A Paradise Built in Hell

The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster’ by Rebecca Solnit

The bad news is that more disasters are coming, arising from any number of sources: climate change, widespread infrastructural vulnerabilities, toxic threats brewed at cellular or weapons-grade levels, seismic or oceanic volatility, and so on and so on. Whatever their cause, disasters will be born of some mixture of human and natural action or inaction, lives will be irrevocably altered, and absurd numbers of people will die.

Yet Rebecca Solnit sees human possibilities inherent in the certainty of big trouble. In “A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster,” this writer of impressive versatility explores disasters and the goodness that can come to characterize them. A careful student of the sociology of catastrophe, Solnit argues that the human experience of disaster so alters convention that a different social milieu can emerge, if briefly, within them; one distinguished by altruism and the absence of social hierarchies. In contrast to the presuppositions of the powerful (and Hollywood), steadfast about the inevitability of anarchic mayhem and riot, Solnit makes a convincing case for the sheer dignity and decency of people coming together amid terror.

This is no easy task. How to tease out, much less emphasize, threads of hope or community from the shattered spaces and lives of calamity? How can supposedly redemptive, even joyful, qualities emerging amid horror be explored so as to not render the interpreter naive, callous or both?

LA Times