headed east to help the communities hit by Louisiana. She shares stories of the generosity of Rainbow Family members who arrived in Mississippi to share their experience building temporary sanitation, community kitchens, and spontaneous welcoming communities. (Burners Without Borders also came into existence as volunteers traveled straight from Burning Man to the Mississippi coast to help rebuild.) Community groups formed in New Orleans, providing basics like medical care and construction tools while also fighting for the rights of long-time residents as elites and outside parties sought to rid the city of public housing and other social infrastructure.
I had started reading A Paradise Built in Hell hoping for a perspective on the unfolding disaster. COVID-19 was in many ways the inverse of the disasters described in the book. Instead of everyone in a city simultaneously experiencing a sudden tragic event, the pandemic quickly jumped from hotspot lockdowns in Wuhan, Northern Italy, and New York to worldwide "safer at home" orders. Everyone in one house could die of COVID without anyone else on the street realizing anything was wrong. Rather than gathering with our neighbors in the streets and pulling strangers out of collapsed buildings we tried hard not to get within six feet of our neighbors. Instead of a city cut off from communication, experiencing a very different world than the media's rumor-fed narrative of chaos and looting, hundreds of millions of people spent hours a day sheltered in their living rooms feeding on COVID stories from around the world. And despite the constant stream of bleak news, uplifting stories spread as well: a video of a cute lockdown craft project could easily garner a few million views. The ubiquity of recording technology and easy Internet sharing helped everyone find connection in a shared experience: "the famous TV host is working from their living room table, just like me." As in physical disasters, generosity flowed from ordinary people, giving money, dropping off groceries for elderly neighbors, and providing emotional support video conferences. But without a physical shared experience the COVID disaster area turned into social conflict that wasn't typical of disaster communities. Acts of survival like wearing a mask and avoiding large gatherings became flashpoints of cultural conflict, seen by some as effective defense against an invisible hazard and by others as a government attempt at control. As in the disasters in the book, governments in 2020 were generally not well prepared to handle the situation, but it's unlikely that the people left to their own devices would've fared better: fighting an ongoing airborne disease requires coordinated social action, unlike the localized and improvised action needed to help people in a neighborhood that just collapsed.
A Paradise Built in Hell is a book about specific disasters and the communities that arose there. It's also a book about human nature, the human capacity for spontaneous generosity, and the wonderful connection and lack of hierarchy in disaster communities. It's a book about the incorrect assumptions people—especially elites with more to lose in a disrupted society—make about how people will behave without government authority and established social structure. And it's a book about transformation, people whose lives changed from being in a disaster or by coming to help people out of one.
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