A Paradise Built in Hell Read Online Free PDF Page B

it brings us to the ubiquitous fleeting utopias that are neither coerced nor countercultural but universal, albeit overlooked: disaster utopias, the subject of this book.
    You don’t have to subscribe to a political ideology, move to a commune, or join the guerrillas in the mountains; you wake up in a society suddenly transformed, and chances are good you will be part of that transformation in what you do, in whom you connect to, in how you feel. Something changes. Elites and authorities often fear the changes of disaster or anticipate that the change means chaos and destruction, or at least the undermining of the foundations of their power. So a power struggle often takes place in disaster—and real political and social change can result, from that struggle or from the new sense of self and society that emerges. Too, the elite often believe that if they themselves are not in control, the situation is out of control, and in their fear take repressive measures that become secondary disasters. But many others who don’t hold radical ideas, don’t believe in revolution, don’t consciously desire profound social change find themselves in a transformed world leading a life they could not have imagined and rejoice in it.
    The future holds many more disasters because of such factors as climate change and the likelihood of large earthquakes on long-dormant or semidormant faults, as well as increases in the vulnerability of populations who have moved to coasts, to cities, to areas at risk, to flimsy housing, to deeper poverty, shallower roots, and frailer support networks. The relief organization Oxfam reported in 2007, “The number of weather-related disasters has quadrupled over the past twenty years and the world should do more to prepare for them. The report argues that climate change is responsible for the growing number of weather-related disasters—more intense rain, combined with frequent droughts, make damaging floods much more likely.” Disaster is never terribly far away. Knowing how people behave in disasters is fundamental to knowing how to prepare for them. And what can be learned about resilience, social and psychological response, and possibility from sudden disasters is relevant as well for the slower disasters of poverty, economic upheaval, and incremental environmental degradation as well as the abiding questions about social possibilities.
    The Mizpah Café was at once nothing special and a miracle, chaos and deprivation turned into order and abundance by will, empathy, and one woman’s resourcefulness. It is a miniature of the communities that often arise out of disasters. In the 1906 earthquake, a Jewish newspaperwoman would find a social paradise, a Chinese boy would find a new life, the country’s leading philosopher would find confirmation of his deepest beliefs about human nature, and an eight-year-old girl would find herself in a community so generous it served as a model for the radical social experiments she initiated that continue across the United States today. Disasters are extraordinarily generative, and though disaster utopias recur again and again, there is no simple formula for what arises: it has everything to do with who or what individuals or communities were before the disaster and the circumstances they find themselves in. But those circumstances are far richer and stranger than has ever been accounted for.

PAULINE JACOBSON’S JOY

Countless Acts
    F or ninety-nine years, the worst disaster in U.S. history was at least arguably the 1906 earthquake centered in San Francisco that killed an estimated three thousand people, annihilated the center of that city, and shattered structures along a hundred-mile stretch from San Jose in the south to Santa Rosa in the north. What happened after the quake has been told over and over as a story about geology, about firefighting, about politics, and about people in power. It has never really been told as a story of ordinary citizens’ responses,