A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster

The Epilogue provides a conclusion to Solnit’s thoughts on disaster while looking to the future. At Solnit’s time of writing, Barack Obama had recently been inaugurated, and she writes about this event with hope and the same sense of civic pride described throughout the book. She describes the way his campaign was built on grassroots support and the promise of change. She acknowledges that the actualities of his presidency may differ from the rhetoric that got him elected, but that the message was important, nonetheless.

Solnit then turns toward the future, listing floods, fires, and other disasters that were occurring at her time of writing and noting that they will be getting worse in the coming years due to climate change. To respond to these immense challenges, Solnit advocates for major improvements in infrastructure and disaster preparedness, but also for a change in mentality for how disaster is conceived of—to acknowledge the truth of the how people behave in disaster and to avoid the institutional fear and justification for not helping them. Such profound improvements in disaster preparedness require making societies resemble disaster utopias more closely, making them “more flexible and improvisational, more egalitarian and less hierarchical” (416).